WORLD | Jungle cowboys | Sophia Lee | March 19, 2016

Every now and then I hear or sew news about Burma which reminds me of the campaigns to outs the Japanese from their in WWII. Images of Gen Slim, Merrill's marauders and the movie Bridge Over the River Kwai come to mind.
The Burma Rangers are on a different kind of mission bring much needed medical supplies, help train villagers and share Christ dense Burmese jungles
"BURMA—“Help!” Sahale Eubank, 15, screamed as she clung to a rock with one hand and held onto the reins of a panic-eyed horse with the other. River rapids dragged the poor beast toward jagged rocks.
David Eubank, 55, dashed into the icy waters without taking off his socks and hiking boots. Father and daughter splashed, grunted, and pulled until the horse—their main porter for baggage stuffed with medical and educational supplies for impoverished villagers—climbed trembling onto the rock.
Eubank, founder of the Free Burma Rangers (FBR), a humanitarian aid group, was on a two-day trek through the Karen State mountains of southeast Burma. His wife Karen, their three children, several FBR volunteers, and I were with him, hiking at 4,000 feet amid 90-degree heat and high humidity.
Wander into these dense Burmese jungles, and a man will risk “1 chance in 100 of survival,” declared Col. Nicholson in the classic film The Bridge on the River Kwai. Perhaps that’s true for someone like me, an urban princess from Singapore and Los Angeles. But for the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced peoples in Burma, the jungle is survival: The bamboo and timber trees provide temporary shelter from the Myanmar military.
Decades of military dictatorship and civil war have made Burma one of the most opaque, impoverished, politically repressed, and human-rights-violating nations in the world. The war’s greatest victims remain ethnic minorities who comprise one-third of Burma’s population. For almost 70 years, “home” for the Karen, one of the largest and longest-fighting indigenous ethnic groups in eastern Burma, has been a battlefield.
Land mines pockmark once-fertile soils where government soldiers have tortured men, raped women, and enslaved children. The military junta doesn’t differentiate between innocent villager and armed rebel. It terrorizes civilians by burning their villages, razing crops, confiscating land, pillaging natural resources, and force-recruiting child soldiers and human minesweepers. (Even the name of the country is a battle: The military junta changed it to Myanmar in 1989, but Burmese rebels and the United States—officially—still call it Burma. The United Nations uses Myanmar, and Barack Obama fell in line with that when he and Hillary Clinton visited the country in 2012.)
Eubank founded FBR in 1997 during the government’s bloodiest offensives against the Karen, Karenni, and Shan states. He had no long-term plan, team, or budget when he responded to a call for help from the Wa State in 1993. He did have a gut-spurred, prayer-led conviction: For such a need as this he had grown up as a missionary’s kid in Thailand and then become an Eagle Scout, U.S. Army Ranger, Special Forces soldier, Fuller Theological Seminary postgraduate, and ordained pastor. He and his wife Karen spent their post-honeymoon slogging through jungles and hauling rucksacks jammed with medical supplies and Bible teaching materials.
It’s remained for him a family affair. I first met his teenage daughters, Sahale and 13-year-old Suzanne, as they galloped bareback on full-size horses, their tangled blond hair bouncing. When their 10-year-old brother Peter was 3 weeks old, his willowy mother strapped him to her backpack and climbed hands-and-knees up steep, thorny trails lit by headlamps. Danger and death loom like next-door neighbors: Sahale almost died of typhus, Suzanne of malaria, Pete of pneumonia, and Eubank of mortar and gunfire.
In the company of such hardy, mission-driven individuals, along with Sahale’s cantankerous pet monkey, Kid, I humbly swallowed my complaints. Twenty-four hours before this trip, I was rolling in bed retching, paying penance for enjoying too many dirt-cheap pork satays. The first night in an open-air bamboo hut reeking of pig feces, I shivered and twisted all night under a thin sleeping bag over hard bamboo floors.
I had also busted my knees, ironically from overtraining. During my first phone conversation with Eubank, he asked me if I was “fit.” I told him I run every day. “Good,” he said. “Just keep on running hills 10 miles a day, and you’ll be fine.” Ten miles? Hills? Realizing that my daily “run” was probably Eubank’s post-dinner stroll, I doubled my workout overnight and pounded pavement until my knees mutinied. That meant during the trip, I plodded with joints that ached like my granny’s on a winter night, while middle-aged Karen men traipsed past wearing rubber flip-flops and 40-pound rucksacks.
SINCE THE START OF CEASE-FIRE NEGOTIATIONS IN 2011, civil fighting in Karen State has waned (see sidebar). That has allowed certain roads to expand, little village “shops” to pop up, and FBR teams to travel in broad daylight without fear of military patrols. “None of these roads existed just a few years before,” Eubank told me as I struggled to keep up with his long strides. “We used to move only at night.” That day, we greeted people running mundane errands—mother and son roaring up steep hills on a motorcycle strapped with goods, an elderly couple traversing a stream with man-sized, vegetable-packed cane baskets slung across their foreheads."
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