I don't suppose you were wondering, but just in case.... (the taste of Vietnamese elephants)
A place of myth and legend, so says our Golden Triangle website, a way of saying that no-one's really sure what went on here during the gaps between the ancient chronicles, the Burmese ouster of 1805, the first foreign explorers of the late 1800's and the first serious Royal interests in development of the late 1980's.
There are folks on all sides of the world who knew and controlled what was going on, of course, but those sorts of folks don't talk about it that much, sometimes it gets made into movies (with the names changed to protect the guilty) and therefore becomes little more than myth and legend once again.
So when we hear of texts that may even partially fill the gaps we grasp them, books such as Roger Warner's "Shooting at the Moon" - a tantalising look at the CIA's influence in Laos, including an infamous battle that took place on our very own Don Sao - or Martin Windrow's account of the end of French rule across the river - "The Last Valley" - which is worth reading if only for its description of the horrors of war and siege that put all of your day to day worries into perspective, the Thai author Khun Vasit Dejkunjorn's small aside about the Thai's lining up to watch Burmese insurgents battle on their side of Doi Tung. All books that help fill in the gaps.
Another such book, though not about the Golden Triangle, is Truong Nhu Tang's account of his part in recent Vietnamese history as a Nationalist and a Socialist but never a doctrinaire Communist - at least according to his memoirs - a man who met Uncle Ho in Paris during the pre-Dien Bien Phu negotiations with the French, joined the Nationalist struggle on returning home and eventually entered the South's Government in waiting - living in the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia, hiding from B52's, during the war - before returning in power and glory only to see his dreams dashed by the Northern cadres and eventually escaping to a UN refugee camp (having been attacked by Thai 'honourable pirates' on the way).
A different side of the story told by a non-combatant, non-communist Viet Cong - shows how much I know, I didn't know such a designation existed, let alone lived in Paris and wrote memoirs. The book itself is apologist in places and one suspects a little revisionist in his outright denials of communism but is extremely enlightening - unfortunately the only elephants in it are dead ones but one passage explaining the food available in the jungle GHQ may explain how Vietnam went from the bountiful jungles and plains in William Baze's pre-war, post 'independence', 'Just Elephants' to the situation known to exist today.
"In addition to rice, each man's personal larder was rounded out by a small hunk of salt, a piece of monosodium glutamate, and perhaps a little dried fish or meat. The rice ration for both leaders and fighters was 20 kilos a month. Eaten twice a day, at about nine in the morning and four in the afternoon, the ration did not go far. But by and large it was our entire diet, a nutritional intake that left us all in a state of semistarvation....
....Rarely, some sort of special shipment would come in from Cambodia, occasioning real celebrations. More often the guerrillas would go off on ad hoc hunting expeditions, returning at times with kills of every description. Elephants, tigers, wild dogs, monkeys - none of these were strangers to our cook pots. Still, even protein starved as I was, I had a hard time choking down monkey meat or dog. Some people think of dog as a Vietnamese delicacy. But, in fact, it is only native to Northern cuisine. Southerners tend to regard it with the same sort of distaste Westerners might. Elephant is another unappetizing item, a tasteless rubbery substance as tough as old shoes. Dried it was slightly more palatable.
....Sometime during the second or third year after my release from prison, the most exotic fare no longer appeared on our jungle menu. By then the tigers, elephants and monkeys had all but disappeared from the forest - into the stomachs of the guerrillas."
Incidentally, much later in the book, after the glorious spring victory, the author explains that the proscribed rice rations for even Government ministers - albeit frustrated and dictated to ones - was far less than was being received in the jungle.
With an entire country starving under communism it is no wonder the wildlife disappears.
There are folks on all sides of the world who knew and controlled what was going on, of course, but those sorts of folks don't talk about it that much, sometimes it gets made into movies (with the names changed to protect the guilty) and therefore becomes little more than myth and legend once again.
So when we hear of texts that may even partially fill the gaps we grasp them, books such as Roger Warner's "Shooting at the Moon" - a tantalising look at the CIA's influence in Laos, including an infamous battle that took place on our very own Don Sao - or Martin Windrow's account of the end of French rule across the river - "The Last Valley" - which is worth reading if only for its description of the horrors of war and siege that put all of your day to day worries into perspective, the Thai author Khun Vasit Dejkunjorn's small aside about the Thai's lining up to watch Burmese insurgents battle on their side of Doi Tung. All books that help fill in the gaps.
Another such book, though not about the Golden Triangle, is Truong Nhu Tang's account of his part in recent Vietnamese history as a Nationalist and a Socialist but never a doctrinaire Communist - at least according to his memoirs - a man who met Uncle Ho in Paris during the pre-Dien Bien Phu negotiations with the French, joined the Nationalist struggle on returning home and eventually entered the South's Government in waiting - living in the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia, hiding from B52's, during the war - before returning in power and glory only to see his dreams dashed by the Northern cadres and eventually escaping to a UN refugee camp (having been attacked by Thai 'honourable pirates' on the way).
A different side of the story told by a non-combatant, non-communist Viet Cong - shows how much I know, I didn't know such a designation existed, let alone lived in Paris and wrote memoirs. The book itself is apologist in places and one suspects a little revisionist in his outright denials of communism but is extremely enlightening - unfortunately the only elephants in it are dead ones but one passage explaining the food available in the jungle GHQ may explain how Vietnam went from the bountiful jungles and plains in William Baze's pre-war, post 'independence', 'Just Elephants' to the situation known to exist today.
"In addition to rice, each man's personal larder was rounded out by a small hunk of salt, a piece of monosodium glutamate, and perhaps a little dried fish or meat. The rice ration for both leaders and fighters was 20 kilos a month. Eaten twice a day, at about nine in the morning and four in the afternoon, the ration did not go far. But by and large it was our entire diet, a nutritional intake that left us all in a state of semistarvation....
....Rarely, some sort of special shipment would come in from Cambodia, occasioning real celebrations. More often the guerrillas would go off on ad hoc hunting expeditions, returning at times with kills of every description. Elephants, tigers, wild dogs, monkeys - none of these were strangers to our cook pots. Still, even protein starved as I was, I had a hard time choking down monkey meat or dog. Some people think of dog as a Vietnamese delicacy. But, in fact, it is only native to Northern cuisine. Southerners tend to regard it with the same sort of distaste Westerners might. Elephant is another unappetizing item, a tasteless rubbery substance as tough as old shoes. Dried it was slightly more palatable.
....Sometime during the second or third year after my release from prison, the most exotic fare no longer appeared on our jungle menu. By then the tigers, elephants and monkeys had all but disappeared from the forest - into the stomachs of the guerrillas."
Incidentally, much later in the book, after the glorious spring victory, the author explains that the proscribed rice rations for even Government ministers - albeit frustrated and dictated to ones - was far less than was being received in the jungle.
With an entire country starving under communism it is no wonder the wildlife disappears.
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