HOWDY’S ADVENTURES IN THAILAND – The Hero

This is a true story, and was for sure not funny when it first took place – fortunately, I am able to have some fun with it now… 

It was 1974, toward the end of my tour of duty in Thailand. I was living off base in Ubon. It was a relatively small community of rental apartments; a pretty quiet place to live most of the time. My fiancé, JB, had been visiting, and was about ready to return to her home. It was around 10:00 p.m. and dark outside, with the exception of a few lights shining from some of the apartments. There were no streetlights and the roads there were made of dirt.

 As we waited outside on the edge of the road for a Samlor (three wheeler bicycle taxi) to arrive to give her a ride home, JB tugged the sleeve of my shirt to get my attention. I looked around in the direction of where JB’s finger was pointing about the same time five Thai nationals (men) turned and looked at us.  They were just almost to the front door of a black GI who lived in the building behind me. The guy in the lead by the front door had a gun and fired a couple of shots off in our direction

When the bullets hit the dirt just a few feet from us, I realized this guy was shooting at us (pretty smart assumption on my part, don’t you think?). I turned and began to run in the direction of my apartment. Oh yeah, JB was running, too!

 “He’s shooting at us!?” 

Now, JB is well known for being about the slowest woman God ever put on the face on this earth and I have told her so, many, many times, but that night she dang-near beat me to the front door of my apartment! Not quite, but just almost – I got there first, but only so I could open it for her, of course, [uh] being the gentleman I was raised to be. (whew)

We waited quite some time until we were pretty sure they had left before we went out to wait for the Samlor again… (or did she wait by herself this time? Hmmm, I really cannot rightly recall) Anyhow, we both were still around to tell our story the next day!

We found out in the next couple of days that there was a ‘hit’ out on the black GI and he probably would have been murdered had we not foiled their attempt that night. Yeah, it was really uncanny how I distracted their attention toward me to help that guy out! Go figure – Me, a hero… Oh yeah, JB helped some, too -  ~Howdy