Word: manerplaw
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...
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