In the now vast scholarly literature on the Vietnam War, the participation of the non-US foreign forces that fought for the Saigon regime may constitute one of that conflict's few understudied subjects. Thailand sent 37,644 military personnel to South Vietnam, mostly between 1967 and 1972, a contingent that became the third largest operating in that embattled country — behind just those of the United States and South Korea. Two special units of the Royal Thai Army and one each from the Royal Thai Air Force and the Royal Thai Navy served in South Vietnam; 539 Thai military personnel died there.
In this novel account of Thailand's contribution to the Vietnam War, Richard A. Ruth attempts to tell the story of the Thai ‘volunteers’ from their own perspective. To do so, he conducted interviews with 60 Thai veterans of the conflict. Lengthy passages from those oral histories pepper this book, offering a rare and revealing glimpse into the personal experiences, motivations, and recollections of ordinary Thai servicemen, most of whom hailed from poor, rural regions of the country. For the most part, the author eschews an examination of the international history of Thailand's role in the Vietnam War. The fact that the Thai National Archives still prohibits scholars from examining most materials relating to that topic makes his predominant emphasis here on the social and cultural aspects of Thailand's Vietnam War both sensible and innovative, if also somewhat limited.
Above all, Ruth seeks to reconstruct the world-views and ground-level experiences of the Thai Expeditionary Forces. He especially emphasises the common meanings that soldiers ascribed to their Vietnam tours of duty, highlighting the transformative impact that their service had on so many of the Thai volunteers. While devoting some attention to the combat operations and non-combat missions of the Thai military contingent, Ruth displays substantially more interest in other matters: the symbolic significance of the expeditionary force within Thai political culture; the rampant consumerism among Thai soldiers, fostered by the amazing cornucopia of goods they were exposed to at American PXs (US army based retail store); their relationships with South Vietnamese civilians, especially women; the spirituality and beliefs systems of the volunteers; and their often strange encounters with what Ruth describes as the ‘metaphysical landscape’ of South Vietnam.
Some of these topics prove more fruitful than others. Ruth's exploration of the PX phenomenon is especially salutary. ‘For Thai soldiers’, he observes, ‘the PX was a destination of wonder that surpassed any other in South Vietnam’ (p. 82). It heralded a consumerist modernity that assumed a place of great prominence in the social imagination of Thailand — a point illuminated by the vivid recollections of Thai veterans recounted here. Ruth's detailed treatment of the way the soldiers’ superstitions generated deep-seated fears about Vietnamese animals and the Vietnamese physical landscape, on the other hand – a subject to which he assigns a whole chapter — seems curiously excessive. Not many scholars are likely to find wider significance in the stories that gained currency among Thai soldiers about ‘animal-driven karmic vengeance’ (p. 201).
Thai military personnel dispatched to South Vietnam have often been depicted as mercenaries bought by the United States for its own diplomatic and public relations needs. And, as Ruth acknowledges: ‘They wore American uniforms, carried American weapons, and conducted military operations according to American training. They departed and returned to Thailand aboard American ships and planes. They lived in an American-built camp bearing an American name. They carried American currency with which they purchased items of American material culture’ (p. 5). Yet In Buddha's company succeeds in its main purpose of complicating and widening that overly simple story. Most volunteers did not see themselves as mercenaries and few cited financial remuneration as a principal motive for their service. Rather, ‘most saw their actions as their patriotic duty to protect the traditional institutions and sovereignty of their country’ (p. 14).
Their own memories about their service in South Vietnam warrant our attention, as do the cross-cultural encounters and contestations that Ruth nicely captures in this monograph. The focus of his study will doubtless strike many diplomatic and military historians of the conflict as narrow. Despite its limitations, however, the book provides a useful addition both to the internationalisation of the Vietnam War literature and to the broadening of that literature into the domains of social and cultural history.
