Border Conflict Day Five: Bombs and Bomb Shelters

The day started quietly. I revisited the school on Soi ? where I had observed the Thai howizters on Saturday. They were long gone but the damage they had done to a school outbuilding was far worse than anything I saw as a result of shelling from Cambodia.

Most of the windows and all the doors had been blown off the main school building and this outbuilding had been dedimated, pages of kids text books with recent colouring in were littered all over the floor. I wanted to explore as far afield as I could and I found the track to Prahan Ta Kaboey, there was a group of black shirts who were taking a break and warned me not to go any closer.

A bit further down the road I found an old Thai man, everyone else had evacuated but he had lots of cats and dogs and couldn't leave them. I didn't want to ask him how old he was so I asked him how long he had been there for and he just said, 'long time'

I also asked him if he was scared adn why he didn't leave and he just shrugged and said he had to care of the animals, I wish my Thai was good enough to have properly interviewed him, I would lvoe to have heard his story.

After a bit more off road exploring I found a couple of tanks but I think they were a long way from the front line because everyone was very relaxed and let me take photos. It's all countryside and I am sure it would be possible to sneak into Cambodia, a couple of journalists actually asked me about this, but I wouldn't want to risk being blown up by a mine leftover from the Khmer Rouge or arrested for being a spy.

At 1:30 I heard my first explosion of the day, accom panied by the sounds of jets overheard which might or might not have been a coincidence. There were a couple more explosions, coming from the Prasat Ta Kraboey area but I left to see if I could get closer to the front line at Prasat Ta Muang.

In Bang Nong Kana they were filling sand bags and putting up bomb shelters, I took a few pics little suspecting that I would be running for my life and diving into that very same shelter later that day.

I got as far as the barbed wire roadblock but they wouldn't let anyone through. I saw a Thai photo grapher I knew taking pics of a shelter near the roadblock so went for a chat. A load of ambulances turned up but they were dropping odd drink and water and supplies, then there was a shout and the ambulance crews ran for their vehicles and drove off while everyone else piled in the shelter. To start with the journalists were staying on the outside and filming taking pics but after a couple of minutes they were elbowing the locals out the way.

You could hear the sound of the Cambodian artillery but nothing seemed to be landing near and it was all quite relaxed, although I for one was certainly aware that 11 shells had fallen in this small village on Sunday, even if only one of them actually went off.

The artillery died down but a couple of vehicles had sped fast at a speed which suggested they contained injured soldiers and I decided to check out the hospital. By the entrance to Ban Nong Kana was a check point and a lot of the Thai media had retreated here. For some reason even though less than a km away people were in shelters here everyone was standing about in the open.

I also met a farang called John (Here he is sitting casually at his computer while all the Thai journalists take cover in a ditch), who had a flak jacket, a proper hard hat and had been wounded in the line of duty several times. Instead of staying in a hotel he was sleeping in a hammock here because it was as close to the front line as he could get and he had brought a healthy supply of beer which we got stuck into while we waited for something to happen, we didn't have to wait long.

Seconds after this picture was taken one of the soldiers shouted 'MB 21' and everyone ran for their lives, either taking cover in the ditch or running even further away into the fields. It's difficult to distinguish between incoming and outgoing but there was definitely some incoming and it sounded disconcertingly close, I heard a whizzing noise which was new to me.

I showed the soldier who took me round the shell holes on Sunday a picture of damage in Ban Phum Saron, a 10ft wide crater and a destroyed house, and he took one look at it and said 'MB 21' so I had a healthy respect for these things. Given that the 75mm shells didn't explode most of the time you would need one to basically hit you on the head so I wasn't too fussed about these but the mention of MB 21 was enough to set the pulse rating.

I think one landed in a field close by and failed to go off, but there were a few pillars of smoke coming from a couple of kilometers away. Despite the bomb ardment there were a couple of farmers who stayed in the field with their buffalos the whole time, even when shells were landing in neighbouring fields, I guess for some people life just goes on. Once the firing had stopped I headed back towards Praset Ta Moang and discovered a house which had taken a direct hit on Ban Nong Kana. It was empty and didn't belong to anyone, so no real harm done once again.

I managed to take a couple of photos of it when the Cambodians started firing again and everyone through themselves to the floor. Given that I knew that I was lying down less than 10 metres away from where a shell had landed half an hour ago this was not a particularly good moment.

Lying on the ground or out in the open during incoming fire is not a particularly pleasant sensation. Even though I knew that statistically there was a 99.9% chance I would be ok I wasn't inclined to hang around (although I did take a quick photo, the dog doesn't look too bothered...) and when the firing stopped for a second and someone ran and jumped on their bike I did the same thing and followed him.

I was going to get the hell out of there and hit the main road but he drove at breakneck speed to the same bomb shelter I had photographed earlier and dived in there so I did exactly the same The bomb shelter felt like a jacuzzi in the Ritz after lying in the dirt by the side of the road and I felt completely safe. All the people who had stayed were middle aged to elderly men, many of whom had ancient rifles strung over their shoulders. They looked after me really well, kept offering me bottles of water and seemed genuinely excited to have a journalist in their midst.

When this bomb ardment ended I headed back to where the journalists had been camped on the edge of the village but they had all gone by this stage, probably to somewhere a little further away from the fighting.

I kept stopping and talking to locals, partly because I was about to run out of petrol and urgently needed to find somewhere to buy some, and by luck got pointed in the direction of another shell in Ban Kok Asuat.

This one had landed harmlessly in the ground and failed to go off. The firing had been pretty much constant since 2:30pm when I first had to shelter but it all seemed to be heading from Thailand towards Cambodia. At a school about 3 km from where I found the unexploded shell there were people playing table tennis out in the open and there were people milling around in all of the villages.

I found this group sitting in a hole in the ground. Personally I would have wanted something with a substantial and preferably sandbag covered roof over my head but they seemed to be content. One of them even walked slowly up the road with me to show me where the shell had landed and didn't seem remotely concerned about the possibility of another one heading his way.

Everywhere I went I encountered cheerful, defiant people. I guess the fact that, so far, Thai civilians seem to have been completely unharmed helps but I think in some ways a war can bring out the best in people. There was something very noble and dignified about these 60 year old men who probably lived in these villages all their lives and had stayed behind to defend their homes when everyone else had fled to the safety of refugee camps.

There is no doubt in my mind though that Thailand has fired far, far more shells and artillery into Cambodia then has come in the opposite direction and if this war goes on I think there will be a lot of suffering on the Cambodian side of the border.