07 March 2006

Thread Count

May Sot is a sweaty little town, halfway up the Thai border with Burma. A correspondent was up there reporting on the misery of the Karen refugees, and I heard his words from the radio as I lay flat on my back on the 600-count sheets I put on the credit card and will pay for next month.

The sheets are a luxury, I know, but I justify it on the grounds that I should live at home in small ways that are as nice as being on the road. When I was last in May Sot, looking at the misery of Karen refugees it was a decade ago. The sadness was real, and the children at the orphanage we visited would be riding little motorcycles now, the ones that lived, and their eyes would have lost their innocence.

Nothing appears to have changed there. The Junta in Rangoon has changed its name since then, but they are just as ugly, and just as implacable as the day my Boss got up and walked out of the meeting with them. The Strand Hotel was where we were staying, a remarkable pile o old tropical wood built by the Victorians, and recently refurbished by the thugs who run Burma, or Myanmar, or whatever it is they are calling the lush country these days.

The bedding was excellent, and if the houseboy at his desk in the hall worked for the state security services, so be it. I propped a chair against the thick mahogany door just in case.

We were staying at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok on the next leg of the Congressman's trip, and the sheets were nice. There was a big press conference about the trip to May Sot, and we did not get enough time to sleep, except at the state dinner where I awoke to find a delicate desert course in front of me.

The Thai general to my left had been nice enough to let me doze without interruption, and taking the cab back to the hotel we had no inclination to stop by New Patpong Road, where busloads of Japanese and Europeans were on the prowl for what trouble they might find.

There was plenty, if my first visit to the bars of the old Patpong fifteen years before that trip was any indication. Maybe that is the definition of age; caring more about the sheets than who is tangled in them.

When the BBC correspondent on the radio was done with the Karens, he went back to Bangkok to head for Bangladesh, and more misery.

I do not know if there is a decent hotel in that country, though there must be.

Even miserable places have nice places to sleep, and that affects the quality of the reporting. In Haiti there are a few exceptional hotels high on the hill above Port au Prince, the Montana being the one preferred by the press corps and visiting firemen. The key is to have a decent base of operations, and a good night's sleep.

That may account for the peevish tone of defeatism from Iraq. It is awfully dangerous, going outside the wire. If you travel with the troops and have decent security you may be attacked. If you try to go out by yourself you could be kidnapped. It is a thoroughly worrisome prospect, and in the wrong hands, can lead to Saigon-style reporting.

Maybe that is why we hear little about the misery in Darfur. There are few places to stay of any sort there. In the current war, it is much safer to use local Iraqi stringers to go out and look at the war, and report back. If the reports are tinged with inflated drama, and hyperbole, so much the better. The story is what counts.

The last time I passed through the city that once was known by that name, the cityscape was already undergoing a metamorphosis from sleepy imperial humiliation to a bustling tiger of economic growth. The construction cranes towered over the skyline, and the familiar view from the sky bar at the Caravelle Hotel to the former Embassy would be obstructed soon.

There was talk of building a tower alongside the original ten-story building. That was where the correspondents gathered at the rooftop lounge to watch the evening rocket attacks against the big airbase at Tan San Nhut, and chat about how the war was going.

There were several new five-star hotels in Ho Chi Minh City, and we could have stayed in one of them and slept on new mattresses.

The Caravelle belonged to the State at that point, and had sunken into a Stalinist Intourist-style somnolence. It had not been upgraded. As penance for our defeat, and because I was responsible for the logistics, I booked us into the Rex Hotel, the massive colonial pile near the Opera House and the market.

The Rex had been the home to the Military Assistance Command's afternoon briefings on the war, timed to permit the correspondents to file their reports for the morning news in Washington. The beds were hard and the rooms Spartan, and I spent part of the evening washing the grit from some souvenir bricks torn from the demolished Hanoi Hilton prison that we were given in the new capital of Vietnam the day before. That night, I felt I was not alone in the little room, and there was a physical feeling of sadness that one does not find in a new hotel.

In the bad times, it was possible to walk from the Caravelle over to the Rex, take in the afternoon briefing, and then return for dinner and drinks in the rooftop bar for the evening glimpse of the war in the suburbs.

Overlooking Lam Son Square and the Opera House, the rooftop was the ideal place to watch the story go by. There were plenty of sources who came to the bar, and many an excellent story was written without ever leaving the immediate precincts of the Hotel.

Sometimes the story is really about the thread-count. Before the fall of Saigon, the beds and the sheets were pretty good at the Caravelle. And it was an easy walk over to the Embassy when it was time to get a helicopter out of town.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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