Note: 4,000 Days: My Life and Survival in a Bangkok Prison. Warren Fellows.
St.
Martin's. 206 pages. $22.95.

CAUGHT IN THE UNFORGIVING GRIP OF THAI JUSTICE

In the course of this almost entirely gruesome narrative, Warren
Fellows describes an incident in which it seemed certain that his best
friend would be shot to death by a malicious Thai police officer
nicknamed Mad Dog. The person to whom he told this, he writes, "seemed
to think that the story was too horrible for me to have made up."

Many readers are likely to have the same reaction to 4,000 Days,
Fellows' account of the 11 1/2 years he spent in various Bangkok
prisons on charges (which he scarcely denies) of heroin peddling.

It is an unrelievedly horrible tale, save for notes of release and
redemption that creep in toward the end, so horrible that the
temptation to disbelieve it is severe. But those who have read
Midnight Express, to which of course Fellows' publisher compares 4,000
Days, know all too well the extraordinarily brutal punishments that
have been inflicted on drug pushers in some of the world's more
merciless societies; thus there seems little reason to doubt that
Fellows is telling the truth.

Along with a friend, Fellows was arrested in Thailand in 1978 for
attempting to smuggle heroin to Australia, his home country. He was in
his mid-20s and, like many drug couriers of that day, had drifted into
criminal activity almost unaware of where he was headed.

He makes no effort to justify what he did, beyond saying: "I was a
courier. I never had to look at the damage I may have inflicted." He
knows that heroin is pure poison and blames no one who believes that
any punishment, however cruel, is appropriate for someone who helps
lead others -- many of them innocent -- to addiction and
self-destruction. Still, he writes: "My punishment seemed way out of
proportion and I couldn't see the lesson that was to be learned. How
much suffering was I to go through before the world agreed that I'd
paid my price?"

Assuming that Fellows' story is accurately told, it is hard not to
agree with him. Sentenced to life imprisonment after a dreadful
interrogation, torture and preliminary confinement in unspeakable
conditions, he was shipped off to serve his time in Bang Kwang, a k a
Big Tiger.

"I was well aware of Bang Kwang's reputation as quite simply the most
feared prison in the world. While doing my business in Bangkok, I had
been aware of the possibility that, if caught, I [might] be sent to
Big Tiger. But somehow it had seemed a distant chance -- I did not
belong in Bang Kwang. It was a place for the lowest, most hopeless
forms of humanity. Nobody thinks of themselves in that way. Not even
criminals."

That Bang Kwang did not destroy Fellows, as it has destroyed so many
others, is testimony to his strength of body and spirit. Through a
variety of tortures both physical and spiritual, it made him "a slave
and an animal for a period of time I could never regain," and it's
clear from his narrative that it took a great deal away from him that
he will never recover; but he survived, he was freed on a King's
Pardon on Christmas Day 1989, and he returned promptly to Australia,
where he lives now with his mother.

At a clinical level Fellows' story is interesting, but its details are
heartbreakingly brutal and obscene. Without self-pity, he makes a

compelling case that his punishment was wildly out of proportion to
his crime.

Checked-by: Rich O'Grady