In the Blast Zone – A Night to Remember

 

Policeman over waist deep in bomb crater with debris
in the background. No trace of the truck that held the 
bomb is left and block wall is gone as well.

It was Sunday, March 11, 1984. It started like many other Sundays for us but had an explosive ending that is indelibly chiseled into our memory.

We attended the Karen church service at the CUHT in the morning and gave our Karen language teacher, Naw Win, a ride home after the service. We then went home to relax a bit, read the newspaper, write some letters and take a little rest. In the late afternoon, we went to the Community Church, an English language service attended by many missionaries. After dinner, as we often did on Sunday evenings, we wrote letters and on this day I was preparing a package to send back to the US.

It was a typical Sunday until 8:45 pm. Then, out of nowhere, there was a monstrous blast the force of which pushed both Marcia and I off our chairs. In the instant before the lights went out, I saw the curtains blow into the dining room at the same time all the glass in the windows shattered into pieces and came flying toward us. I also saw Marcia move toward the kitchen. I first thought she was running that way, but I suppose she was just pushed from her chair in that direction.

I felt like I was thinking clearly and I wanted to tell Marcia to not run toward the kitchen as my first thought was that our kitchen gas tank had blown up. But I couldn’t talk. I just stood there with my mouth opening and closing like a fish and no sound would come out. It was just as well as the blast had come from the opposite direction from our kitchen and the gas tank. My thinking, apparently, was as muddled as my voice.

As quick as the blast had come, it was followed by instant, utter silence and darkness. As our thoughts
returned to some level of coherence, Marcia and I checked on each other and thought about what to do. We knew that the glass had blown into the house and was all over the floor but we needed shoes. This was Thailand after all, where the custom is to take off your shoes at the door. So, we were barefoot in the house. The first order of business then, was to get a flashlight, then find shoes and put them on. Stepping on and over the broken glass we managed to find some light and some shoes without cutting our feet. The next order of business was to check on the neighbors to see if they were OK. They were. Then all of us wanted to figure out what had just happened.

I suppose the phones were still working as somehow, we heard rumors that a bomb had gone off and that there was to be another blast soon. As I recall, our neighbor Johann Facchini and I decided there wasn’t much to the rumor of another blast, so we went toward where we saw a large fire burning to see what had happened and to see if there was anything we might do to help.

The remains of the missionary house. Largely
burned but Bible translation files were
intact!

By the time we arrived at the blast area, a missionary house was fully engulfed in flames but they had gone out to dinner after the English church service and were not home at the time of the blast. So the family was safe. This family had been involved in Bible translation work and all their work was stored on paper in file drawers in the house. In what was surely the hand of God, about the only thing left intact in the house after the blast and fire were the file cabinets with the Bible translation.

General Li's fortress like house - target of the blast

What had happened? As posted earlier in this blog (April 6, 2025 “Golden Triangle 101”), after World War II a number of former generals of Chiang Kai Chek settled in the Golden Triangle region where Thailand, Burma and Laos come together. To fund themselves and their operations, they got involved in opium/heroin trade and became rich and powerful politically and economically in the region. One of those generals, General Li, happened to have a large house just a couple hundred yards (straight line distance) from our house. General Li apparently was having a dispute with a competing warlord. Rumor has it, that General Li was supposed to have been at this house on that Sunday for a meeting with some of his lieutenants. So the disgruntled competing warlord loaded a pick up truck with explosives and parked it outside the wall of General Li’s house. It exploded around 8:45 pm.

It's hard to say what happened to Gen Li and his house. This is the kind of story where the Thai government and General Li would limit what the press would learn and report. The General’s house was protected by the concrete block wall but we saw enough to know the wall had been partly destroyed and there was some damage to the house. We heard though, that General Li himself was not actually at that house when the bomb went off.

Much less protected were a number of homes near where the truck bomb was parked. The missionary house had burned down and at least one other house was totally destroyed. Houses are often built very close together in Thai neighborhoods though, so it would not be surprising if several other houses were destroyed as well. Adjoining the back side of General Li’s house was the international school where many missionary children attended. It was damaged and was closed for a few days but did not catch fire. Our children would eventually attend this school starting in the late 1990s.

I went to look over the blast area early the next morning. I could see the blast itself left a crater about waist deep to a Thai police officer and I could see no trace of the truck that had carried the bomb. The official death toll for the blast as reported in the paper was one person who apparently lived by himself in a neighboring home. It would not be surprising if the real death toll was much higher. I do know I watched a Thai police officer carry a very full washtub of jiggly, charred, human body parts away from the blast area that Monday morning. Had the police been carrying similar tubs of body parts all through the night? Who knows?

Some of the blast area.

For us personally, we learned that bomb blasts cause wooden houses to quickly expand and then contract which shakes dust loose from any and all cracks and crevices. So we had a very dirty house to clean. We also had to arrange for the replacement of a lot of louvered window panes which had shattered.

The longest lasting effect though was a mild PTSD. For months afterwards, when certain car doors shut, they must have been on the same sound frequency as the bomb and both Marcia and I would jump out of our skins. We’d feel silly afterwards but the jumping was involuntary.

That Sunday night, our bed had broken glass and dirt all in it from the blast and the lights were out so we couldn’t really see to clean it up. So we went to Rupert and Dee Nelson’s house to sleep. They lived further from the blast so had no broken glass, but their house did have a lot of dust.

Laying awake at the Nelsons, I remember thinking about how some people running around Chiang Mai that evening were celebrating the blast they had created. Maybe they were even gloating that they had avenged some grievance toward General Li.  But for me, the pure evil that bomb represented was haunting and palpable. That someone was pleased with their bomb and the damage and death it caused only amplified the evil I could feel. I have a lot of sympathy for the untold numbers of people around the world that have to live with bombs going off all around them on a regular basis. The effects must be devastating mentally, physically and permanently.