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Outside Magazine October 2003

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The Ghost Road (Cont.)


	Indian commander Y.S. Rama, second from left, in blue (Mark Jenkins)

I LEAP THE GIANT TROPICAL TREES that have fallen across the track and move between the moss-sheathed embankments. The road narrows to a tunnel. I step through spiderwebs larger than me, strands clinging to my face.

In two hours I reach Pangsau Pass, a roadcut through mud walls. There is a rotting concrete sign atop the pass. I snap a photo and walk into Burma.

Just over the border the road begins to disappear. Light and sky are closed off by vines thick as hawsers, leaves large as umbrellas, bamboo stalks rooted as densely as prison bars. I begin to wonder if the trail might be booby-trapped.

A queer uneasiness comes over me: I'm being watched. When I look over my shoulder, two soldiers, as if on cue, part the jungle with the barrels of their rifles.

A queer uneasiness comes over me: I'm being watched. It makes me want to stop, but I don't. I keep walking. When I finally look over my shoulder, two soldiers, as if on cue, part the jungle with the barrels of their rifles and step onto the road. Two more soldiers appear in front of me.

They are small men in dark-green fatigues and Chinese-issue camouflage sneakers. They have canteens on their belts and AK-47s and bandoliers of rounds across their shoulders. One wears a large knife on his hip, another a black handgun in a polished black holster. I wave to the two soldiers ahead of me and move toward them eagerly, as if I am a lost backpacker. Their jaws tighten. I hold out my hand, talking and smiling. The soldiers train their weapons on me, their faces flat and strained.

The soldiers behind me begin to shout. One soldier starts prodding my stomach with the barrel of his rifle, as if he's trying to herd me back where I came from, but I won't move. A soldier behind me grabs my pack and starts to pull me backward. I spin around and he lets go.

This is the moment—they know it and I know it. The soldier in charge, the one with the black handgun, steps forward and holds my eyes in a cold, searching stare. I stare back. I know what he's looking for: fear. Fear is what he most wants to see, what he is accustomed to seeing.

But I have a secret weapon: I'm white. My whiteness protects me. My whiteness is a force field around my body. I know it is unjust, immoral even, but my whiteness means he can't act unilaterally. White people can cause trouble. He knows this.

The soldier shouts in my face but drops his eyes. His men begin to march me down the road, deeper into Burma, barrels at my back. Eventually we arrive at a burned-out building in a clearing. Laborers in rags are squatting in the mud in front of the building. Using machetes, they're hacking long bamboo poles into three-foot spears and hardening the points over a campfire.

From the color of their sarongs and the way they wear their machetes in a shoulder scabbard, I know they are Naga tribesmen. The Nagas were headhunters until the early 20th century (British colonial authorities outlawed the practice in the 1890s); although the Nagas have their own language, architecture, religion, and customs, the junta lumps them in with the Kachins.

As I come close, the squatting men do not look up. There are soldiers all around. The soldier with the handgun continues up steep stairs cut into the mud embankment, while the other three remain to guard me. I drop my pack and lean against the roofless building and watch the laborers. Their machetes make muted hacking sounds, the sounds you hear in a butcher shop. The men themselves are silent, as if their tongues have been cut out.

I realize that this is exactly what I was not supposed to see. This is why northern Burma is closed, why so many remote regions of Burma are closed. According to the Free Burma Coalition, an international alliance of activists dedicated to the democratization of Burma, most ethnic minorities across the nation have been viciously persecuted; more than 600,000 have been removed from their villages and forcibly relocated. By interviewing refugees, Amnesty International has documented forced-labor camps hidden throughout the country.

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