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INTERVIEWER
I've heard that you bought a ten-year-old prostitute out of servitude.
VOLLMANN
Oh, I did that in Thailand. That Afghanistan book is all about how I tried to help people and failed. Even the book itself was a failure—not a perfect book and it sold terribly. Everything has been totally consistent about it.
INTERVIEWER
It's a masterpiece in its own way.
VOLLMANN
A masterpiece of failure. Anyway, so when I was in Thailand, I went to a town in the south and bought a young girl for the night. This awful brothel—one of these places hidden behind a flowershop with all these tunnels and locked doors and stuff—was like a prison. I tried to help a couple of the girls but you just can't get them out. I tried and I couldn't. I made the mistake of going to the police, trying to have the police get them out—all that did was nearly get them arrested and put in jail, because the police are paid off. I managed to get the raid called off by taking all the cops out to dinner and buying them Johnnie Walker. I bought this fourteen-year-old girl and got her in a truck and drove like hell to Bangkok. I was with this other girl at the time—Yhone-Yhone, a street prostitute, a very happy one. She was my interpreter. She put the fourteen-year-old girl at ease and got her to trust me. We got her set up at a school, run by a relative of the King of Thailand. I went up north, met her father, gave him some money and got a receipt for his daughter. He didn't know she'd been sold to a brothel. When I met him and told him he said, |
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