Land of Jade

by Bertil Lintner

  As the raft neared the middle of the river, it was seized by the force of the racing current which swept it around in a sharp curve. Now the ferrymen struggled to propel the craft obliquely towards the far bank as it was swept at high speed downstream. They were dripping with sweat, grunting from their exertions with the crude, wooden oars. We all sat tensed—except for Ja Reng who obviously found the speed exciting. She cried “da-da” and waved her arms as the raft shot the rapids and hurtled through the whirlpools.

  Immediately south of the river rose a large mountain. We struggled uphill and made camp in the jungle just under the summit. Discipline and organisation was strict; Sgt.-Maj. Dingring Naw Bawk’s voice could be heard all over our temporary bivouac as he assigned duties to the various sections. Within half an hour, lean-tos had been built, cooking fires lit among the rocks to conceal the flames, and sentries posted in the jungle around the perimeter of the camp.

  When we woke at dawn it was raining. The drizzle continued to fall all morning as we climbed the last mountain before Manwing village where we planned to cross the road to Chipwe. We stopped for a rest at the top of the ridge and saw the green Manwing valley spread out below—and beyond it the jungle-clad mountains towards which we were headed. Once there, we would be safe again. The descent was not a long one, but it took time since the route ahead had to be reconnoitred. Soldiers dressed as villagers were sent to Manwing to collect news. The report they returned with clearly worried Capt. La Nan.

  “A truckload of Ma Sa La troops has just arrived in the village,” he told Hseng Noung in Burmese. The entire column halted. The soldiers began checking their weapons and magazines.

  “It’s not clear why they’re there. I don’t think they know we’re coming. Probably, it’s just a group of road guards who’ve returned from a routine patrol in the jungle.”

  We sat down under the trees to await further developments. We could only hope the soldiers would leave soon so we could proceed without any confrontation. They did not. Villagers brought us news that they were drying their clothes over fires in the houses, suggesting they had indeed returned from a jungle patrol. There were not many, the villagers said; only 15 against our own force of almost 100.

  “Nothing to be afraid of,” La Nan said. “But we must at all costs avoid a clash near the village. The villagers would be caught in the cross-fire and any shooting would definitely alert Sailaw.”

  Manwing was located right at a junction of the main road to Chipwe and another smaller one which forked off southeast to a garrison at Sailaw where an entire company of government troops backed by heavy weapons was based. We made a detour around the village, over some hill paddy fields. The rain had stopped and the sun was out. This prolonged walk to the east of Manwing now meant having to cross both roads.

  The soldiers quickly took up positions along the Chipwe road, with the main force placing itself between Manwing and the point where we were to cross. I saw bazookas and light machine-guns pointing in the direction of the village as I hurried across the road. Hseng Noung stopped to take pictures—and before long, an army patrol of five soldiers arrived; but retreated hastily to Manwing as soon as they saw what was happening on the road.

  “Shall we open fire?” the section commander shouted at La Nan.

  “No! Hold your fire unless shot at!”

  Without any exchange of fire having taken place, we continued into the jungle across the road. There was no track to follow and this slowed movement considerably: it took us almost two hours to reach the second road. Here was the danger. Should government troops be lying in wait, our own force might be trapped between the two roads and even with their relatively small force they might block our way until reinforcements arrived from Sailaw.

  The first section emerged from the jungle. Moving at a crouch, the soldiers deployed along the tree-line. Rifles at the ready, they knelt motionless and listened intensely. It was all clear: no government troops. But at precisely this juncture two old women came walking unconcernedly down the rutted dirt-track. They did not notice the troops until they were almost upon them. Suddenly, they screamed and put their hands to their faces.

  La Nan was in a dilemma. If allowed to go free, they would undoubtedly be questioned by the government troops and probably also beaten to extract information as to our movements. It would be unreasonable to expect the old women not to reveal in what direction we were moving—which was all the soldiers would want to know. There was then no choice: we had to take them with us, at least until the column had put a safe distance between itself and Manwing.

  Judging from their dress, the women were Shans and not Kachins. They were terrified and one of them began to sob. Seeing me in green fatigues, dark sunglasses and surrounded by a section of the most heavily armed KIA soldiers, they obviously took me for the column commander.

  “Khun! Khun! Let us go home! We won’t tell the Burmese! Let us go!” one of the women called, addressing me by the Shan honorific for a man of authority. I strode on in silence, feeling acutely uncomfortable. It was no time for explanations or apologies.

  Half an hour later, we reached some rice paddies just south of Manwing. The village was so close the dogs barked at us and we could hear the cocks crowing. I was certain the government soldiers would open fire at this point—we were walking in a long single file in the open with no cover. But there was no sign of any activity in the village. We marched undisturbed across the fields and reached the jungle at their southern edge.

  Then, when half the column had disappeared into the bush, a mortar was fired. Its report panicked the old women. One of them began crying. La Nan turned around and laughed:

  “So it’s time to open fire now? When we’ve already passed you?”

  A second mortar round exploded a few minutes later, followed by a third. I looked around to see where the bombs were falling. There was no burst, no smoke. They had not even been shooting in our direction—but the message was clear enough:

  “Hurry up and clear out! We don’t want to see you and we certainly don’t want to fight you!”

  It was hard to blame them. For all the bombastic bulletins emanating from Rangoon, its army had made little headway in a decades-long struggle against Burma’s 30,000 odd rebels. Why should some simple Burmese village boys who had virtually no chance of employment other than as soldiers go looking for death?

  We walked briskly on for a few hours until we reached a spot where it was considered safe to bivouac. Luckily, it began raining just as we had built our lean-tos for the night. All our footprints would be washed away before any pursuing Burmese Army unit could even leave their garrison if the order to follow us was given.

  That night as we were cooking dinner over our small, well-hidden fires, we felt sorry for the two old Shan women. They spoke no Kachin and had no idea what was going to happen to them. Hseng Noung went over to their lean-to, addressing them in Shan.

  “Don’t be afraid, grandmother. Nobody’s going to harm you. If we hadn’t taken you along, you’d been caught between us and them. But now you can return tomorrow and tell the Burmese soldiers those horrible insurgents kidnapped you.”

  The women were enormously relieved. As it turned out, one of the pair’s husband had died and this was the day of his funeral. The widow had taken a friend along and gone to the next village to buy paper decorations for the funeral in accordance with Shan custom. On their way back, they had encountered our column on the Sailaw road. Hearing this made us feel guiltier still and in an effort to make amends we lent them our Naga shawls to use as blankets and donated 50 Kyats to the funeral.

  We were up well before dawn the following morning. It had been cold, the drizzle falling all night. Hseng Noung said goodbye to the two old women.

  “We’ll tell the Burmese what you said, grand-daughter. That we were captured and you were horrible to us,” one of them chuckled as they began picking their way cautiously back down a sloping track still slippery after the night’s rain.

  Th
ere was now little possibility of government troops pursuing us from Manwing. But ahead of us was an old mule track which led from the garrison town of Washawng up to Sailaw and then on to the rebel-held areas closer to the Chinese border. The track had been built in the colonial era by the British who maintained a post, Fort Harrison, near the frontier pass of Kambaiti.

  The mule track was now hardly ever used and Kambaiti anyway was controlled by the CPB which maintained a limited presence in eastern Kachin State. But in a case like this, troops could be sent up from either Washawng or Sailaw to block our way; the mule track followed a high ridge, an ideal ambush position.

  We made slow going uphill as the advance sections scouted the terrain ahead. It was almost noon before we reached the top of the ridge. There were no government troops in sight and the route appeared clear. We followed the mule track for a few kilometres, climbing over fallen branches and uprooted trees. It had clearly not been used for years although the track had once been well built with embankments of rocks and timber.

  The ridge marked the de facto border between the government-held area along the Chipwe road and the KIA’s eastern strongholds along the Chinese frontier. According to La Nan, the government troops rarely ventured beyond it.

  An hour later, we left the track and headed south, into the gorge below the ridge. We could now count ourselves safe, but pushed on nonetheless to put as much distance as possible between ourselves and the danger zone. In the late afternoon, we stopped to cook dinner. While eating, we were surprised to hear the rumble of artillery—from ahead! The firing continued for half an hour before dying out as inexplicably as it had begun.

  Despite the uncertainty, we pressed on as far as the first village inside the KIA area. It consisted of only a few huts and we halted for a brief rest before continuing—uphill, downhill, uphill and downhill yet again. To the west, the sun was setting over Myitkyina and the dark frieze of the mountains around the town stood out in sharp relief against the glow of a day fading from pink to a deep crimson. The great bend in the Irrawaddy at Myitkyina was discernible, the water glimmering silver in the twilight.

  For the first time since the Triangle, we were now allowed to use torches and the column was transformed into a string of shining pearls, snaking its way down into a valley and the village of Jum Yang where we were to spend the night. The village was prosperous. There were several shops, a school and through the open doorways of the houses, we glimpsed KIA calendars on the walls; a clear sign that the contested area lay behind us.

  We had covered more than 40 kms since setting off before dawn. Ja Reng had slept most of the time and made her presence felt only when she cried to be fed. Now she was lying on a straw mat in one of the bamboo houses in Jum Yang, oblivious of the dangers she had been through. Khun Nawng was clearly relieved we were now out of danger.

  “Brother,” he said, smiling broadly. “What about some liquor?”

  I needed little urging. He disappeared for a few minutes and returned carrying a bottle of moonshine. A group of villagers accompanied him, bringing us plates of fried pork and rice. We were all set for a convivial evening. The new arrivals came from the local village committee and were eager to talk to us. They told us no government troops had been to the village since 1972, but the local people were always on the alert since Washawng garrison was only 20 kms away. Village militiamen patrolled the area every night in case Burmese Army patrols should come their way.

  The column set off at 8.30 the next morning, unusually late by guerrilla standards. But after the exertions of the previous day, everyone had been grateful for a solid night’s sleep. The path led uphill from Jum Yang towards the border and the watershed between Kachin State and Yunnan Province in China. At noon, we marched into a big village called Uthau. At one of the village stores, Khun Nawng bought a couple of bottles of Kunming-brewed beer.

  We sat on a wooden bench outside the store from where we could see the high, rugged mountain ranges of Yunnan; China was only a kilometre away. Khun Nawng and I drank a toast to our family’s having successfully crossed the north of Burma, from India to the Chinese frontier.

  We left in the afternoon and walked along a path which was as wide as a road and better maintained than anything we had seen so far in Kachin State. It had been built by the KIA and led to its 3rd Battalion headquarters 12 kms away. We surprised the local officers in charge by marching in after dark; they had known that a pair of foreign journalists were coming but not the exact time of our arrival.

  The camp consisted of about a dozen large bamboo barracks spread out around all sides of a forested hill. We sat down in comfortable deckchairs and hot tea was served. After exchanging the usual courtesies, we asked the local officers about the artillery fire we had heard the previous afternoon.

  “That was in Dabak Yang,” one of the officers said, puffing on his cheroot. “On the main Myitkyina-Bhamo road. Ma Sa La came close to the village and fired mortars into it for half an hour. Four houses were destroyed and some villagers wounded.”

  His tone was completely matter-of-fact, devoid of anger or surprise. After a lifetime at war, such attacks had become routine. For us, however, the incident came as an insight into the sufferings of the civilians who live close to the fighting zone. The Myitkyina-Bhamo road had been cut by the KIA in the late 1970s and since then the rebels had controlled a 75-km stretch of the 173 km-long road.

  Dabak Yang was located on the northern section of the road and now and then, government troops were given to coming and lobbing a few mortar rounds into the village, just to remind the people there that it was not safe to live under rebel administration. But the government troops had now returned to their garrison near Myitkyina and our way ahead lay open.

  There were two routes to Pa Jau from 3rd Battalion headquarters. The shorter one would take us over the border mountains in just two days. But we chose the longer route, across the plains below the mountains, as this would provide an opportunity to see the Myitkyina-Bhamo road, actually an extension of the old Ledo Road from India to China.

  We set off after breakfast the following morning and walked downhill for five hours until we reached the bank of the Dabak River in the valley. The old iron Bailey bridge had been blown up by the Kachin rebels when they cut the road ten years before and our column of nearly 100 troops was ferried across in large boats.

  Dabak Yang on the further bank was the biggest settlement we had seen so far in Kachin State. The Myitkyina-Bhamo road cut right through it and was lined with shops and stores full of contraband from China that would later be re-sold in government-controlled areas. It was enclaves of free enterprise such as this that offset Rangoon’s socialist austerity and provided consumer goods for Burma’s pervasive black market.

  We headed for a small KIA outpost by the river south of the village where we decided to spend the night. After the long march from the north, we were all in need of a good bath and immediately made for the river. The water, which flowed down from the mountains along the Chinese border, was cool and, after the grime of the march, wonderfully refreshing. Ja Reng was given her bath in a tin tub in the camp and soon put to sleep.

  That evening, Khun Nawng had arranged a dinner party in Dabak Yang at a Shan lady’s home which also served as a small restaurant. The landlady was short and plump, with the healthy good looks typical of her race. Delighted to hear Hseng Noung was also Shan, she was busy until late, cooking and serving one delicious dish after another: steamed minced pork with egg, chicken stuffed with herbs and spices, soya bean curd soup and a salad made from fresh tomatoes and cabbage.

  All this was accompanied by home-brewed Shan liquor and canned Chinese beer. It was a magnificent repast and occasionally, the Shan lady would call Hseng Noung into the kitchen to show her how to prepare a special dish.

  “I don’t doubt you Kachins are the best fighters in Burma,” I teased Khun Nawng over a toast. “But you have to admit that nobody can beat the Shans when it comes to cooking!”

 
I ate until I was sated, while our hostess giggled in delight at this appreciation of her cooking. Had not sympathy for our guards waiting outside overcome greed, we could have sat there all night. Sgt.-Maj. Dingring Naw Bawk was in command and I had noticed he had changed from his fatigues into a longyi and white shirt, the only clothes he had apart from his two sets of uniform. I could not but admire the Spartan simplicity of his lifestyle and the total dedication to duty it reflected.

  Nevertheless, it was almost midnight before we strolled through Dabak Yang, back to the camp. Despite the lateness of the hour, there was still considerable activity around the market. Bright kerosene lamps hissed above the food stalls where several parties were eating and drinking. Other groups were gathered in the town’s only street, standing with their bicycles quietly chatting.

  On the way from the Triangle to Pa Jau.

  There was, of course, no motor traffic in Dabak Yang, but it struck me suddenly that this was the first time since India that we had seen bicycles. The population appeared mixed, with Shans possibly in a slight majority, followed by Kachins, Chinese and even a few Burman and Indian merchants. It was all a world away from the remote villages in the hills of the Triangle.

  The onward journey down the Myitkyina-Bhamo road was almost like an outing after trekking hundreds of kilometres across mountainous terrain. 2nd Lieut. La Nu had managed to borrow bicycles for Hseng Noung, Khun Nawng and myself, while the soldiers—including Ma Shwe who was carrying Ja Reng—marched along the dusty road. The journey took us through rolling countryside and we pushed the bicycles up the steeper slopes—and then mounted to swish downhill, the wind blowing cool and fresh in our faces.