I am in Udonthani, Thailand to attend the wedding of Bob and Phun. I met the couple seven months earlier on Sukhumvit, Soi 3 in Bangkok at an open-air bar. Bob told me over a beer, "They shipped me home from the war when my girlfriend was seven months pregnant. I've been in Thailand searching for my kid - he’d be 35 this year. I haven't found either of them yet, but I found Phun and we're gettin' married next Valentines Day."

That was the beginning of a friendship between Bob, Phun, and me. And it was the moment I first saw Thailand in a new light-as a country where planeloads of broken hearted misplaced men come to find love and sometimes find a new home in the process. Seven months later, Bob picks me up at the Udonthani airport, where I have arrived for the wedding. He talks me out of my hotel room and into staying with he and Phun.

"We’re going to the crippled children’s home in Khan Kaen next week to deliver 30 more." (See information at end of article about how to donate to this project.) By 6AM the next morning, seven members of Phun's family have arrived for the wedding after an all-night bus trip from Chiang Rai.

They squat in a circle on bamboo mats on Bob and Phun’s kitchen floor (the dining table and chairs go unused) eating sticky rice and lahp neua. At 10:10 AM Bob pops open the first Chang of the day and offers me one. "No thanks," I say. "I like to stay alert until at least noon." He tells me that Chang means elephant in Thai, "and this beer kicks like an elephant too." A fighter jet screams overhead and we stop talking until we can hear each other again. "Is that normal?" I ask Bob who is looking up, "Yea, ain’t it nice?" He says. He tells me it’s an Alpha jet, sold to the Thai military by the Germans.

We walk down the street to Bert and Yen’s house. Bert met Yen when he was first based in Udonthani 30 years ago. They’ve been married ever since and have lived all over the world including the United States and Saudi Arabia. Their son lives in the United States with his wife and child. Yen says she misses them but she’s too afraid to visit them in America this year. "Too much war there now," she says. In Yen’s western-style kitchen loaded with modern appliances, the women sit in a circle on the floor preparing food for the wedding reception. Bert says to his wife, "Honey, why don't you use that slicer I bought you?" Yen just shakes her head and continues lopping off symmetric slices of tomato into a bowl with a carving knife. I join the women on the floor. Phun spoons some potato salad in a bowl for me to sample. They all sit back to watch my reaction. I say that it's the best potato salad I've ever tasted and mean it. A local Chinese caterer will cater the other half of the menu Bob says. "Why no Thai food?" I ask him.

"We’re having Chinese. Thai. Chinese. It’s all the same," he says. By 6PM that evening, the men are gathered outside in the soft heat of the evening, empty beer bottles are stacking up – Bob says they’re giving the Chang a test run before the reception tomorrow.The men laugh together and share old war stories and tales of ex-wives. Doug is a soft-spoken southerner from South Carolina, and there is Ken, a former FAA executive who looks like the doll of the same name, except for the shock of silver hair on his head, and Tom from Yorkshire, the one the guys tease because he speaks "weird English", and Bartle, the tall, soft-spoken Swede who tells me he was single for 10 years after the death of his wife, and he figured no woman would want him; until he discovered Thailand, and fell for the first woman he met here.

Ken says, "I’m a true American. I love America, but damn it, I don’t want to live there my whole life." After his second divorce in America he tells me, he moved first to Australia then to Thailand. "I like the weather and the people here and after I met a Thai woman, I called my three kids and said, ‘Guess what, I’m not coming home.’ They raised holy hell. ‘I have my life and you have your life’, I told them." (He spends half the year in Thailand and half in the U.S.) "I made two women rich and I’m not about to do that again. American women just want a man for security."

"Thai women don’t," I ask?

"Well sure they do, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper here."

I join the women who are sitting across the street on a raised bamboo platform gossiping animatedly in rapid-fire Thai. Acham (teacher) Nit, introduces the old woman sitting next to her as her mother. "Where does she live?" I ask. Acham Nit tells me in her halting, but excellent English, that in Thailand, when a parent is old, they live with their children. "My mother lives with me," she said. The ladies ask me to find good American men for the two young single women there tonight. "My mother say you look like Thai people," Acham Nit says to me. "Thai people smile a lot - You smile a lot." I guess it's true.

I can't seem to wipe this smile off my face.

The Wedding

The next morning by 8 AM, The caterers are setting up the tables, chairs, and bandstand for the post-wedding block party. Two elder women from the neighborhood and Yen are draping white strings on the branches of a traditional Thai wedding tree, called Bah-Si-Su-Kwa. It’s shaped like our Christmas tree, but intricately woven into shape with individually folded banana leaves and jasmine flowers.

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