Excerpt…

October 5, 2004
Pattaya Beach, Thailand

Much later, when the glass had stopped flying and the screams of pain and fear had died to moans and whimpers and the hoarse rattles of death, when the bodies had been taken to the morgue and the injured to the hospitals, when the television cameras had gone and workers had begun to clear the rubble and business along Central Street began to return to a shaken sort of normal, very few people remembered the two men who had been standing on the corner of Soi Cowboy when the bomb went off.

They were definitely Asian, or so said a vigorous, middle-aged woman who owned a pornographic comic book store nearby.  Slim, short, narrow eyes, sallow skin, neatly clipped straight black hair, she remembered them clad in identical short-sleeved shirts and light cotton slacks in nondescript colors.  A hundred like them sidled into her tiny shop every day to thumb through her merchandise and avoiding eye contact as they made their purchases.

A young man, the proud owner of his own car who specialized in delivering takeout to the pleasure palaces on Soi Cowboy and whose car had been parked twenty feet from the Fun House when the explosion occurred had been blown backwards the entire length of the block.  He had landed hard on his back at the feet of the two Asian men, splattered with nine orders of pad thai and the brains of a twenty-year-old American Marine on leave from Camp Butler on Okinawa.  As he looked up at them a man’s leg hit the side of the Pattaya Inn just above their heads, and what the delivery man found most odd was that the two men hadn’t looked at the leg, or even at him, instead focusing their attention on the chaos that followed the blast.

An elderly Japanese tourist, seeking relief from his shrew of a wife in Nagasaki in the flesh pots of a resort known for its willingness to provide pretty much anything animal, vegetable or mineral in the way of entertainment was sure the two men he had hobbled hurriedly by were Korean, because he’d killed his share in World War II and he ought to know.

At the end of the day the body count had climbed to one hundred and fourteen dead and another two hundred injured.  At least half of these were Thai nationals, many of them dancers and prostitutes, sex shop owners and bartenders.  They merited little beyond the standard obligatory protestations of outrage and vows of retaliation from the nation’s capital, quickly spoken and as quickly forgotten.

The other half was another matter.  Seventeen American servicemen were dead, twenty-two more injured.  Eleven Australians, four New Zealanders, nine Germans, and one Frenchman would never see home again.  It was the Japanese tourists who were hit hardest, although it would take a month before all the body parts had been assembled, DNA matches made.  The count would stop at thirty-one.

In the following days the world waited for someone to take responsibility for the bomb.

Dana sez–

In February 2004 I did a Bering Sea ridealong on USCGC Alex Haley. Sixteen days at sea, the first morning of which I woke up, sat up, and threw up. Yeah, baby. But it was an amazing experience, nothing at all like anything I’d ever done before, and inspired Blindfold Game. I will be forever grateful to one of the most hospitable and hardest working services in the world, the United States Coast Guard.

My price for the trip was to write a daily blog on my website so that friends and families of the crew could ride along with us. I have collected those blog posts in an ebook, On Patrol with the US Coast Guard.

Chatter blindfold game On Patrol withe the US Coast Guard us coast guard