Word: opium
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Poppy's plot is poppycock. Two U.N narcotics agents (Howard and Marshall) assigned to trace a shipment of radio activated opium from the poppy field of Persia to the junk shops of Harlem whip out their trusty Geiger counter and go lickety-click from Teheran to Geneva to Naples to Nice. En route they run a grim gauntlet of all-too-familiar thriller scenes (bang-bang on the Blue Train, hugger-mugger on the bad guy's yacht, hack-the-stripper in a nudie nightspot) and unpleasantly overripe chestnuts ("How'll we get there-take the midnight...
...runs against Communist troops moving toward South Viet Nam along the Ho Chi Minh trail. For all his blustering threats, however, Ma's objectives were limited. Royalist generals, who resented his refusal to let them use his transport planes in their more or less open dealings in the opium trade, had pressured the government to retire him as air force commander and give him a desk job in Vientiane. All he really wanted was to stay where...
...slight defect in the wallpaper pattern and makes funnies that are so far out they sink before the slow boats get there. One day, for instance, he appeared in public leading his pet ant on a leash. On other occasions he wondered evilly if Memorial Day poppies contain opium, tsked sympathetically about a resolutely modern painter who cut off his ear with an electric razor, revealed regretfully that he once owned a silver mine but it tarnished...
Bandits & Opium. As one of his many admiring colleagues puts it, Page is "a daredevil, an adventurer of the old school, not for publicity's sake, but because he is incredibly bored at doing anything else but the hairiest of man's feats." The son of an auditor, Page led a fairly normal life until his graduation from a good grammar school near London, then bought a Volkswagen bus and started driving from Amsterdam to Nepal. It took him a year; he then blithely climbed a few Himalayan mountains, began hitchhiking to Laos...
Before he fetched up there, Page had survived being bushwhacked by Burmese bandits, "gone dead broke seven times," sold ice cream in Bombay, taught English in Bangkok, worked in hotels everywhere, given driving lessons anywhere, and even smuggled a little opium. Once in Laos, he persuaded U.P.I, to take him on as a stringer photographer, though he had no professional experience. He soon moved to Viet Nam, turned freelancer, and has been covering the war ever since-except for a few brief vacations like the one to Singapore, where he began a motorbike ride back to Saigon through Laos, Cambodia...