Embarrassing photo no.1

I promised when I started to write this blog that I would regularly add new embarrassing photos to my fundraising page.

Here's one I posted up earlier. On the back of the photo is written "Bangkok January 1965" which, if correct, would mean I was almost 3 when it was taken. My parents were working in Thailand, and we lived in a house that was then in the outskirts  but has since been swallowed by expanding urban sprawl and is now pretty central in the City.

I don't remember much about Thailand at that time, just isolated memories such as when a cobra was found and killed in the garden. Another time the khlongs (canals) flooded in the monsoon and left fish stranded across our lawn. I remember, too, family holidays to Pattaya - now a centre of the sleazier side of tourism, but then an idyllic beach fringed by palm trees and wooden bungalows.

I'm told - but don't actually remember this - that around the time this photo was taken, I somehow became separated from my parents during a visit to Bangkok zoo. Lost and increasingly desperate, I was found by an American soldier (who must have been on R&R from the Vietnam War) who picked me up and put me on his shoulders, then walked me around until I spotted my parents.

I wonder who he was, and what happened to him.