Thanks John;

They looked black to me
Used to send my mom photos of the kr riding around in trucks on the thai side of the border an my mom used to send me copies of the Washington posts stating there were NO KR in Thailand.

My roommate was in camp 8

There were also Hmong/ Vietnamese/ Burmese refugee camps much further north.

Still plenty of camps along the Burmese border between Um Phang and Fang. Never visited any Hmong camps

Still some old KMT camps as well

A quick Google search says the Khmer Rouge was chased out of Phnom Penh in 1979 by the Vietnamese and crossed into Thailand.

There was great chaos at the end of the Vietnam war with many people moving about in the whole region from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.. The history is quite complicated and I don't claim to know anything other than what I experienced.
I think it was around 1980, no cellphones, no satellite tv, only news source I had was that crappy BBC radio 12 o'clock briefing.

And of course what I was experiencing on the ground where I was. Specifically the winding road between Chiang Dao and Chai Prakan.

amatuertrader wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2020 8:49 am A quick Google search says the Khmer Rouge was chased out of Phnom Penh in 1979 by the Vietnamese and crossed into Thailand.

There was great chaos at the end of the Vietnam war with many people moving about in the whole region from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.. The history is quite complicated and I don't claim to know anything other than what I experienced.
I think it was around 1980, no cellphones, no satellite tv, only news source I had was that crappy BBC radio 12 o'clock briefing.

And of course what I was experiencing on the ground where I was. Specifically the winding road between Chiang Dao and Chai Prakan.

what where you doing up there? Beautiful roads up there:-)
I was first in cm in 75 and than back in 82, did some trekking to hill tribes before they were gentrified.

amatuertrader wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2020 8:02 am ... the fear was real.

Yep, Trader, i believe it was.
I got a glimpse of the locals and Thai military fear one dark night.
Late August, '75 after just crossing out of Laos 10 days after the final Pathet Lao takeover of Vientienne.
One of the eeriest on-edge spookiest scariest nights of my life was on the dimly lit overnight coach back to Bangkok.

Every 20 minutes /20 miles (whatever) we would be pulled over by a couple of torches on the dark empty road.
Sitting there in that close steaming space aware those dim shadowy figures surrounding us just a window pane's distance away are Thailands hardest commando's in camouflage. Hyper alert, twitchy, triggers on their fingers.

2 or 3 hard muscled blokes would jump on board and a sheffield steel-eyed officer ever so slowly and meticulously moved up the bus - stopping and staring into every passengers soul for as long as it took for him be satisfied. (half a dozen rough country types, including women, were ushered off into the night at one of the stops)
Spooo keee. especially in the nearly total dark.

I was carrying 3000 sticks and both me and my aussie girlfriend had dropped a couple of that Indian baker's famous ganja cakes for the trip. (cafe near the vientienne market, he was still there when i went back in 2005)
But i promise you, i was not the only one who pissed himself on the bus that night (well i may have - hard to tell when you are sweating so much), Even the most innocent passengers were trembling their eyeballs out of their sockets under that piecing steel commando gaze.

Yeah, i reckon whole vast swathes of the Thailand's northern, NE and eastern borders were probably all on hyper alert in 1975.
Understandable i s'pose

The Thai Communist Party were active at that time, the war in the north of Thailand was underreported. It died down after the Chinese agreed to stop supporting the TCP in return for allowing KR to set up camps in Thailand.