By Mac McClelland, AlterNet

Posted on March 9, 2010, Printed on March 15, 2010

http://www.alternet.org/story/145899/

In 2006, Mac McClelland went to Thailand to volunteer and ended up living with
refugees from Burma. They turned out to be survivors of a nearly unreported
genocide the Burmese army is currently waging against an ethnic minority, in
retaliation for ethnic insurgents’ fighting a war against the government for the last
sixty years.

But as hard as those refugees’ lives were, they were still better off than those
who’d fled the Burmese troops burning down their villages but were trapped
between their destroyed homes and the Thai border, in territory contested by
government and insurgent sides. Eastern Burma alone is packed with well more
than half a million of these internally displaced persons, or IDPs—more than twice
as many as the whole great internationally war-torn landscape of Afghanistan. One
in five internally displaced Burmese children dies before they make it to the age of
five. One in twenty-five deaths is caused by land mines. And unlike IDPs in places
like Iraq or Sudan, none of the major international aid players, such as the Red
Cross, has official responsibility for them. One of their only chances for help is
from the roving army of a Pasadena-seminary-ordained American ex-Special
Forces soldier who moved to the middle of a war zone and adopted the nom de
guerre Tha U Wa A Pa—Father of the “White Monkey,” his daughter’s nickname.
McClelland profiles him and his Free Burma Rangers in this excerpt from her new
book, For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story from Burma’s Never-
Ending War.

Tha U Wa A Pa grew up in Thailand, the son of American missionaries of some

repute, his father a gruff and understated preacher, his mother an ex-showgirl who
says she was second in line to play Julie Andrews’s part in The Sound of Music. She
smiles when she explains that she thought her husband was brash when they first met
but was soon so won over by his passion for Christ that she quit her promising career
and moved with him to Thailand. She’ll sing for you, if you go over to their Chiang
Mai house for pancakes, and she’ll tell you about how they gave their son a found
bear cub for a playmate, and how it was the cutest thing when Tha U Wa A Pa
would wrestle the bear, and how everyone was sad to have to get rid of the bear
after it got a little rough with Tha U Wa A Pa’s young sister.

When he grew up, Tha U Wa A Pa went to Texas A&M and became an American
Special Forces soldier, doing anti-narcotics in South America, working with special
forces in Thailand. He met a girl, who thought he was a little brash, but he wooed her
into a mountain-climbing date, and beyond. They got married, he quit the service,
and he joined Fuller Seminary in California, ultimately deciding that he, too, should
become a missionary.

He was in Thailand doing God’s work when a massive Burma army offensive was
displacing people like crazy. When he went to the border with a backpack full of
supplies, he ran into a medic-soldier from the ethnic insurgency who was also eager
to help. That day in 1997, with the insurgents in full retreat and refugees and IDPs
swarming the borderlands, the two men treated as many wounded as they could,
picking up a guy who’d stepped on a land mine and taking him to a hospital to have
his leg amputated, back and forth over the border, rushing into Burma to help the
injured as if the whole country were a house on fire. The Free Burma Rangers was
born.

The first Free Burma Rangers team consisted of two medics, a nurse, and a guerrilla
soldier, along with a videographer, photographer, reporter, and pastor sent to the
jungle for a three-week relief mission. Since then, 110 teams have conducted more
than 350 missions that have treated some 360,000 people. And they’re all dispatched
with medicine and video cameras and at least one gun from a base that Tha U Wa A
Pa has built right in the middle of enemy territory.

“The purpose of the training is to train, equip, and inspire you to serve your people
and help them get freedom,” he explains to his new recruits, ethnic guys from
Burma, sometimes peppered—or salted, I guess—with a few white Christians, during
the six-week training on base. Tha U Wa A Pa is buff and sinewy and fair. He is a
charismatic brightness in the vast green jungle camp. “We call ourselves the Free
Burma Rangers because we want everyone in Burma to be free. A ranger is one who
can go alone, or go in pairs. No matter what the obstacles, he will always try. If a
ranger has a weapon, he can fight. If he has no weapon, he can still do something to
help. No one can stop the Free Burma Rangers from serving and loving other people.
And no one can stop you from serving your people.”

Training involves war-game-like drills, with burning buildings and unconscious

villagers and enemies attacking from the wings. The rangers complete intense
physical obstacle courses, plus training in swimming and lifesaving, backpack
floatation, using maps and compasses, operations order, building rope bridges,
rappelling, land-mine removal, video camera use, CPR, first aid, syringe and IV use,
human rights interviewing, counseling, crack surgery and dentistry.

So this is where Tha U Wa A Pa lives, along with his wife and two little towheaded
girls and a boy, running his own kind of insurgency from the middle of the jungle in
the middle of this war. Sometimes the kids go on the missions, but the lifestyle isn’t
all rough: Tha U Wa A Pa has implemented the use of pack animals, and
subsequently kept his offspring in ponies. Also, they got to learn to swim the fun
way. You can see Tha U Wa A Pa chucking the youngest daughter into a raging river
by the seat of her underpants in a video the family made to submit to the “Postcards
from You” segment of PBS’s Arthur cartoon.

The whole thing operates on a budget of about $1.3 million a year, and the whole
budget, like all of the money that fed Burmese refugees for years, like some of the
money that still educates and feeds them now, comes from individual donations and
church groups, via Internet donations and checks. Additionally, PO boxes in
Thailand receive contributions of supplies: toys and vitamins and toothpaste, all
sealed into little plastic bags with postcards full of Bible verses.

But Tha U Wa A Pa tells his recruits that they can all work together even if they’re
not Christian, because they’re all God’s children, and God is bigger than everything.
Trainings include liberal amounts of praying. Before the missions, team members
confess their sins to one another. During the missions, they pray over their patients,
and hand out Bibles where few other books exist. They pray that God will keep them
safe and give them signs so that they can avoid conflict with or capture by the
Burma army. Tha U Wa A Pa says there’s no other explanation for his being alive
today. Once, when he was being pursued by more than a thousand Burma army
troops, he says, the only way to survive was to hunker down and pray for safety. It
worked. The teams press on whether fighting is heavy or not, whether or not Tha U
Wa A Pa’s baby girls are with them. Prayer has, according to the Free Burma
Rangers, made Burma army soldiers get lost in pursuit or mis-steer their boats, has
helped teams find their way when they’re lost and alone in the middle of completely
encompassing land-mine-filled jungle. They’ve got a list of miracles longer than the
Salween River.

And like any decent paramilitary force, they’ve got uniforms, too. I saw one of the
specially printed T-shirts—soft jersey knit, in nice army olive, with free burma
rangers in a white insignia over the left breast—on one of my first days volunteering.
I didn’t know what FBR was, or how much cred it had, when I laid eyes on the shirt,
but I told one of the refuges I’d do anything to get my hands on one. What with the
flattering color and emblemed front and the motto—“Love each other. Unite and
work for freedom, justice, and peace. Forgive and don’t hate each other. Pray with
faith, act with courage. Never surrender.”—printed on the back, I just thought it was
a really nice shirt. I didn’t realize until I saw one of FBR’s videos that the rangers
were total fucking badasses.

The video one of the refugees showed me starts with war footage, guys shooting
guns in tall jungle bush and loud rocket fire, and a village burning down and
screaming women running for their lives, before moving briefly to photo stills: a
picture of villagers standing over a group of dead bodies, a picture of a beaten
woman with her shirt torn open, dead on the forest floor, a picture of murdered
children on the ground, lying all lined up in a row. Then the camera centers on the
face of a seventeen-year-old boy with lifeless, unfocused eyes, rolling his head on
the ground, moaning, while a hand pets his cheek, a longyi held up below his neck so
he can’t see what’s going on with the rest of his body, which is that a few men hold
on to his completely exposed lower leg bone, a bloody white stick still hung with a
few slick and glistening black-purple sinews, protruding from a bloody knee, a
land-mine wound swarmed by flies. Then he’s in a thin hammock, with a man in
cheap plastic flip-flops at each end of the bamboo pole from which it swings, and
another walking alongside holding an IV drip dangling from another piece of wood,
being carried through the mountainous terrain. For four days. Which is how long it
takes the team to get him to a clinic on the border, where a proper amputation can be
done.

By now, instantly, I’d twisted my face into a permanent wince, and it didn’t get any
easier to watch. A husband and wife sit next to each other on the ground while he
explains that their two sons and daughter were taken by Burma army troops that
stormed into their village. Local leaders negotiated the return of the two boys, but
they haven’t seen the girl since. “We want her back,” the woman says, smiling sadly,
before dropping her face to her knees, covering it with her pink sweater, and starting
to sob. When she calms down a little, the man says, “My wife and I are like dead
people.” There are people getting ready to run from an attack, little girls running
around talking fast directions to each other while they throw shit in baskets and
sacks they can carry strapped to their foreheads. A man on his back breathing hard
and fast and shallow as Free Burma Ranger medics jab their fingers and instruments
into the bloody stump below his knee where his calf and foot were before he stepped
on a land mine. Skulls and bones on the ground and a ranger telling how he brought a
bunch of children’s presents donated by kids overseas only to find that there are no
children in this village anymore. Rangers tearing out infected teeth with pliers.
Rangers stitching up a gaping, blood-spurting hole in someone’s foot. Rangers
cleaning the gory, festering wound on a little kid’s leg as the child stands still, calm,
pantsless. Rangers delivering a baby in the darkness by the green glow of the
camera’s night mode, in open jungle air, on the jungle floor. The partially
decomposed decapitated head of an old man on the ground, which the rangers bury
when they find it. A shot of a Burma army compound, the camera zooming in
shakily on the faces of the boys with rifles, the hiding cameramen whispering
breathlessly to each other. Shots from an FBR team that came under attack when
they went back to a village of some recent IDPs to see if they could recover any
food; the camera jostles violently as they run along, set to the sound of gunfire
cracking and thundering through the trees. An FBR team rushing to the scene of a
new attack and meeting two fleeing villagers, young guys who tell them they were
taking a smoke break with four other friends when the explosions and bullets started
coming. They’re not sure if the guys who were running with them survived, since
there was so much shooting. By way of illustration, one of the guys points to a bullet
hole in the side of his loose jacket. A man rocking the tiniest sleeping baby and
complaining about the Burma army because his wife died during childbirth in the
jungle while they were running. He worries that he has no idea how to take care of
this child without her. Tears streaming hard and quiet down the face of a woman
mindlessly fingering her jacket zipper with one hand, standing among the ashes of
her old village, in which her husband was killed. A toddler barely grown enough to
stand picking his way through the jungle as his village flees, carefully parting the
brush with his chubby little fingers and stepping through with his bare, scratched legs
and feet. Three more stills: a dead villager facedown on the ground. A dead villager
faceup on the ground. A five-year-old with a bullet in his leg. Video of yet another
land-mine casualty, medics holding a bleeding, seething, sinew-dripping, mangled
hunk of something vaguely human looking, recognizable as a foot only because it
comes at the end of an ankle. An FBR team leaves a group of IDPs and the IDPs call
out please don’t leave us, please come back. A man keeps hiding his face it’s so
contorted with sorrow as he says, sobbing convulsively, “I don’t understand why
they killed my children. They didn’t even know their right hand from their left
hand,” while the woman next to him weeps silently and gnashes her teeth. The video
ends with a quote from Galatians on the screen: Let us not grow weary while doing
good. In due season we shall reap if we don’t lose heart.

Currently, FBR is running some forty full-time teams on monthlong missions in

Burma throughout the year, treating about 2,000 people in each, trekking hundreds
of miles. They find malaria, AIDS, gastric disease, dysentery, colds, diarrhea, severe
vitamin deficiency and malnutrition, worms, anemia, skin disease, skin infections,
respiratory infections. When the Burma army massacred villagers in Htee Law Bleh
in 2002, rangers were there to treat people who didn’t die from their gunshot wounds
and photograph a pile of dead children. Sometimes the team members get shot at.
Sometimes they fall fatally ill or are captured and tortured. If FBR personnel are
caught, or get a disease, or step on a land mine, they can be killed. Sometimes, they
are: six of them in the organization’s first ten years.

“I can’t believe I never heard of any of this before I got here,” I told the guy who
showed me the video. “Seriously, my friends are really smart. Nobody I know has
ever heard of this.”

“So,” he said, nodding emphatically, “you will tell everybody in America.”

It was easy for even my really smart friends to be ignorant of this war, the world’s
longest-running war, such an active war; it didn’t get a lot of media play. “I don’t
think there’s enough news in [this] war itself,” a New York Times Magazine editor
told me once. He was absolutely right. As juicy as the real-time footage was, the
situation is, as even Tha U Wa A Pa once put it, “not a car wreck. It’s a slow,
creeping cancer,” a conflict that’d started sixty years ago, which is actually the
opposite of news. Every year, when the United States Department of State slams
Burma in its “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” saying that the
government rapes and tortures and kills people and indiscriminately and indefinitely
and illegally detains people and blah-blah-blah, the media ignore it.

Except the Burmese media, which report how the Burmese government is
flabbergasted by these absolutely flabbergasting charges. Take this press release
from the Permanent Mission of the Union of Myanmar to the United Nations Office
and Other International Organizations, in Geneva. It’s a re-release of the press
release whereby Burma’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejects 2009’s State
Department report. It’s titled, aptly, “Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Myanmar rejects
US State Department’s human rights report.” It explains how the US has, due to its
dire need of fact-checkers, made Burma sad, and how, further, Burma is rubber and
the US is glue:

The United States Department of State released on 25th February 2009

its 2008 Country Report on Human Rights Practices of over 190
countries, including Myanmar. As in the past, the report repeated its
unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations of human rights violations in
Myanmar.

It is saddening to find that the report contained the usual sweeping

accusations of human rights abuses in Myanmar without verification of
the validity and accuracy of the information and reliability of its
sources. Instead of making false allegations at other nations regarding
human rights matters, the United States should concentrate on uplifting
its own human rights records.

Myanmar has long been a victim of a systematic disinformation

campaign launched by anti-government elements, generously funded by
their foreign supporters. The rootless allegations of human rights
violations which invariably emanated from anti-government elements
have found their way into the reports of the U.S. State Department.
Thus, there is a need to verify all information before it is judged fit for
inclusion in official reports.

Verify this: even if you haven’t had the pleasure of opening a database of the
interviews and reports aid workers like the rangers collect and being assaulted by the
headlines—a woman gang-raped and stabbed to death in murng-su; guide beaten to
death by [BURMA ARMY] troops; a woman cut to death in the throat, in kun-hing;
villagers robbed, arrested, tortured and killed in nam-zarng; a handicapped woman
gang-raped, causing death, in lai-kha—it’s possible you may have actually seen
some of the FBR footage I watched. PBS’s Frontline did an episode called “Burma:
State of Fear” in 2006 that followed the “mainly Christian medics who bring aid to
villagers being targeted by the Burmese government” and even borrowed some of
their film. Rambo, the 2008 one, which takes place on the Burmese border, opens
with some FBR footage that’s as disgusting as the outlandishly gory effects in the
rest of the film. And even if you’ve missed all those, and your media aren’t reporting
the story, you don’t have to take my word or the State Department’s word that the
regime is violating international law and human decency to an astounding degree
every day.

FBR has a website. And a Wikipedia entry. You can just google the organization’s
name. The guys have it all on tape, filmed in bloody, handheld real time. You can
verify that shit on YouTube.

Mac McClelland is the author of For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story
from Burma’s Never-Ending War and the human rights reporter at Mother Jones.
Follow her on Twitter.

© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/145899/