Bruce Eures:  

Life I was born an orphan in a Red Cross hospital in Bangkok, Thailand, a country notorious for not having a social welfare net for its people. I was destined to live the life a street urchin, or at best, spending the rest of my life in the rice fields of Thailand. The year was 1962, just as the Vietnam War was heating up. According to the hospital records, my natural mother abandoned me at the hospital after having been born. The hospital some time later contacted her and told her that her baby was at the hospital, and that she needed to come back and take her baby. She did go back to the hospital, only to abandon me a second time, for she had already had a large family, and both her and her husband were very poor. At that point I was sent to the orphanage /adoption unit within the hospital until further disposition could be made. Because I was new in the orphanage unit, I still had some strength, unlike a lot of the babies there that had been there for a while. My unspent energy allowed me to be a happy baby for the moment, and I spent my time charming random visitors to my bedside with a wide Cheshire grin. After about six months in the unit I was visited by an American couple that could not have children. The wife, born in middle American Iowa, and the husband, a Florida native, seem to take to me. I gave my usual greeting, the largest smile I could muster. At eight months, I was living in the home of my new American parents, the house of a career government civil servant. My father’s career would take me to many places beyond the walls of the Thai hospital orphanage unit. The first stop was back to Miami, Florida for a short time, then to Washington D.C. . I would continue to careen across the globe as a dependent to my father’s career. I went to Katmandu, Nepal where I lived a life not unlike the scenes from Rudyard Kipling’s, The Jungle Book, and hunting for blue bull while attempting to avoid Bengal Tigers in the tall elephant grass. The family would take our rest and relaxation in Bombay and New Delhi, India. Then it was back to the US for the family, while my father when on assignments in Islamabad, Pakistan, during one of the frequent Indian/Pakistan conflicts. We also stayed in Florida as my father did a year tour in Vietnam at the American Embassy. It was 1968, and the Tet Offensive had been launched. During the seventies, I spend more time overseas in Thailand and the Philippines. Our family vacations consisted of short excursions to Penang, Malaysia. Because labor is affordable overseas, we were never without domestic help to keep the family in order. By the time I was 16, I was already a weary world traveler, having seen Thailand, Philippines, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, India, and Nepal. College Because a government salary is modest at best, my time in the US was spent very simply and with out the domestic help afforded overseas. My adopted parents, although well meaning, tried to, but never successfully set aside any money for college for myself or my adopted sister. With that in mind, I joined the service in 1980 after high school to work my way through college....Expand for more