I should like to talk more about our vegetable patch but let me first introduce my dear colleagues here. There are eight of us, nine if you count the dog but I’ll tell his story later. There’s no need to memorize the names. As I proceed, I’ll talk about them in more detail. Our commander is Major General Dorari Momoyotsu (怒驘詈腗四). He’s a sweet man, small with a huge shiny skull. From behind, it looks like he’s wearing a pink motorcycle helmet. I am his second-in-command. Below me is Captain Jame Nomishige (邪目耳滋). He is our quartermaster. He isn’t fit for active duty because he lost an eye in one battle and a leg in another. I joke that it was very clumsy of him. But despite his age, he is a wonderful stores man. Next is Second Lieutenant Tetsukimo Souben (泆膽藻麵). He’s very tall for a Japanese and skinny as a bamboo pole. Then there is Warrant Officer Ukabane Orimimi ( 迂屍淤耳). He’s as strong as an ox and a little scary to look at. His face is all battered and misshapen. Corporal Yatsusuki Hokobei (奴犁夸謎), on the other hand, has a smooth, kind face but he’s built like, as they say, a concrete latrine. Private Oshiira Somai (啞苛蔬迷) I secretly call Quasimodo because he has a hunched back and bad skin. He sings quite beautifully. Last is Lance Corporal Hokofugu Hama (餘鮭芭麽), who has a penchant for alcohol although he doesn’t become violent when he’s drunk. I’ve noticed that drinking brings out a hidden feminine side that perhaps only I can see.

What a colorful group we are. I confess I am dull compared to my comrades. Our mission is to prepare Thakhek for the coming-together of all the Japanese armed forces. We have been allocated forty acres of land abutting the town. With the help of local labor we will build our own little Nirvana with dormitories and roads and other facilities. Meanwhile we live in tents, which I find most invigorating.

Nineteen eighty-one Laos was wallowing in a quagmire of bad luck and naivety, a state that had set back all its dreams of the previous three years. First floods then droughts killed the crops. Bad management and apathy killed off an overly ambitious cooperatives program. Siding with Vietnam killed off any hope of aid from China. And the mass exodus and prolonged incarceration of the royalist workforce killed off a skilled middle class. So what better course of action could there be, given the total failure of the government’s first three-year plan of action, than to make a new plan? The People’s Democratic Republic of Laos’s new five-year plan of action offered new hope and prosperity. The highlights were to revamp industry (currently amounting to small factories producing matches, plastic bags, beer, and rubber sandals), encouraging agriculture (in a country where 75 percent of the lowland was already being farmed), and to work on national highway number nine (which would need heavy equipment the country didn’t possess). In the meantime, imports exceeded exports by 80 percent and experts from other communist countries searched desperately for a proletariat to stimulate. Overseas, the United Lao National Liberation Front with its snug headquarters in California was funding insurgencies and promising to rescue those trapped in Laos—as if the country didn’t have enough problems.