‘The bunker’ is both a physical site as well as an appropriate metaphor for the prevailing sense of besiege and vulnerability that is felt by communities in the border provinces. The village ‘bunkers’ occupied by the village defence units (Cho Ro Bo) are sandbagged enclosures often no more than five sacks high, offering little real protection. The Cho Ro Bo units officially consist of 30 members per village, operating in shifts, from 8:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m., supervised by village headmen, under the aegis of the Ministry of the Interior (through the district offices). The following accounts are drawn from my records of conversations with, and talk among the Thai Buddhist Cho Ro Bo members of two Thai Buddhist villages in Tambon Thamuang during my second stay in 2006. These narratives and comments reveal something of the categories that ordinary people have deployed in their effort to map friends and enemies in a home (ban) and a country (banmueang) that have become somehow strange and unfamiliar to them.