EPILOGUE

In early 1995, I flew to the Land of the Big Tree, SLORC-controlled Burma. After the unfiltered, amphetamine bustle of Bangkok, Rangoon seemed nearly comatose, too listless to erect a single high-rise building or scheme of impossible traffic. Polite black marketeers and a pervasive torpor awaited beyond bored bureaucrats at Mingaladon Airport. This is monsoon country, a land of two seasons: dry and hot, and wet and hot. The alleged “cool season”—also dry and hot—is a cruel rumor fed to gullible Westerners. So, too, is the advice of the guidebooks to the country: bring duty-free Scotch (preferably Johnny Walker Red Label) and cigarettes (always 555 State Express Filter Kings) to exchange for kyat. My plane was filled with the duty-free bags of tourists who had heeded this counsel. They imagined windfall profits in Rangoon. They were rudely disappointed. Burma’s black marketeers had a surfeit of Scotch and cigarettes. Crafty traders, they knew the prices of duty-free items in the few foreign cities with air service to Burma, and underbid accordingly. Tourists who paid eleven dollars for a liter of Johnny Walker Red in Dhaka, Bangladesh, walked away with one thousand kyat, the equivalent of ten dollars in Rangoon. I kept my bottle of Famous Grouse for social tippling, my carton of 555s for small bribes and favors.

Fern-fingered rain trees, buckled sidewalks, and shabby colonial-era buildings line the route into the city, an aging dowager that clings to its fading beauty and lost promise. Only the towering, gilded spire of Shwedagon Pagoda, blinding in the afternoon light, breaks the horizon. Before World War II, Burma had been the pearl of the Orient, the world’s leading rice exporter and a regional center for business that overshadowed Singapore and Bangkok. But that had been before General Ne Win’s mad reign.

A Burmese acquaintance of mine cited a parable taught by U Uttara, a dissident Buddhist monk now living in England, to explain his tragic country. In Benares, India, went the tale, there had once been a very devout man cursed with a scoundrel for a son. When the old man died, so great was his merit that he went to heaven and became king of the angels. The son soon dissipated his inheritance, lavishing money on women, drink, and games of chance. The old man felt sorry for his destitute son and came down from heaven to give him an atesah thah yaowe—a magic pot for all wishes. But the young man would not change his dissolute ways. He would drink, then toss the pot to the sky, catch it, then cavalierly toss it again. Life was all a great game. The old man warned his son, but the talk fell on deaf ears. The son continued to drink, then toss the pot until finally, inevitably, the pot was dashed to pieces.

Wasn’t Burma like the magic pot? Ne Win had squandered his nation’s riches, toyed with a great treasure. Burma was at its breaking point. Power was in the wrong hands, in the clutch of thieves. Infrastructure—railroads, highways, schools, clinics—went neglected as the military consumed at least one third of the annual budget. Fisheries, forests, fields, all were plundered to underwrite the swelling martial force, the largest standing army in Southeast Asia, that propped up a brutal kleptocracy.

“In engineering we learn that ‘k’ equals constant,” a sad, university-educated man told me in Burma. Desperation and disillusion led him to talk to strangers; fear of government retribution will leave him anonymous. “SLORC would like to be ‘k’—to be the constant. They have sampled the tastes and the flavors of the entire country. They know what tastes good and what tastes bad. They go to inspect the gem mines at Mogok.…” His voice trailed into disdain. He opened his palm. “Tea money is not enough for them.”

In 1934, George Orwell had set Burmese Days, his early, anticolonial novel, in this resplendent jewel of the British Raj. Sixty years on, Burma is an oppressive, joyless place, an appropriate setting for Orwell’s grim, final novel, 1984. The very name of the ruling junta—the State Law and Order Restoration Council—reeks of Newspeak. And SLORC invites the Big Brother comparisions. To gather information on its own citizens, the generals created a pervasive internal security apparatus, the dreaded Directorate of Defense Services Intelligence. The state-owned English-language newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, plays stories in inverse proportion to their news value. On the day I arrived, the entire front page of The New Light was devoted to the urgent news that SLORC chairman Than Shwe had played in the Tatmadaw golf tournament. Major international stories, except for those about the civil war in Yugoslavia, were buried in the back pages. As a lesson against federalism, the paper prominently features stories about the Balkan conflict, intimating that any accommodation of Burma’s ethnic minorities would lay the groundwork for similar strife.

Throughout the country, hectoring SLORC billboards, such as the sign hung between the ionic columns of the Information and Public Relations Department, constantly reminded the people of the junta’s selfless altruism:

NON-DISINTEGRATION OF THE UNION OUR CAUSE!

NON-DISINTEGRATION OF NATIONAL SOLIDARITY OUR CAUSE!

CONSOLIDATION OF NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY OUR CAUSE!

The fading sun bathed the ancient stone façades an ochre hue and gave curbside pools of betel juice the color of kiln-fired bricks. On the ground-floor galleries, book vendors packed their stocks of Burmese comics, already wrinkled in the humidity, their moldy, fifty-year-old British pamphlets, and their mint-condition stacks of post-coup apologia. Despite their voracious reading habits—the high literacy rate had very nearly cost Burma its United Nations–designated “least-developed nation” status—no Burman seemed moved to buy toadying books such as Naing-Ngan’s The Conspiracy of Treasonous Minions Within Myanmar and Traitorous Cohorts Abroad. Freelance guides and moneychangers hovered outside the Strand Hotel, armed with letters of recommendation and damp wads of kyat in bewildering denominations.

Visitors saw the renovated, three-hundred-dollar-a-night Strand, the sedans purring along the wide boulevards, the new stores stocked with Japanese electronics as proof of SLORC’s market reforms, but blood money also fuels Burma’s modest economic growth. According to human-rights activists, SLORC commanders extort immense sums from rural villages, then launder the cash through the Union of Myanmar Economic Holding Co., an army-owned firm with huge farming and financial interests, or through family members in Rangoon who invest the lucre in small businesses. Without SLORC connections and access to hard currency, life in Burma is a constant struggle against pervasive repression and mounting inflation.

In the wide, empty street fronting the Myanmar Port Authority, a restaurateur arranged the low tables and wooden stools of his temporary, nocturnal cafe. Soon the warm river air carried the fragrance of tea, cheroots, and candles, the low talk of serious, disillusioned men forced to mark time and play checkers with worn bottle caps.

*   *   *

Jet lag and campylobacter, a gastrointestinal bacteria I blamed on a meal of curried mutton and pickled mango, laid me low the next morning. I didn’t have Sullivan along to hound me about my gone-native diet, and I paid dearly. For the rest of my two-week stay in Burma I suffered recurrent nausea, chills, and diarrhea amid some of the most wondrous scenery on earth. I gobbled multivitamins, Lomotil, Cipro, to no avail. And so I drifted through Burma, condemned to feverish dreams.

To see the country, I fled the capital. The night train to Mandalay eased from Rangoon Station at precisely 5 p.m.; for all of its considerable faults, SLORC—like Mussolini in Italy—made the railways run on time. The departure offered no grand views of Rangoon, only the backsides of shabby suburbs and impoverished satellite towns where men lounged in the portals of salvaged-wood shanties and women wrung longyis in brown, putrid tidal creeks. The living conditions had been better in Khun Sa’s remote jungle bastion. On lots strewn with corn husks and banana leaves, spirited children played chinlon, using elegant kicks and delicate head taps to keep aloft a small rattan ball. Then the slums gave way to fallow rice fields where gaunt cattle foraged on rice stalks beneath the gaze of racket-tailed treepies clinging to power lines, their long, flared tails like oars dipped in dark oil.

Roving vendors squeezed between the lower-class passengers crowded on the floor of the upper-class car, selling beer, paperback novels, and fried sparrows—high-fat, no-merit birds. After a riotous sunset daubed the rising moon the color of copper ore, the train ate up the dark, empty fields for hours. Its slow, rhythmic progress was broken by whistlestops in darkened towns that harkened Burma’s storied past. Pegu, the thirteenth-century capital of Lower Burma and site of Shwemawdaw Pagoda, a golden chedi to rival Shwedagon. Toungoo, the cornerstone of the Second Burmese Empire that overran Southeast Asia during the sixteenth century. Pyinmana, where a dispute over a shipment of teak had escalated into the Third Anglo-Burmese War, a succinct 1885 campaign that brought all of Upper Burma, including Shan State, into the British fold.

Mandalay. The name conjured the romance and nostalgia of the East and of empire but delivered only heat, dust, and the distinctive aromas of a police state: gasoline and fresh paint from a sprawling Tatmadaw motor pool, old leather from flatcars piled with newly felled teak, fresh excrement and cold ashes from neighborhoods of the disenfranchised. Once, in the time before the British, Mandalay had been the center of a small, arrogant universe ruled by the Arbiter of Existence. The symbol of that faded glory, and of the cruelty that haunted the national character, was Mandalay Palace. In 1857, King Min-don ordered a new capital on a sun-fried plain east of the Irrawaddy River. Within two years, thousands of slaves fulfilled his decree, building a moated citadel of four square kilometers. As further protection, Mindon’s astrologers ordered that fifty-two people be buried alive beneath the massive brick battlements. The spirits of these myosade could not prevent the inner complex of teak reception halls, throne rooms, and consort apartments from going up in flames in March 1945 during fighting between the Japanese and advancing Allied forces.

After decades of standing empty, SLORC had decided to rebuild and beautify the palace in time for 1996, which had been designated “Visit Myanmar Year.” The eastern and southern stretches of the moat had already been dredged of nearly 140 years of detritus and refilled. The fortress walls were decorated with gigantic SLORC banners:

TATMADAW AND THE PEOPLE, COOPERATE AND CRUSH ALL THOSE HARMING THE UNION

THE TATMADAW SHALL NEVER BETRAY THE NATIONAL CAUSE

Careful replicas of the corkscrewed watchtower and the throne hall, with its gabled, seven-tiered thuyma roof, now vaulted toward the cloudless sky. Along the western wall, beneath crenalated ramparts and wooden pavilions, hundreds of workers repointed the stone-and-concrete revetment and scooped muck out of the drained moat. My guide said that “murderers and thieves” performed the stoop work. If he spoke the truth, Mandalay had an astounding crime rate. Closer scrutiny revealed a motley work crew: uniformed soldiers, prisoners wearing white, jailhouse-issue shirts, and ordinary civilians clad in longyis and dirty T-shirts who had “volunteered” as corvées. The alternative to this unpaid labor, from which military families were exempt, was a fine of two hundred kyats—the equivalent of two black-market dollars and well more than the official daily working wage.

Many of the prisoners had been jailed and convicted of petty crimes, such as violating curfew or, if they came from out of town, failing to register with local authorities, an irate local told me over dinner. Each domicile, he explained, carried a document that listed the names of all household occupants, their distinguishing physical characteristics, and their national registration certificate numbers. The specialty of the local police was late-night head counts.

“And if there are discrepancies?” I asked.

“Six months in jail and a three-thousand-kyat fine,” he replied.

I wondered how he felt about foreigners coming to such a country on holiday.

“It is good,” he said, “and bad. Tourists who bother to look and speak get to know the situation from the Burmese people. The bad thing is that not much money goes to the people. It all goes to the government and the military.” He paused to spit a crimson gob of betel juice into a cup. “They don’t care if you come or not. They’re doing the drug trade with the Chinese and the Thai. They have very good money. All the drugs to New York City are coming from Burma.”

Laundered through a camouflage of real-estate and business ventures, the drug money has reshaped Mandalay into the southernmost city of Yunnan Province. In the urban area south of Mandalay Palace, new Chinese enterprises line 80th Street. The latest edition to the cityscape, four-story Zego Market, which boasts the only escalator in Upper Burma, is stuffed with cheap Chinese goods, from clothing and cosmetics to bicycles and motor scooters. The food stalls are piled high with Chinese produce.

“We used to export to China: watermelons, apples, mangoes,” the Burman told me. “Now we import from China: watermelons, apples, mangoes. The Chinese are the cause of the trouble. Very soon, Burma will be swallowed by the Chinese.”

Chinese commercial domination had bred local resentment. In September 1993, a minor traffic accident in Mandalay had sparked a huge riot after the perpetrator, an ethnic Kokang Chinese, tried to use his SLORC connections to intimidate his Burmese victim.

“Development is all drug-related,” the man continued. “The Burmese want to know why the authorities aren’t catching and arresting the Chinese. They arrest us for petty crimes—staying out after ten o’clock, not reporting visitors—while the Chinese are dealing drugs. It is a joint-venture scandal between the army and the Chinese.”

The chaw of betel had ceased to bob in his cheek. He grew quiet.

“We’re in the middle of nowhere. This is a Buddhist country. We don’t believe in killing. Not killing humans, not animals, not even an ant. Yet SLORC shoots people like dogs. We are living hand-to-mouth. There are no jobs. We can’t overthrow the army. They are too powerful. We have no arms, no ammunition. We can’t fight against guns. We die in despair.”

*   *   *

The thousands of temples, monuments, and shrines that crowd Pagan went up in a two-century spasm of piety, atonement, and masonry that began in the mid eleventh century during the reign of Anawrahta, founder of the First Burmese Empire. None of these ancient edifices haunts the soul like the modest Manuha Temple and its “jailed” Buddhas. Temple construction began about 1059, underwritten not by Anawrahta, but by his royal prisoner, Manuha. Once the ruler of Thaton, a Mon kingdom along the Andaman Sea, Manuha had unwisely rebuffed a request by Anawrahta, a fresh convert to Buddhism, for a copy of the holy Tripitaka scriptures. Enraged by Manuha’s refusal, Anawrahta had marched his army several hundred miles south to Thaton and laid siege until Manuha surrendered his capital. Anawrahta took possession of the holy books and the entire population of Thaton, who were herded back to Pagan to fulfill his vision of a new center of Thereveda Buddhism.

Amid a grove of jacaranda trees and coconut palms in the small lacquerware village of Myinkaba, Manuha built the temple that became a metaphor for his miserable exile: a trio of huge Buddha images, uncomfortably constrained in small rooms by massive, whitewashed walls. Two of the somber figures held sitting positions, a pose the Burmese called Tinmyinkwe, accentuating the protruding torsos meant to express Manuha’s heartache. The third statue took the uncommon Shinbinthalyaung, or “witnessing the earth,” form of the reclining Buddha. The Buddha figure stretched more than fifty feet, his red, giant lips pursed in a beatific smile as he entered Nirvana. All life was suffering; only death brought cessation from pain, escape from incarceration.

After sundown had bathed the brickwork of Pagan, foreigners gathered at the bar of the lone tourist-class facility in the archeological zone to discuss temples: the terra-cotta tilework of Mingalazedi, the masterful masonry of Dhammayangyi, the view of sunset from atop the fifth terrace of Shwesandaw.

“Hellohello.”

A bar girl’s greeting, but for the childish voice. A Burmese girl, no older than ten, hovered below the raised deck of the bar and practiced her new skill—begging—on the tourists. It might have been the only talent she knew: one third of Burma’s children do not attend school; one half of those who do attend never finish primary grades. Poverty, the cost of books, the demands of farming, the threat of war, all encourage truancy.

“Present,” the girl whispered shyly, standing on tiptoe to extend a jasmine bud and a small block of thanaka through the balustrade of the deck. “Present.”

I reluctantly accepted the sweet flower and the chalky cosmetic. The girl smiled and held out her hand.

“Present,” she demanded.

I rummaged through my knapsack, gave her a red-ink Bic pen. She accepted, although clearly disappointed. She wanted a worthwhile trinket or money, even kyats.

“Mother,” she said. “Come see mother.”

“No.”

“Come,” she persisted, pointing toward a dark bank of acacias. “Five minute. Walk. Bring T-shirt. Stay with mother.”

“No,” I said, offering a black-ink pen. “No stay with mother.”

But she was already gone, clutching another flower and walking in the deck’s shadows toward another tourist. I left the hotel by foot, bound for Ananda Temple, where Buddhist pilgrims were in the midst of a three-week festival. The road through the ruins was cloaked in eerie, empty silence, save for the clopping footfalls of distant horse-drawn carts. The construction of Pagan’s fired-brick temples nearly a millennium earlier had denuded the countryside and permanently altered the regional climate. The arid earth now nurtured little more than acacia trees, brambles, and sandburs. Gawdawpalin Temple rose from the spare, sandy landscape, black and ominous in the moonlight. I swept my flashlight in half-arcs ahead of my route, looking for snakes that might be basking upon the still-warm pavement. A dark car traveling in my direction slowed beside me.

“Where you go?” the driver asked.

“Ananda.”

“We go the same way. Please.”

A back door opened. Two shadows in the front seats.

I entered the vehicle, gripping the Swiss Army knife in my pocket.

“Don’t be afraid,” the driver said. “We are honest Burmese.”

They let me off a mile later, just beyond Sarabha Gateway. The place buzzed with the chatter of food vendors and dry-goods merchants, the discordant tones of a pwe musical. Behind the temporary encampment stood serene, nine-hundred-year-old Ananda Temple, its whitewashed walls and gilded, one-hundred-sixty-foot-tall banana-bud spire flickering in the festival lighting. Ananda’s patron, King Kyanzittha, a son of Anawrahta, had been so impressed with the design and craftsmanship of the low, elegant structure that he ordered the ritual execution of its architect upon the temple’s dedication in 1090. Royalty knew no higher compliment. The usual contingent of reliquary merchants, florists, and men with cheeping cages of merit-making sparrows sat on the periphery, taking stock of the day’s business.

I soon tired of the pwe and wandered through a bazaar bursting with Chinese-made cookware, bolts of cotton fabric, toys, tools, and cheap baseball caps carrying American iconography: Camaro Z28, Navy SEALS, Chicago Bulls. I bought a bundle of fifty cheroots for twenty-two kyats, just twenty cents, and headed for an outdoor restaurant across the road to enjoy a green cigar and a lukewarm Tiger Beer. The courteous driver who had delivered me to Ananda sat alone at a table beneath the sulphur-yellow trunk of an acacia tree, smoking. He saw me, motioned me over. I sat and ordered two Singaporean beers. Although Mandalay had a brewery, it was impossible to find a restaurant that stocked anything but imported beer.

“Have you enjoyed the temples?” he asked.

“Amazing,” I replied. “In Europe, you see maybe one or two cathedrals in a city. In Pagan, it’s like having hundreds of cathedrals together.”

“From the eleventh century to thirteenth century, Pagan was a Golden Age,” he said. “Sixty thousand people. Today, it is like a Stone Age.”

We sat silently for a while, drinking beer. He leaned forward, grabbed my forearm, whispered conspiratorally. “We are waiting for a new government.” He surveyed the customers at other tables, then spoke again. “We are all hiding behind something.”

His dark eyes seemed clouded with regret and alcohol. Without prompting, he recited his army serial number, told me he once worked for SLORC. “You have to understand what I was,” he said firmly. “I would like to talk to you later. There are many spies here.”

I paid the tab and we walked out to Sarabha Gateway to stand under the whitewashed trunks of a stand of neem trees. Beyond the portal guarded by a pair of nat spirits, Lord of the Great Mountain and his sister, Lady Golden-Face, had stood Old Pagan, a home to nearly five thousand people until 1990.

“I was born in this village,” said the driver. He gestured toward the empty, sandy stretch of ground. “They moved us for nothing. We lost everything.”

In a decision that pleased only archeologists, SLORC had razed Old Pagan, a thriving village of tourist-oriented shops, restaurants, and guest houses that had grown amid the ruins. More than one thousand families were relocated three miles away to New Pagan, to scratch out a living from small, barren plots of a former peanut field far from the tourist trade. The driver turned away. In the moonlight, I could see the tracks of the tears streaming down his dusty cheeks.

“You must understand what I was,” he repeated.

It was nearly ten o’clock, a late night by Burmese standards. The pwe had concluded, and festival merchants were covering their stalls. A few bird men were preparing to sleep under the stars. If I wanted to build some last-minute merit, I could turn loose a caged sparrow for the cost of a few kyats. There was no act of charity to set free a people imprisoned by their own government. I returned to Ananda and dickered with a trishaw driver. We settled on the exhorbitant sum of thirty kyats, then rode through the gloom toward Sarabha Gateway. The distraught veteran suddenly appeared on the roadside, walking towards us. He extended a moonlit arm; I shook his hand as my driver pedaled past. It was a proper introduction and a sad farewell to a guilty, bitter man.

That night, the fever taunted my dreams. The beautiful, dessicated blonde of my Ho Mong visions lay upon a bed. Another woman sat on the edge of the mattress, administering a heroin injection with a gesture that seemed almost a caress. I leaned forward, intent on begging her to stop feeding her fatal habit. Instead, I kissed her lips.

*   *   *

The road to Taunggyi, the capital of Shan State, rose beyond the rail-junction town of Thazi, following the kinking folds of Highway 4 up a narrow river valley, hemmed by ever-lusher, ever-darkening jungle. The air cooled and freshened, and Burmese pines and Chinese-made army transport trucks appeared in profusion. The smells and sights of Indian country. The road leveled and straightened beyond the old hill-station of Kalaw, and the terrain held the character of the myelat, the “middle land” of rolling downs that extended toward the Salween River more than one hundred miles to the east.

This road was passable until the great river, my betel-chewing driver said, then turned bad—very bad. In the early 1980s, he had spent four years coaxing trucks through the mountains from Taunggyi to Tachilek, four hundred miles to the southeast. A one-way trip was a five-day ordeal along bad tarmac and impossible grades. Trucks always rode in armed convoys of several dozen vehicles, a necessary precaution against the bandits and warlords who roamed the mountains. The land and its proud people did not embrace the Burmese.

“They believe they are living in Shan country, not Burma,” a Burman had told me. “They call it Shan pyi. Shan land. They are very proud to say they lived under the saophas.”

The deeper the passage into this restive region, the more plentiful became the SLORC billboards that warned against any notions of a separate Shan State:

ANYONE WHO TRIES TO BREAK THE UNION IS OUR ENEMY. WE WILL STRIVE FOR PERPETUITY OF THE UNION

NEVER HESITATING, ALWAYS READY TO SACRIFICE BLOOD AND SWEAT, IS THE TATMADAW

ONLY WHEN THERE IS DISCIPLINE WILL THERE BE PROGRESS

Not unlike Mae Hong Son, Taunggyi was the official end of the line for outsiders. The ridges to the east held dacoits, rebel armies, Tatmadaw press-gangs. The eastern military region of the Tatmadaw was headquartered here, but the lowland Burmese were in the minority, outnumbered by the Shan, the Intha who lived on nearby Inle Lake, and the Pa-O and Palaung tribesman settled in the surrounding tumble of purplish mountains. In the swirl of the talaat, sun-darkened faces bore a patina of suspicion that came with decades of Burmese occupation. Old men still wore baggy gon trousers, not the wraparound Burmese longyi, and defiant turbans.

This land once belonged to the saopha of Yaunghwe, who ruled from a town along the north shore of Inle Lake for more than six centuries. The prince’s teak palace now stood empty. The last Sunset King, Sao Shwe Thaik, died in military custody in 1962. The Ministry of Culture owned the property, now called the Nyaung Shwe Haw Museum, and operated the eighty-year-old building with the neglect and penury that had characterized Burmese treatment of the Shan. I found the palace in a forlorn state, its foundation riddled with cracks and fissures, its galleries slumping in terminal fatigue. Its rare, seven-tiered thuyma roof, a design found only atop royal buildings and the holiest of temples, was a rusted shambles.

The curator of this crumbling cenotaph materialized to open the padlocked palace door only after a lengthy search. Inside, coils of barbed wire were strewn across the floor of a large reception hall. A water-stained painting, depicting a Shan royal barge on Inle Lake, leaned against a massive teak pillar decorated with the antlers of a deer. The creaking stairs led to a room that held a few puckered photographs of Sao Shwe Thaik and a selection of ancestral chairs, howdahs, and litters. The assembly hall, the throne room, and the levee hall were silent and barren, alive only in fading photos and in the wrinkled memories of old men in baggy pants. The Burmanization of Shan State would come like the ocean tide, slowly, inexorably.

In the evening I ate dinner with a Burman in a near-empty Chinese restaurant overlooking a foul-smelling canal that drained into Inle Lake. Out on the water, the fishermen rowed home in unique fashion, standing in flat-bottom boats, using their arms as fulcrums and pushing long, single oars with sweeping leg strokes through clumps of water hyacinth. Swallows skimmed the dead-calm surface, feeding on insects. Our dinner conversation eventually turned to the forbidden subject of Burmese politics, as it often did when there was plenty of Chinese beer and few eavesdroppers.

“SLORC does not hold to Buddhist doctrine,” my companion said in a low voice. “Abstain from evil, do good works, purify the mind. SLORC does what is good for them. They are not truly Buddhist people. In 1988, they violated the sanctity of life. SLORC should understand who is telling lies. They promised to hand over the power when there is peace, but it is difficult to hope. It is as if you are sitting in a very comfortable chair. You don’t want to get up. SLORC is sitting in such a chair.”

The chair was a palanquin, borne on the shoulders of a gentle people burdened with spiraling inflation, benumbed by constant oppression. The devoutly Buddhist Burmese looked to the next life for salvation, making merit to improve their destiny, earning a few black-market dollars from tourists, then purchasing gold leaf for a temple or buying a sparrow’s freedom.

“We have to close up our mouths, our ears, our eyes,” my dinner companion continued. “We have to wait for one day.” He smiled thinly. “According to Buddhist doctrine, nothing is permanent. Everything is subject to decay. Even SLORC.”

I said nothing. What could I tell him of America’s commitment to Burma? Most Americans couldn’t locate Burma on a world map, let alone speak of the country’s complicated history or of the plight of The Lady. Would I tell him that his country was of almost no concern to U.S. policymakers? That even if there was a groundswell of American support for the democracy movement, that Washington was loathe to become involved in another quagmire in Southeast Asia? I only nodded my assent. Perhaps SLORC, corrupt and sated, would finally alienate the Burmese, a people with a famously high tolerance for dictatorial rule.

“I have a question for you,” the Burman said.

“Fire away,” I replied. After two weeks in the country, I felt comfortable articulating my impressions about Burma. Ne Win, SLORC, or Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, I was ready to provide an American perspective. The man leaned across the dining table.

“There is one thing I would like you to tell me. Michael Jackson—he or she?”

*   *   *

Close to a year later came Khun Sa’s stunning news: the warlord had stepped down from the Shan State Restoration Council, crafted an amnesty deal with the Burmese, and retired from drug trafficking and ethnic revolution. The development took all but Khun Sa’s closest confidants by surprise. Through the spring and early summer of 1994, his Mong Tai Army had fought the Burmese to a virtual standstill in Shan State. In May, his forces had blown up a reservoir dike outside of Tachilek, severing the Golden Triangle town’s water supply. SLORC retaliated with air strikes on MTA positions in the area, causing refugees to flee into Thailand. Although casualties to both parties reached into the hundreds, there was little notice of the battles, beyond brief wire-service reports, in the Western press. In a departure from past doctrine, Khun Sa began far-reaching mobile guerrilla operations the following year. In March 1995, the MTA destroyed Tatmadaw installations in Tachilek, then melted across the Sai River into Thailand. The following month, MTA saboteurs staged a late-night raid on a lumber mill south of Mandalay. Hoping that the projection of force would impress SLORC, he threatened further urban attacks if the Burmese Army, which was preparing to launch a post-monsoon assault on Ho Mong, threatened his headquarters.

The decisive blow against Khun Sa, however, came from within his own ranks. During the summer rains of 1995, hundreds of soldiers of the MTA 16th Brigade based in northern Shan State broke with him. The mutineers complained that the Shan struggle for independence had been overshadowed by Khun Sa’s preoccupation with drug trafficking and his promotion of ethnic Chinese to key organizational positions. The breakaway force renounced the MTA and adopted a new name, the Shan State National Army, and took a new leader, Major Karn Yod, a Khun Sa protege and one of the movement’s best political organizers and tacticians. The MTA field commander, Sao Kan Zet, was dispatched across the Salween to persuade Karnyod to return. Instead, hundreds of troops in Sao Kan Zet’s escort deserted to the breakaway faction. In Ho Mong, the Shan intellectuals and armchair revolutionaries who had long questioned Khun Sa’s ethnic credentials became openly critical of their half-Shan, half-Chinese commander. They lobbied for a realignment of power. They wanted collective governance, not a supreme leader. Khun Sa should remain in the background, but still underwrite the Shan movement.

On November 22, on the tenth and final day of a merit-making festival to celebrate the completion of a new pagoda in Mong Mai, Khun Sa formally announced his retirement from the Shan State Restoration Council. The MTA defections and his subsequent failure to generate political credibility and support among Shan nationalists had been too great a loss of face. “It is as painful to me as if somebody was cutting out my heart,” Khun Sa said. “But the time has come for me to finish.” He would become a humble farmer, he told associates, and spend his retirement raising livestock and growing vegetables.

It was expected that Khun Sa would continue to wield power from behind the scenes, as he had after relinquishing political control of the Shan independence movement to his critics in 1992 and 1993. But the old warlord sensed the walls closing in around him. His tax revenues had declined as an increasing percentage of the heroin trade was smuggled through China via territory controlled by warlords with SLORC ceasefire agreements. The Tatmadaw and the Wa were preparing for a massive, two-front assault on MTA positions. At the urging of the DEA, the Thai had decided to step up border security, making it more difficult and expensive to resupply Ho Mong. And the Shan patriots had forced him from power. Khun Sa’s hurt was immense: he had built Ho Mong from nothing, had made a name for Shan State in the press, then had been cast aside. The fight of the Shan would no longer be his fight. He would make a separate peace with the Burmese. He revealed himself to be, ultimately, a survivor.

After more than a month of secret, back-channel negotiations conducted by his uncle, Khun Saeng, with top Burmese leaders, SLORC battalions entered Ho Mong in early January 1996 without a shot being fired in anger. Khun Sa and senior SLORC commanders signed a peace agreement, then raised glasses of whiskey in a toast. Giving up was painful, he reasoned, but the only other course would have been further bloodshed. “Now it is up to the Shan people to determine if what I did was right or wrong,” he said in a statement.

Once again, Khun Sa had demonstrated a capacity to confound: he would become a private, wealthy, legitimate businessman. The warlord undoubtedly had some guarantee of government amnesty, for the Burmese Army would never have taken Ho Mong without heavy fighting. Sources close to the General said he would be allowed to keep his city-state, to take commissions on timber and mining agreements in southern Shan State, and to retain seventy-five hundred soldiers. The MTA would become a government-sanctioned militia in the fight against the new opium villains, the Wa. Ho Mong would become a district of Loi Kaw Province, administered by SLORC and MTA officials.

The surprise agreement allowed SLORC to claim it had driven the world’s most notorious druglord from the business on the eve of “Visit Myanmar Year.” The foreign community would howl in indignation, but it was unlikely that Khun Sa would be sent abroad for the druglord trial of the century, United States of America v. Chang Chi-fu. For one thing, Burma had no extradition treaty with the United States. For another, Khun Sa had too much damning information about too many of SLORC’s top leaders. It was to their advantage to keep him in Burma, despite a two-million-dollar bounty offered by American authorities. Khun Sa was said to be particularly close to Lieutenant–General Maung Aye, the Burmese Army Commander in Chief who also headed the eastern military region. While the MTA skirmished with the Tatmadaw, Khun Sa had paid Maung Aye five thousand dollars a month since 1992, according to MTA officers.

In early March, Khun Sa took a villa near Ne Win on Inya Lake, Rangoon’s most fashionable suburb, and began organizing gem factories in the capital and developing trading centers in Tachilek. If I knew how I would have been treated by the Burmese, he jokingly told Flynn, I would have given up a long time ago. While Khun Sa shuttled between Rangoon and Ho Mong by helicopter, the Shan nationalists were forced to flee into hiding or to Thailand. They angrily fingered Khun Sa for the stunning collapse of their movement. But these overconfident patriots, who had chased Khun Sa from power in the belief that they could sustain the fight, also had themselves to blame. Some view Khun Sa’s abdication as an opportunity to rebuild the Shan movement anew—without the taint of drugs or the force of Khun Sa’s personality. Karn Yod merged his Shan State National Army with another former MTA group, the Shan State Army, to create a force of eight thousand men. They will carry the SSA banner, for the time being.

Khun Sa’s “capture” briefly disrupted the drug trade until the Wa boosted production at their heroin refineries along the Thai border. After the weather-weakened harvest of 1994, the poppy fields yielded a near-record crop in 1995. The latest U.S. State Department report paints a grim picture of Burma. The few drug seizures by Burmese police target low-level dealers; the heroin warlords, legitimized by SLORC as “leaders of national races,” enjoy “complete autonomy” in their private fiefdoms. “The drug trade in Shan State continues virtually unchecked,” according to the State Department.

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Sengjoe plans to retire to Thailand and open a tour company specializing in day-trip tours of Ho Mong, “the last rebel outpost” of Shan State. If any Shan gets the tour concession, it will be Sengjoe, whose surviving daughter from his first marriage is now married to Number One. Doctor Sai Yiseng, the veterinarian, moved to Rangoon with the General to oversee the gem business.

Lord and Lady Brocket will never spend a night in the costly Shan replica of their English manor. The couple divorced acrimoniously in December 1994. Two months later, Lord Brocket was arrested on a fraudulent, £4.5-million claim he made on four classic cars he said had been stolen from his Hertfordshire estate in the spring of 1991. The investigation had been assisted by Barry Flynn, who said he contacted English authorities when he learned that his cousin, Rick Furtado, and Lord Brocket were trying to use his contacts to sell the cars in the Far East. In December 1995, Lord Brocket pleaded guilty to insurance fraud; he is currently serving a five-year prison sentence. The M.P.’s empty Shan villa became a showroom for the General’s haute couture shoe enterprise and a house for visiting VIPs.

Au Cheng has tried to put his mercenary ways behind him. He sings American country-and-western music in Chiang Mai restaurants, and polishes jade in Khun Sa’s Chiang Mai gem factory. Monsoon rains flooded northern Thailand in 1994 and 1995, but Keutsada “Noi” Panyatipaya has rebuilt his restaurant along the banks of the Ping River. His fried cashews remain exquisite. Mook Keaw Kam and his wife live in Chiang Mai with their daughter, born in December 1994, one year after their marriage. With no external-relations department to represent, Khernsai Jaiyen resigned from the MTA and moved to northern Thailand, where he works for a Shan human-rights group. The fate of Sai Ching and other young recruits of the Noom Suk Harn is unclear. Hundreds of the boy soldiers were reportedly left homeless in the wake of Khun Sa’s brokered peace with Rangoon.

Somwang Oonman, the head of the Shan State Restoration Council’s office in Mae Hong Son, was arrested in November 1994 during Operation Tiger Trap, a roundup that coincided with the Bangkok visit of DEA chief Thomas Constantine. The agency termed Somwang a senior lieutenant in Khun Sa’s drug-trafficking organization and requested his extradition to the United States. Senior Thai officials, however, characterize Somwang as “little known.”

With his ever-fluctuating status in Thailand, Flynn moved his wife and children to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1994. He continues to split his time between the United States, Shan State, and northern Thailand, selling Mogok rubies and Kachin jade and trying to interest investors in the wondrous natural resources of Shan State.

In the unlikely event that the “Prince of Death” is to be brought to American justice, it will not be by Catherine E. Palmer. The Dragon Lady left the D.A.’s office in 1994 and returned to her old corporate-law firm, Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander & Ferdon, as a partner. In September 1995, Palmer joined the powerhouse firm of Latham & Watkins, where she specializes in intellectual-property litigation. In May 1995, Donald F. Ferrarone forsook the migraines of Southeast Asian counter-narcotics work to head the DEA’s Houston division. It is a prestigious domestic posting; only New York and Miami have larger staffs among the DEA’s nineteen U.S. divisions. William F. Beachner retired from the United Nations in 1994. At last report, he worked as a consultant for ASEAN, the Southeast Asia regional economic cooperation alliance.

Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel James G. “Bo” Gritz has a variety of lucrative, ultraconservative interests. In addition to developing Almost Heaven, a survivalist-oriented real-estate venture in Idaho, he hosts “Freedom Call,” a nationally syndicated radio talk show, and travels the country with David Scott Weekly teaching combat, first-aid, and personal-security skills to the public at SPIKE (Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events) seminars. Lance E. Trimmer remains a Montana P.I. Vinnie Arnone moved home to Massachusetts from Thailand in 1994 and edits a weekly newspaper in suburban Boston.

Jon Stuen-Parker has taken his needle-exchange program to Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, and Singapore. Tom “The Sailor” Williams’ guardian angel has worked overtime. After receiving several thousand dollars from a car-accident insurance settlement, The Sailor tried to go straight. He bought a truck, which he promptly rolled over on the Maine Turnpike in a spectacular accident. After a hospital stay and detox, The Sailor bought a motorcycle, which he soon wrecked in another, near-fatal crash. When he got out of the hospital in late 1994, he moved to California. His current whereabouts are unknown.

The potency of The Sailor’s drug of choice is undiminished, according to the Domestic Monitor Program, the DEA’s street-buy survey. Average retail-level purity climbed to 40 percent by the spring of 1995. Purity levels in Philadelphia (74 percent), Boston (73 percent), and New York City (69 percent) were even higher. Intravenous drug use remains a major vector in the spread of AIDS in the United States and in Southeast Asia. Burma has the world’s highest rates of infection among IV-drug users, nearly 75 percent, according to the U.N. International Drug Control Program.

Gracious Thailand continues its headlong plunge towards public-health disaster. By 1995, the kingdom had almost eight hundred thousand HIV cases; more than 40 percent of its AIDS-related deaths occurred in the northern provinces of Chiang Rai and Phayao. At an international AIDS conference held last September in Chiang Mai, speakers warned that the epicenter of the epidemic had shifted inexorably from sub-Saharan Africa to Asia.

“We are losing the fight,” said John Dwyer, president of the AIDS Society for Asia and the Pacific. “Things are going to get worse, not better, unless we do things smartly.” According to projections, Thailand will have more than four million HIV-positive citizens by the end of the century, and upwards of one hundred thousand orphaned children whose parents will have succumbed to AIDS. But in Bangkok, the farang bars along Patpong and Soi Cowboy continue to rollick, all except for Lucy’s Tiger Den, which has been sold and renamed Demoiselle. Phoumano Nosavan still resides in Bangkok, still dreaming of liberating Laos, still swindling Americans with bogus information about alleged American POWs.

Thailand’s relations with the United States have cooled since the July 1995 inauguration of prime minister Banharn Silpa-archa. Two of Banharn’s key supporters, power brokers Narong Wongwan and Vatana Asavahame, have been denied U.S. visas because of suspected links to drug trafficking. Under Banharn’s shaky coalition government, slippery General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh added a new title to his resume: Defense Minister.

Thailand’s relations with Burma remain frayed. In early 1995 the Burmese Army and another of its proxy forces, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), a disgruntled faction of the Christian-led Karen National Union, overran the last KNU border strongholds at Manerplaw and Kawmoorah. Thousands of ethnic refugees fled across the Moei River to Thailand. Disdaining Thai sovereignty, DKBA and Burmese troops crossed into Mae Hong Son and Tak Provinces to attack villages, loot refugee camps, and kidnap Karen leaders. That July, Burma closed the border for eight months after four Burmese were killed at sea by Thai fishermen. In early 1996, Tatmadaw offensives chased thousands of refugees from Karenni State into Mae Hong Son Province and routed the Karenni Army.

The SLORC rules Burma with a heavy, arrogant hand. The Lady, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was discharged from house arrest in July 1995, but SLORC has blocked her from leading the political party she helped to establish and continues to detain and harass her supporters.

“I have been released, that is all,” said The Lady, who urged foreign nations to withhold investment until democracy has been restored.

Under President Clinton, the United States initiated a confusing two-track position on Burma, condemning SLORC for human-rights violations but supporting the military regime’s counter-narcotics efforts. The conflicting goals of the State Department, which has pushed democracy and human rights, and the DEA, which believes SLORC has not gotten credit for its counter-narcotics work, have created a nasty interagency feud. When DEA special agent Richard A. Horn was recalled from Burma, he took the unusual step of filing a civil suit against the top American diplomat in Burma, chargé d’affaires Franklin P. Huddle, Jr., for harassment—including the tapping of his telephone—stemming from policy disputes. All documents filed in the suit are under seal in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

Jay F. Sullivan never did give up his search for American prisoners of war in Southeast Asia. Despite General Khun Sa’s discouraging news about POWs, Sullivan’s foray into Shan State had given him a taste to which his man in Bangkok, Phoumano Nosavan, could not cater. Sullivan had to see the black hole of Laos for himself. In November 1994, I found myself once again on a Bangkok-bound flight, riding shotgun alongside my obsessed friend. After Ho Mong, I figured I owed it to him. With the same freeze-dried stores of beef stew and twice the amount of Absolut vodka, we four-wheeled down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to become the first American civilians to reach Attapu Province in extreme southeastern Laos in a quarter century. Sullivan has since returned to the far reaches of the Laotian panhandle nine times.

My four-day series on Khun Sa, Shan State, and the resurgent heroin epidemic began in the Boston Sunday Herald on June 12, 1994. Two days later, the double murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman dominated the front page; “Mainline: The Heroin Trail” was brushed aside in the frenzy over O. J. Simpson. It was a valuable journalistic lesson: no matter how much planning, risk, and effort went into an exclusive story about a timely topic, a celebrity murder case always got bigger play. And about the same time that O. J. was dominating the headlines, my wife Maria accidentally threw away a small paper packet containing the rubies I had bought her. Their current whereabouts are unknown.

A year to the day I returned home from Shan State, Maria gave birth to our first child, Timothy Otis. March 9, 1995. A day divisible by three. A very auspicious day, according to the Burmese.