Like Odysseus in Homer’s Greek tragedy, the journey of Pornchai Max Moontri left him shipwrecked in a far-off land. His journey home is a moving tale of Divine Mercy.
October 28, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae
Before we get there, however, we must stop here for a moment. In the photo above Pornchai Moontri is expressing with hands in prayer, the traditional Thai gesture of gratitude to his aunt, who raised him and now welcomes him home. Seated behind them with a big smile is Pornchai’s older brother Priwan. Both of them were taken away in 1985, and now they have come home again.
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In May 2022, in the aftermath of the calamitous U.S. withdrawal from a long, protracted war in Afghanistan, I wrote a post about a true and tragic chapter in that Biden-era disaster. My post was “No Child Left Behind — Except in Afghanistan.” It tells the story of an eight-year-old Afghan boy whose father had served the American troops as a translator during the war. It was absolutely essential that he leave Afghanistan with his family for he and they would have been at the mercy of the Taliban. On the day of the chaotic U.S. withdrawal, the former translator took his wife and their baby along with their eight-year-old son, James, to board the last flight out of Kabul. During a heated struggle to get through a crowded gate onto the last plane out, James became separated from his father and forced back into the struggling mob. My post then changed over to a parallax view, that of eight-year-old James watching in tears as the plane took off with his family but without him. The translator did everything possible to leave that plane to find his son, but he faced an existential dilemma. Does he save James? Or does he save his wife and infant child born that very morning by cesarean section. Before he could decide, U.S. troops aboard the plane told him that if he leaves that plane he cannot come back. The choice was devastating.
My account then changed to the story of James, who sat on the ground and cried as the plane departed. An Aghan citizen who was there with his 16-year-old nephew knew that Taliban agents were also there among the enormous crowd. The man who discovered James knew he would be in grave danger, so he took him away from that airport and away from Kabul.
After a series of terror-stricken encounters with Taliban soldiers, eight-year-old James ended up being smuggled to the United Arab Emirates, where a group of American expats had formed an organization called “Task Force Argo,” which worked clandestinely to get Americans safely out of Afghanistan. At the time I wrote that story, it was unclear whether they could or would save James. My story ended without any resolution to the tragedy contained therein.
Of interest, and an example of Divine Mercy, I set this present post into writing on October 24, 2026. I did not realize as I was writing it that this date was, and for some Orthodox Christians still is, the traditional feast day honoring Archangel Raphael long before it was combined with a September 29 observance honoring the three archangels of Sacred Scripture, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. I was struck by this revelation, and especially so when I re-read the Traditional Prayer to Saint Raphael. Here it is:
O Raphael the Archangel, lead us toward those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us. Raphael, Angel of happy meeting, lead us by the hand toward those we are looking for. May all our movements be guided by your light and transfigured with your joy. Angel, guide of Tobias, lay the request we now address to you at the feet of Him whose unveiled face you are privileged to gaze. Lonely and tired, crushed in spirit by the separations and sorrows of life, we feel the need of calling to you and pleading for the protection of your wings so we may not be as strangers in the province of joy. Remember the weak, you who are so strong, you whose home lies beyond the region of thunder in a land that is always at peace, bright with the resplendent glory of God.
After praying this prayer anew, I learned from an AI Grok query through a friend that after publishing my 2022 post about James, the Task Force Argo people were successful in getting James out and restoring him safely to his family. We will append this news to the end of my 2022 post, which we will link to again at the end of this one. I hope you will read it.
Pornchai Max and Moong — 41 Years After Their Parting
Many readers know that Pornchai is now also called “Max” after his choice of Patron Saint and role model, Maximilian Kolbe, who was no stranger to the injustices of prison and tyranny. For many former prisoners, Pornchai’s dramatic conversion was an inspiration. My immense empathy for the plight of Pornchai Max in Thailand and James in Afghanistan (now in California) is driven by my personal awareness of the immensity of their traumas.
“Freedom from stone walls and iron bars brings no freedom from a prison of the mind. Pornchai Moontri now faces a tempest within and I still walk with him from afar.”
You may recall those few lines from my recent post, “Pornchai Moontri and the Things We Carry.” Sometimes those “things” are deeply traumatic and form a longstanding burden. Through much help and grace, Max is still recovering. He came into this world during the winds of war in Vietnam. Poverty, starvation, and abandonment were the landscape of his early life. The Fall of Saigon in neighboring Vietnam ended that war, which so haunted the United States, while introducing much evil and a flood of desperate refugees into Thailand.
Pornchai was abandoned by his biological father before he was even born. Then at age two he was abandoned by his mother, barely out of her teens, who was deeply traumatized and rendered desperate from her inability to care for or even feed her sons. Years later, in the care of an aunt whom he came to believe was his mother, his young life was consumed by hard work. Then his mother came to claim him nine years later when he was age eleven. None of his mother’s family knew that she was controlled by the selfish evil of an American whom she had married. He sent her to retrieve Pornchai and his life from then on descended from Purgatory into Hell. If you have kept up, you know the rest.
After an absence of 41 years, starting with Pornchai’s removal from Thailand at age eleven, he is now back where he started. He is living in the house his mother was building, a house that remained empty and crumbling for decades. He is now working to repair it, and he is working to live with the terrible tragedy in which his mother’s life ended in what is now an unsolved homicide on the U.S. territorial Island of Guam. She was beaten to death. The case is “unsolved” only in the minds of those who must now investigate it. Max and I both know exactly what took place, and why. I continue to work toward reopening that matter with some recent success. I wrote of this in “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.” Please pray that truth and justice will prevail for Wannee and Max, and for me as well.
Pornchai’s brother Priwan, who was twelve in 1985, was also brought to the U.S. at that time under the abusive “care” of Richard Alan Bailey. One of their close friends in Thailand at that time before they were taken away was a boy named “Moong.” He was Pornchai’s and Priwan’s best friend, but he too was traumatized at age twelve when his best friends disappeared from Thailand without explanation. Pornchai and Moong have now come full circle in a blessed reunion as Pornchai returned to the home of his late mother in September this year. More on this below.
In 2020, when Pornchai left our prison cell and his time in prison was at an end, he was deported from the United States to Thailand. I have been assisting him from afar to the best of my ability. Unlike for most men who leave prison, there were no jobs to be had in Thailand at the height of a global pandemic. This was especially so for Pornchai who had no job history at all in Thailand. Some of our generous readers have helped me in my decision to provide basic sustenance to Pornchai, which I have done for the last six years. His return has been a painful journey, but he has lived up to the true meaning of his name: Pornchai in Thai means “Triumphant Blessing.”
Pornchai has lived in seven locations over those six years. For four of them he had landscaping work for room and board but no pay. In three other locations, he lived in near homelessness in rented rooms. For one period of time, he was in fact homeless, sleeping in the jungle near the northern border with Laos. In each place, including in the jungle, I connected daily by telephone with Pornchai, again thanks to the kindness of our readers.
The most recent few months have been an especially difficult journey. Priwan, Pornchai’s older brother by two years, had a reunion with him in Thailand. For both of them it was a glorious event. Back in 1985, when Priwan was twelve years old, he too was taken from Thailand and brought to the State of Maine. Distance and expense made him a stranger to his homeland. In 1985 at the village school in Phu Wiang, Priwan had a close friendship with his first girlfriend, who was also a classmate. They kept in touch for 41 years. In September, after all that time, they became betrothed to each other in a traditional Buddhist ceremony in Phu Wiang. Pornchai attended as his brother’s witness. As part of this ceremony, Pornchai had to give his brother away. “But I just got him back,” he pleaded. I had to explain to him that it is only symbolic. The scene is depicted in the photo below as they are surrounded by their extended family in that village.
But that was not the only amazing reunion in September. As mentioned above, at the Phu Wiang village school in 1985, Pornchai and Priwan had a best friend, like another brother, really. They called him “Moong.” That is not his entire name, but it was the name they knew him by. When Pornchai arrived in Phu Wiang in September this year, he had a meeting at the school and asked if he could arrange to provide an ice cream treat for the children at the school. Everyone liked the idea, and so, from the mayor down to all the students and teachers, they used the occasion as a welcome-home event for Pornchai. Later that day, an eight-year-old boy at the school went home and told his father that a man named Pornchai came to the school an bought ice cream for everyone. The boy’s father, amazingly, is Moong. Moong was shocked. He immediately called the mayor at home, who confirmed that Pornchai Moontri was back in Phu Wiang after 41 years.
So on the next day, which was a Saturday, Moong showed up at Pornchai’s house with the mayor. Moong and Pornchai did not recognize each other at all. But as soon as Moong began to talk about all the things they did back then, the eyes of Pornchai’s memory were opened. They have renewed their bond of friendship.
Moong’s renewed presence in Pornchai’s life is a Providential gift from God. The house that Pornchai’s mother, Wannee, had been building had seen better days. It needed enormous repairs, not the least of which was the demolition of another house, only partially built, when some unnamed person took over that property believing that Pornchai was never coming back. When Moong saw the scene of what Pornchai faced, he said that he would be back the next day with a backhoe and a truck and a crew. The scene below is what they faced as they tackled it.
It seems symbolic of Pornchai’s own recovery when two days later Pornchai sent me this photo below taken just after he and Moong faced the calamitous rubble. The transition was nothing short of amazing.
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A Flood of Biblical Proportions
After the cleanup above, Pornchai traveled to Bangkok with his brother Priwan to see him off for his long flight back to Maine. When Pornchai tried to begin his return to Phu Wiang, Thailand’s monsoon rains came. For the next week roads were impassable with up to three feet of water raging along his path to home. Pornchai was able to go only as far from Bangkok to Pattaya on the Gulf of Thailand. From there it was another nine hours to Phu Wiang, but all the roads were closed. I told Max not to attempt it, but to find a cheap motel and ride out the deluge. It was a long week for Max. Fortunately, our BTSW editor was able to consult AI Grok on a daily basis for up-to-the-minute reports. Finally, in mid-September, Grok reported a dry route between the monsoon downpours — if Pornchai would hurriedly depart Pattaya for Phu Wiang. Grok continued its reports, and we were able to send Max, by email, warnings of road closures and detours. A full day later, Max was home and Phu Wiang was perfectly dry.
The next day, Pornchai attended a Mass of thanksgiving at the Phu Wiang Catholic Chapel of Saint Joseph, which Max volunteered to repair and maintain for the village. Many of those who attend Mass also attend the Bhuddist services. This is common in many mission territories.
When Pornchai was still with me between 2006 and 2020, he gradually set aside his Bhuddist traditions to become Catholic. His present family respects Pornchai’s Catholic traditions, and some of them even attend Mass with him.
Pornchai owes a debt of gratitude to many people, among them is Catholic League President Bill Donohue, who helped me move a mountain of ICE. “A Catholic League White House Plea Set Pornchai Moontri Free.”
Before Pornchai left me for his deportation to Thailand, a reader sent him a beautiful prayer written by the great Catholic spiritual writer, Thomas Merton, a Trappist (Cistercian) priest and monk, who became globally known for his spiritual writings. It was Thomas Merton who brought me back into the Church in my adolescence.
Pornchai kept the beautiful prayer and he told me that it was the story of his life. He was amazed when I told him that Father Thomas Merton died from accidental electrocution at a Bangkok monastery in 1968. I like to think that he left Pornchai and me both with this prayer:
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for joining us in this post about triumphant Blessings overcoming trauma. Please spend some time with these related posts:
No Child Left Behind — Except in Afghanistan (published in 2022, and with a new and hopeful addendum by AI Grok)
For Pornchai Moontri, A Miracle Unfolds in Thailand (2021)
Book of Tobit: The Angel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri
A Catholic League White House Plea Set Pornchai Moontri Free
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The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”