Word: thais
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...clatter of mess-hall cleanup had just given way to the nocturnal sounds of the jungle when Sergeant Manit Kammung and 800 other Thai Border Patrol Police suddenly received orders for a maneuver in the north. Armed with assault rifles, grenades, recoilless rifles and rocket launchers, the men clambered aboard trucks and rode all night through the newly harvested rice fields of central Thailand. Finally the trucks began to growl up the narrow roads that climb to the Golden Triangle, the opium-rich territory where the borders of Thailand, Burma and Laos converge...
...Taek, the fortified mountain stronghold of Khun Sa, the most powerful opium warlord in Asia. Their objective: capture the town and crush the 2,000 mercenaries of Khun Sa's Shan United Army, who ran the opium refineries and ruthlessly held sway over the entire region. The Thai soldiers promptly took up battle lines on one side of the town's main street. Ten yards away stood the surprised drug traffickers, many of them routed from bed and still in their underwear-but heavily armed with automatic weapons...
...bedraggled Line of Shans, some of whom had been passing a bamboo bong filled with marijuana when the Thai soldiers arrived, looked startled for a moment, then raised their weapons and opened fire. "It was like a shootout in a cowboy movie, only it wasn't a movie," recalled Sergeant Manit. "I've been in many battles with Communist insurgents, but they were nothing compared with this...
...artist's expertise does not embarrass Thai antique dealers, who often pass off Yas' reproductions as originals. While the sculptor's work is so highly regarded that he charges between $1,000 and $2,000 for his best stone figures, the dealers who peddle them as antiques can ask-and get-up to ten times as much...
...break the neck off," he explains with professional pride, "it must look natural." He heats the sculpture with a hair dryer, paints it with a secret chemical solution, and buries it for two weeks in his backyard, often in Cambodian soil that he has imported through refugees at the Thai-Cambodian border...