Double karma, p.6
Double Karma, page 6
A few hours after my visit with Thandar’s parents, I went looking for students in the only place they would still be safe in Rangoon: Shwedagon Pagoda. Around the corner from the student monument, I recognized a young man in disguise, with a shaved head and dressed in the Full Saffron — Kyaw Zwar, a student leader I’d met at a few meetings with Thandar, an engineering major at the Rangoon Institute of Technology who had joined the protests in June. I liked Kyaw Zwar. He was earnest and friendly, well-informed and inquisitive, interested in learning more about the world beyond Burma. Each time we met, he had peppered me with questions about life and politics in the United States. Fascinated by our system of government and how our constitution guarantees freedom of speech, he was more eager to explore our similarities than our differences. And he knew a lot about how democracy had worked in Burma before 1962.
Now disguised as a monk, Kyaw Zwar spotted me as I approached him from the terrace. Taking me by the hand, he led me to a hidden corner near a stupa, his bright orange robe flowing behind him. Why was I still in Rangoon? he wanted to know. When I told him I wanted to leave and was looking for a way out, he said he was fleeing the city later that night with a few comrades, heading to the border. I asked if I could join him. He agreed to let me accompany his group, but I wasn’t to breathe a word to anyone. Just pack a few things and meet him at three a.m. behind the clothing factory in the South Dagon industrial park. I wasn’t to be late!
Our journey to the Karen rebel compound at Manerplaw, not far from the Thai border, took us a couple of days. To make our way there, we depended on the kindness of strangers. From South Dagon Township northeast to Pegu, we rode in the back of a chicken farmer’s truck. From there to Kyaikto, a produce van. To the Karen State capital of Hpa-an, a semi-trailer with industrial parts. Into the jungle towards Kawkareik, a straw-filled ox cart. For the final stretch, a Karen rebel army truck. Along the way, I became better acquainted with my travel mates. Kyaw Zwar was the youngest at twenty-three. The rest were twenty-five-year-old graduates, all history majors and arts students who had survived the White Bridge Massacre. I was struck by how events had aged these young men. Barely into adulthood, they carried themselves with the world-weary heaviness of battle-scarred war veterans. And yet, far from being discouraged by defeat in the streets of Rangoon, their sense of purpose had hardened. Back home, most educated guys their age I knew were preoccupied with girlfriends, cars, or finding a good job after graduation. But Kyaw Zwar and his friends cared most about democracy, freedom, and representative government. In a country like Burma, ideals were the only escape from despair.
* * *
Manerplaw, a village nestled along the Moei River about a hundred miles north of the Thai border town of Mae Sot, means “victory field” in the Karen language. Founded in the early seventies by Bo Mya, a pro-Western chairman of the Karen National Union, Manerplaw lay at the heart of an ethnic insurgent–controlled liberation zone known as Kaw Thoo Lei, the proposed capital of an independent state the rebels hoped would one day be governed by the Karen people. Bo Mya was one of those charismatic rebels for which Burma was becoming infamous — like Khun Sa, the Shan State drug lord and leader of the Shan United Revolutionary Army, who embraced his own legend as a renegade and outlaw — and had the press clippings to show for it.
In recent years, Manerplaw had become a gathering place for anti-Rangoon forces. In the wake of the coup, the crowded field of Burman and ethnic opponents of the SLORC could fill a small football stadium. It was hard to tell the players without a program. There was the Democratic Party for a New Society, the National Democratic Front, and several other groups, including one loyal to former prime minister U Nu. Shortly before the September coup, at the age of eighty-one, U Nu had declared himself head of an interim government. This after leading an armed resistance group, some years earlier, that tried to defeat Ne Win from the border. U Nu was something of a Buddhist weather vane, switching from peaceful non-violence to armed insurrection as circumstance saw fit. Some praised him as the country’s first democratic leader, but history has not been as kind given his decision to make Buddhism the state religion.
Within a few months of our arrival, Manerplaw would see the birth of a new coalition. The Democratic Alliance of Burma would include the Karen National Liberation Army and more than a dozen other opposition groups like the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front — the guerrilla army whose birth Thandar predicted before her arrest. Enthusiasm for the Alliance would be short-lived, but in early 1989 it was a big deal: never before had so many Burman activists accepted ethnic minority leadership in their bid to overthrow the dictators. On our first day in Manerplaw, Kyaw Zwar’s group and I reported to the teakwood mansion headquarters of the Karen National Liberation Army. I insisted on doing nothing more than photography. Apart from my feelings about guns, I made a good case for non-military status: I had no more experience handling a firearm than the urban middle-class Burmese students who had recently signed up for the rebellion. “Fair enough,” said the KNLA recruitment officer; I would not be forced to fight. But I wouldn’t be of much use in Manerplaw if I was only taking photos, either. Instead, he suggested I continue down the road and cross the border to Mae La, where there was more than enough work to do supporting refugees.
Mae La, a former base for KNLA rebels on the Thai side of the border, had recently been converted to a giant reception centre for more than a thousand refugees from Karen State, people whose homes and villages the Tatmadaw had burned to the ground. East of Manerplaw, it was the safest place for SLORC opponents to hide and still be within spitting distance of the revolution: thanks to the pro-rebel sympathies of its residents, Mae La was a convenient shelter for students on the run who weren’t quite prepared to pick up arms but wanted to help the resistance. The camp, spread across the town’s muddy hillside, was a crowded cluster of bamboo shacks on stilts, each structure separated by a few trees.
Reporting to a KNU organizer at the camp, I agreed to serve as an interpreter while assisting medical staff. As long as the NGOs kept providing health care, food, and clothing for displaced Karen villagers, almost none of whom spoke English, there would be no shortage of things to do when not taking photos. The daily sight of malnourished children dressed in rags was hard to take, but my heart melted with every smile on those kids’ faces after a meal. Once I was directing a Karen girl of about twelve toward the medical tent when I happened to touch her shoulder. She recoiled, backing away from me.
“You’ll need to keep some distance,” a Karen medic told me. “This girl thinks you’re native Burman. She’s not a big fan of Burmans, having been raped by Tatmadaw soldiers.”
Turning to the girl, the medic apologized on my behalf, telling her I was American; she gradually relaxed in the remaining few weeks that I served her family.
Also humbling were the thanks from refugees grateful for the NGO-provided clothes I gave them. One middle-aged farmer wept as I handed him his bundle: he and his three teenage sons had been wearing the same clothes since escaping their village a month earlier. Most gratifying was the reunion of a five-year-old boy with his parents. Separated after the Tatmadaw destroyed their village, his mother and father assumed the boy was dead. But when I checked a manifest of recently arrived orphans, his name and village were on it. After locating him and confirming his identity, I sent him running into the arms of his overjoyed parents.
I was beginning to feel like I was making a difference when I was confronted by an inconvenient truth. The more I learned about these Karen families, many of whom had fled their burning villages with nothing but the clothes on their backs, the less convincing were my arguments for avoiding combat. By this point I hated the SLORC with a passion, and the Tatmadaw were its military expression — the storm-trooping front men for the junta. After a couple of months of meeting so many people in trauma after barely escaping Burma with their lives, after all the senseless slaughter I had witnessed committed by the SLORC and by the Ne Win regime in its final gasp, I made my peace with war. Abandoning the pacifist, non-violent political stance I had once thought inviolable, I signed up for basic training.
Back in Manerplaw, the Karen squadron leaders put me and my fellow trainees through the paces with relentless workouts three times a day, with repeated cycles of push-ups and pull-ups, sit-ups and crunches, squats and lunges, running races, and strength tests like tug-of-war. After four and a half months of this, I felt like a new person. Before joining the rebels, I was indifferent to physical fitness: a shiftless bohemian, soft and lacking definition. Now I was lean, muscular, alert. A quarter could bounce off my abdominals. I had sinewy arms and legs, and the cardiovascular fitness of a long-distance runner. I had a mind whipped into shape with tunnel-vision purpose thanks to the military training which included hand-to-hand combat, knife-fighting skills, ambush techniques, and lectures on strategy, including how to gain territorial advantage regardless of terrain. I also grew familiar with the Karen rebels’ arsenal of weaponry: from machine guns and hand grenades to rocket-propelled grenades and mortars, flame-throwers, surface-to-air missiles, and rocket launchers. Once deemed ready for combat, I was assigned to an ABSDF squadron joining Karen forces on a mission heading northwest.
Before leaving Manerplaw, I gathered all the film canisters from my time in Burma. Then I paid a KNLA recruiter traveling to Chiang Mai to courier the package to the Associated Press bureau chief in Los Angeles. I included a note giving AP the rights to all my photos until I returned — or died. Then I destroyed my passports, ripping out every page and watching them burn in a fire barrel. I was surrendering my identity to the whims of fate: Min Lin and the Mandalay farmer no longer existed. The camera, too, had become excess baggage: having chosen combat over journalism, I was now a rebel responsible for his own rifle, ammunition, and other heavy equipment. Leaving behind the Nikon was hard, but I reluctantly let it go, handing the camera and all its accessories to the KNLA recruiter who would be stopping by Mae La on his way to Chiang Mai. At my request, he gave it to a refugee camp organizer — a welcome replacement for an older, inferior Pentax his NGO had been using to document camp life.
* * *
High up in the rolling hills of a mosquito-infested mountain range straddling the Thai border lay a critical strategic base for the KNLA, a village called Maw Pokay. Its location along the Moei River marked a key point on the line of defence for thousands of rebel troops dedicated to establishing the independent Karen republic of Kaw Thoo Lei. The Tatmadaw had been pounding Maw Pokay for the past five years. Field reports said they were close to capturing it, so the KNLA were sending in our squadron as reinforcements. When we arrived around mid-March, we spent a few days fortifying the camp and preparing for battle. Our HQ, located at the end of a grassy field beside a deep forest of rubber trees, was a simple bamboo shack, its only notable feature the flag on its thatched roof bearing the KNLA’s blazing-sun-and-star logo. But it lay on coveted ground: once the Burmese Army captured it, they’d be able to cut off key supply routes for the rebel forces. That’s why they had spent so much time in this area, engaging the KNLA every now and then in a cat-and-mouse game of “who controls the river.”
When Tatmadaw forces began shelling Maw Pokay late on the afternoon of March 25, I feared for my life. This was not the fear of September streets in Rangoon — the adrenaline rush of avoiding gunfire as random targets at a demonstration — but something of a much deeper, more existential sort. The fear that comes from suddenly realizing you’re part of a sustained military engagement where there’s no turning back; the fear of knowing that, as rebels going head-to-head against a massive national army, we were stuck in a numbers game where the odds of getting killed were far greater for us than for our opponent. On March 25, it was this kind of fear that gripped me as the first bombs exploded around me and the first bullets zinged past my head, inches from killing me. Dropping to the ground I crawled into a trench, my heart pounding so fast and so hard I thought it might explode. My skin broke out in a cold, nervous sweat. In that moment, I thought about Dad, of how he’d tried to stop me from going to Burma. And I thought about Thandar, rotting away at Insein for inciting the very action I was now taking on her behalf. Well, here we go, I thought. I guess this is it. Let’s see how long I last.
* * *
By clearing the landscape in front of HQ, we had left advancing Tatmadaw forces exposed, allowing us to attack them with mortar fire. The minefield we had planted was picking off Burmese soldiers by the handful but not enough to make a difference in our overall fortunes. And how could it? The combined KNLA/student rebel force was only five hundred soldiers strong, no match for a Burmese Army brigade of five battalions — or six times the manpower, at three thousand soldiers. On day two, I was standing next to Kyaw Zwar, my student buddy who had brought me along with his friends on the long trek from Rangoon, when he was hit by a mortar. Bleeding out from a nearly severed torso as he lay in the weeds beside me, he gathered what little strength he had left to lift an arm and reach for me. I held his hand and tried to comfort him as he took his final breath.
After three days of fighting, several scores of KNLA and student rebels lay dead. But we had killed more than our share of Burmese soldiers, and I had done my part. Over the first two days, I lost count of the Tatmadaw soldiers I had shot dead or blown apart with grenades tossed from the trenches. I felt sick about it. I had signed up for war after adopting Thandar’s cause, putting aside all reservations about violence for political ends. But having been through the actual fighting and dealt with the primal fear of combat during days one and two, I was numbed to the shock and horror of it all by day three. With the end now in sight, and my own death a foregone conclusion, I thought nothing of walking into the line of fire. Acceptance of my doom had infused me with the hollow courage of fatalistic indifference.
Our HQ was now within reach of the Tatmadaw. KNLA command was growing desperate. There was little choice now but to retreat or face annihilation. During a mid-day pause in the fighting, the rebel commander called us together. We needed a decoy, he said. Then he pointed at me. I was one of the few good Burmans he had left. He commanded me to approach him. He handed me a pile of folded clothing I recognized from the green fabric: a Tatmadaw uniform. This one bore captain’s chevrons but no nameplate. The plan was to abandon the trenches on the hill overlooking the Moei River, basically inviting the Tatmadaw to climb up and swoop right in on us. Everyone except for me would be hiding in the jungle behind HQ. My orders were to stand in front of it, posing as a Burmese Army captain, then wait for the advancing Tatmadaw forces to crest the hill and cross over the trench. I was to beckon the first few of those soldiers toward me until they were close enough for my comrades to launch an ambush.
The success of this strategy depended on the illusion that I was an actual Burmese Army regular who had somehow arrived here ahead of his unit. It was a low-percentage strategy, and everyone knew it, but I was in too deep now to refuse — and, as it happened, the uniform fit perfectly. I was about to leave the building when the commander stopped me. I couldn’t possibly step into the field with such long hair, he said; the enemy would know right away that I was not real Tatmadaw. So he ordered a private to cut it off. All of it. When the hack job was done, the commander gave me a pocket mirror. A few comrades gathered around, breathing down my neck as I regarded my own reflection, whistling like a bunch of idiots at a go-go bar. Desperate to find humour in anything. Yes, I was a handsome Burman cover boy, all right: the epitome of a Tatmadaw captain. But what difference did it make? I was going to die out there. We all knew it.
By mid-afternoon, radio reports indicated that Tatmadaw forces had begun their advance up the hill and were only a few hundred yards away. The compound grew silent — we knew what was coming — and I reviewed my assignment. With KNLA and student rebels hiding in the jungle behind me, I was to walk no further than twenty paces in front of HQ and wait. When the first of the Burmese soldiers reached the top of the hill, I would call out a signal as if I were one of them, then draw them close enough for my comrades to step out of the jungle and fire away. A knot grew in my stomach. Was this how I was to die? On some shitty little mountain range in Southeast Asia, fighting someone else’s battle? Without Dad ever finding out where I was? What would my father think of me now, dying for democracy as a killer-hero? Would this make me a man in his eyes? And what about Thandar? Would my death on a blood-soaked battlefield in Karen State convince her of my commitment to The Cause?
At three o’clock, the commander gave his signal for me to leave the building from the front. Taking my rifle, I obeyed while he and the rest of my comrades walked out the back and headed into the forest. Stepping outside, I felt the sun’s burning heat on my face and shoulders. There wasn’t a sound but my own breathing and footsteps, my boots crunching through bone-dry weeds. I had only stepped a few paces before I spotted a Tatmadaw soldier about thirty feet away, standing still. I hadn’t prepared for an early arrival. I was supposed to be alone outside HQ, anticipating the sight of Tatmadaw troops clearing the edge of the hill, more than a hundred feet away. How had this guy managed to get so close to HQ without any of us noticing? And why was he alone? I had no idea what to do since it was no longer necessary to beckon him over. I froze as he kept walking toward me. When he was within fifteen feet, he froze as well.
Holy shit. How on earth could this be possible?
