After service as a commando in the Thai Border Patrol Police Parachute Aerial Resupply Unit, he went to work as a civilian with Air America during the Laotian Civil War.
On 5 September 1963, he was a member of a Curtiss C-46 Commando air crew shot down near Ban Houei Sane, Laos.
After two escape attempts, including one spell of 32 days spent starving in the jungle, he was still struggling to flee when rescued by the Ban Naden raid of 5 January 1967.
[1] Members of James William Lair's Police Aerial Resupply Unit received Special forces training as commandos.
[2]: 32 After that experience, he found employment with Air America as a cargo handler on refugee relief missions dropping rice and other supplies into the Kingdom of Laos.
On 4 September 1963, as part of Laotian Civil War operations, he was scheduled to fly such missions the following day with his usual flight crew on a Curtiss C-46 Commando.
After a nervous return flight, mechanics checked the aircraft for damage, and passed it as safe to fly.
Because Phisit was an experienced parachutist, he hurried to help inexperienced crew members bail out of the stricken plane.
[1] Because Phisit bailed out last, after failing to convince Cheney and Herrick to abandon the C-46's controls, he left the falling plane at a lower altitude than the others.
At 17:45, four Royal Lao Air Force AT-6s flew over his abandoned parachute before turning away from ground fire.
In turn, Phisit sneaked off down a lightly used trail, moving through increasing rain and oncoming dusk.
Although this camp was cleaner because it was on a stream bank, the guards here tied ropes around the prisoners' necks when they slept.
Phisit scrounged a piece of metal from which he improvised a small knife; with this, he jiggered the stocks so the prisoners could remove them when the guards were not watching.
By now, each of the men had lost about 10 kilos weight over five months captivity despite a policy of eating grasshoppers, crickets, and lizards.
[1] As the guards relaxed their vigilance, Phisit cobbled up a makeshift pick for the handcuffs out of an old toothpaste tube.
Pursued for six days, reduced to drinking their own urine and to licking dew from jungle leaves, they were finally caught at a waterhole.
From Ban Pha Tang, the captives marched five days to a cave filled with long-term prisoners.
Located near this large village in a mountain defile under heavy foliage, it had watch towers at two corners of the compound.
After bathing and receiving their first haircuts in more than a year, they were given clean uniforms and interrogated in Lao, Thai, and English with French overtones.
Eventually, all five prisoners signed bogus confessions; Phisit swore he invaded Laos on orders of the Royal Thai Government.
[1] On 3 December 1965, the captured air crew was joined by American aviator First Lieutenant Duane W. Martin, who had been shot down 20 September.
[1] In anticipation of the now-pending rainy season, the prisoners began intense debate about escape plans.
The impatient Dengler believed the guards were fair game, but most of the others claimed the Geneva Convention allowed execution of recaptured prisoners in such cases.
When wild game was hunted and brought into camp, the captives received only the intestines as their share of the meal.
At one point, a Cessna O-1 Bird Dog seemed to spot the camp, and there was fear that they had been mistaken for a supply depot, and the forward air controller would call in a bombing raid on them.
He wandered through the jungle, sometimes in a circle, plagued by daily malaria attacks, eating tadpoles for sustenance.
He spent the following two days trying to cross a North Vietnamese supply route traversed by trucks and under sporadic air attack.
[1] Information about this prison complex was received by Central Intelligence Agency personnel responsible for operations in Laos.
Their poor physical condition led to their recovery from an impromptu helicopter landing zone in the middle of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
After Air America departed Southeast Asia in 1975, Inthrarathat worked in Bangkok for a Thai company before retiring.