Burma’s Other Struggle

And he remembers a battalion "firing everything it had at us" for 30 minutes. "I wasn't even scared, because I knew we were doing the right thing."

Each time the Rangers go on a mission, they spend a month or two in the bush, getting around on foot and hiking 10 to 40 miles a day. "You're not going to get fat," Don observes wryly. "We don't know how long we will hike, and we don't know how far. It depends. It's either, the attack by the SPDC was over there and you have to get there, or someone's chasing you and you have to keep moving."

Ranger teams consist of four to five people and include at least one "medic," typically a native person who has gained some medical experience working with one of the ethnic militias. "A lot of people are interested in joining our teams," Don says. "They love their people and they see something terrible is going on. A lot of them have had experiences, and they're angry. A lot of these emotions are motivating factors for our teams." As a result, the Rangers don't have to recruit. The various ethnic groups, each with its own acronym, send volunteers. "We just tell them the qualifications," Don says.

Don's Karen name, Tha-U-Wu-Pa, means "father of the white monkey." That's a reference to one of his two daughters, herself nicknamed "white monkey." He also has a son, his youngest child. His wife works with him in the effort to, as Wee put it, "remind these people that they are not forgotten." Don's family helps provide perspective. Last year Don took a photo of a nine-year-old Karen girl wounded in a Burmese Army attack in which her father and grandmother were fatally shot at point-blank range. The picture shows a large, bloody hole where a bullet exited the abdomen of the girl, who survived. "It struck me that this could happen to me," Don says. "I thought, 'Wow, man, that's my family right there.' I said from this day on, this is my family."

© 2007