Burma Junior Rambos

By Alessandra Stanley

The Karens may be the most civilized guerrillas on earth. At army headquarters in Manerplaw, deep in the jungle of Burma, enlisted men maintain neat parade grounds, teak officers' quarters, even the occasional flower bed of marigolds and roses. Bugles sound morning reveille, and new recruits march to target practice under a gatepost that carries a black-lettered sign, GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH. Even in Komura, a muddy labyrinth of trenches and bunkers 100 miles south, where some 500 Karen soldiers have been trapped in battle for months with the Burmese army, the men are high-minded. The only pinups on the walls are chaste photographs torn from Thai mail-order catalogs of ladies in bridal gowns and taffeta tea dresses.

Forty-one years of fighting for independence have worn down the rough edges of revolution like a well-pumiced stone. The largest of half a dozen tribes that rebelled against the republic of Burma in 1948, Karen insurgents have spent the past four decades waging war against Rangoon to establish an independent state in the southern part of the country. Of the 3 million ethnic Karens living in Burma, one-fourth have fled to jungle villages in the south, where the 5,000-man Karen army is based. Ignored or forgotten by most of the world, the anticommunist Karens rate attention only from a few evangelical Christian charities and Soldier of Fortune magazine.

Spread throughout the jungles that straddle Burma and Thailand, the rebels have settled into a life of well-ordered predictability. They subsist on teak logging and farming, attend church, send their children to school and adhere to a strict penal code (adultery carries the death penalty). Though there is no electricity at Manerplaw headquarters, a generator supplies power for that most prized necessity, a VCR. The leaders tend to be melancholy idealists, sad-eyed dreamers who pass evenings drafting and redrafting a Karen constitution for use in the improbable event that independence will be achieved. Gentle in gesture and speech, the Karens do not seem capable of nurturing hatred. Nor do the guerrillas seem capable of dispatching their children to the front lines to fight, and die, alongside the men. But they do.

It is noon, and another round of shelling has begun in Komura. As the earth shudders, men drop into bunkers near a thick stand of bamboo trees. Nobody talks, but with each blast, the muscles in the men's faces tighten. Saw Klee Moo's face, however, remains smooth. When a rocket explodes nearby, shaking the ammunition crate where Saw Klee Moo crouches, he smiles. Saw Klee Moo is nearly 15 and certain that he will never be hit by a bomb.

When the shelling subsides, soldiers stretch out in their shelters, supine and seemingly impassive. Only the incessant chewing of betel nuts hints at stress. When they are not chewing, the men smoke cheroots. And when their tobacco runs out, they smoke rolled-up pieces of newspaper. Saw Klee Moo dangles a stick of paper out of the side of his mouth like a fat cigar, but he keeps it unlighted. The children fighting alongside their elders are too young to have developed nervous habits.

A week earlier, Saw Klee Moo was part of a 15-man reconnaissance patrol that was ambushed in the jungle by a six-man Burmese platoon. The Karens outnumbered the Burmese but, taken by surprise, didn't have time to seek cover. Saw Klee Moo and the others just froze and shot at the enemy, raking everything in sight with automatic fire. He doesn't remember how long he stood there, firing madly, but eventually the Burmese withdrew, dragging their wounded with them. It was the first time Saw Klee Moo had encountered the enemy face to face. Asked if he was frightened, he shrugs.

Major Than Maung, 54, the reserved and dignified officer in charge at Komura, could not be more insistent. Soldiers are not drafted until the age of 15, he says. When children show up in war zones, most are sent back. But why not send them all back? Pause. "It depends on the situation," he says.

Sometimes the situation requires taking on anyone willing to fight -- and even those less than willing. Two years ago, a Karen brigade sneaked into a refugee camp in Thailand at night, rounded up all the males ages 14 to 40 and marched them back to camp. The remaining villagers grew hysterical, and leaders of a small group of Seventh Day Adventist and Baptist missionaries, who supply refugees with school books, Bibles and food, protested to General Bo Mya, president of the Karens. The next day the conscripts were returned, and the missionaries received a note of apology from the brigade commander.

Stress takes its toll on civility. A brutal assault by the Burmese troops that September left 40 Burmese and two Karens dead and made something in Major Than Maung snap. A few days later, a journalist visited Komura and found the major resting quietly in his bunker, surrounded by dozens of skulls mounted on stakes and planted in tidy rows. When a young Karen soldier playfully stuck a cheroot in the grinning teeth of one skull, the major chased him away. Then he grew quiet again and didn't want to be disturbed.

Kyaw Lin, 11, is so tiny that the barrel of his M-16 rifle is sawed in half so he can carry it. It is still almost as long as he is. He has a florid tattoo on his right arm -- a premature badge of manhood that also serves as an animist charm to ward off evil. Sometimes Kyaw Lin is shaky and feverish because, like most of his comrades, he suffers from bouts of malaria. Nobody is there to wipe his brow or take his temperature; he just lies in his bunker until the fever subsides and he can return to fighting the Burmese.

Like the rest of the soldiers of the 101st Battalion in Komura, Kyaw Lin is tired. A few weeks earlier, he and other men in his squadron waded across the river into Thailand, chasing a battalion of Burmese troops that had slipped across the border to attack the Karen position from the rear. Karen troops battled the Burmese in the Thai village of Wang Kauo; by the time the fighting was over, twelve Karens and 70 Burmese were dead, and the village was a charred ruin. Kyaw Lin remembers stepping over dead bodies, but little else. He likes to keep his mind, he says, on the present. That means thinking about Komura, about dropping into trenches when the shelling starts, and about waiting for his turn at the front line. Kyaw Lin has a child's simple interpretation of rotation: "Sometimes I go to the front to replace my friends."

The front line is a classic stalemate, with Burmese and Karen troops separated by only a 30-yd. killing zone of mines, bamboo stakes and barbed wire. Kyaw Lin has been close enough to spot the shovels of Burmese soldiers digging deeper trenches across the way. Ammunition is scarce, and so the Karens rely on mines handcrafted from bamboo and fuse-lighted grenades that are no more sophisticated than the ancient British Grenadier devices that gave them the name. Sometimes the Karens launch the grenades by catapult, stretching thick rubber bands between two stakes like a giant slingshot.

Kyaw Lin hangs out with the other kids at Komura, doing chores and waiting for the orders of Lieut. Brown, 38, a Karen who lost his right leg to a mine ten years ago. His stump is covered by an intricate blue swirl of tattoos. Unable to go out on patrol, he trains the children and the volunteers from nearby villages. Brown insists that the children are not forced to fight, and he says he tries to keep them back. But, he acknowledges reluctantly, sometimes they do go to war. He adds that the children are mostly good fighters, but they are not always careful. "When there is shelling," he says, "the younger ones forget to take cover. They get too excited. They have to be ordered to get down inside the bunkers."

Khi Ha Won, 10, is one of the excitable ones who have to be closely watched. He is small, with a sturdy chest and spindly legs. In his shorts and faded Mickey Mouse T shirt, he looks as if he has just come from a playground. Khi Ha Won's parents live in a Thai refugee camp, but he kept nagging to join the soldiers. Eventually they let him. The last time he was rotated forward, he could plainly see two Burmese soldiers on the other side of the minefield reinforcing their bunkers with mud and wood. He lifted his carbine to shoot but was sharply ordered to hold his fire. He still seems incredulous about that; the hardest lesson for the children to accept is that ammunition has to be saved.

He shares his carbine with two others, does not have a uniform or even a helmet to show he is a soldier. As if to compensate, he proudly wears mottled blue-black swirls on his arms and chest -- make-believe tattoos. His commander drew them with charcoal because no one in camp can wield tattoo needles properly. Other kids tease him about trying to act like a grownup and joke that he even has a girlfriend. But Khi Ha Won shakes his head with shy dignity. "Oh, no, impossible." He knows he is too young for that.

+ Unlike the Afghans, Karens harbor mixed feelings about the use of children in war, vacillating between denial and pride. They revere childhood enough to try to preserve its innocence. A wooden schoolhouse in a village near Manerplaw is a tidy outpost of chalkboards, geography maps and tattered textbooks. Students wear blue-and-white uniforms and recite their lessons in singsong unison. They study math, history, Karen, English and even Burmese, and there is no time for indoctrination or propaganda. The war is only a few miles away, but little of it intrudes into the classroom.

To meet the demand for fresh troops at Komura, the customary three-month training course at the Manerplaw headquarters was speeded up to five weeks last year. On this soggy summer day, more than 100 youths are in training, most of them between ages 16 and 18. But more than a dozen are no older than 14. All are very raw recruits, children of farmers, sent to the army because it is their duty -- and also because the army provides clothes and two meals a day.

Say Tu insists he is 14, and perhaps he is. But his sweet, uncertain face, as well as his dirty undershirt and blue-checked sarong, makes him look no older than eight. He joined after a Karen officer went to his village on a recruiting drive and his parents signed him up. He doesn't have a tattoo because, he says, "I'm afraid of needles." He is homesick but not so awed by his surroundings that he can't dread what lies ahead. "I have to do my military service," he says with a miserable smile, "but I'd rather be farming back home."

Ehtablay, 13, is there only for a refresher course and R. and R. He proudly, ostentatiously skips the new recruits' morning routine of calisthenics and rifle training so he can help the other soldiers with cooking and camp chores. A veteran of three battles, Ehtablay ran away from home to join the army when he was twelve. He had never been to school, and says he always wanted to be a soldier, just like his father and two older brothers. He has only a vague notion of how long the war has been going on, guessing "49 years." He acts tough around the recruits his own age and rather grandly answers their tentative questions about combat. "I got to use my gun," he brags. Around adults he sneaks back to being a child; at one point he grabs an older soldier from behind in a mock wrestling hold that looks exactly like a hug.

Before coming to Manerplaw, Ehtablay had never seen television or a movie. He had not even known they existed. At Manerplaw he got his first taste of both. As a special Army Day treat, the recruits are permitted to watch Rambo III on the VCR in the officers' barracks. Ehtablay sits on the floor, hugging his knees, and stares, mouth open, eyes bedazzled, at Sylvester Stallone's leading Afghan freedom fighters in a charge against Soviet tanks.