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Outside Magazine October 2003

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The Ghost Road (Cont.)


	Point of no return: dubbed "Hell Gate" by American soldiers who built the Stilwell Road, the bridge over the Nampong River, near Pangsau Pass, marks the entrance into Burma's leech-infested jungle. (Mark Jenkins)

BACK HOME, I WROTE to the Myanmar embassy in Washington. (Since 1989, Myanmar has been the military government's name for the country.) In 1996, with great fanfare, Myanmar launched a campaign to promote tourism, and visitors could obtain a visa to travel in the southern part of the country, but northern Burma, including the region the Stilwell Road passed through, was off-limits to foreigners.

After pestering the embassy and its representatives for several months, I managed to get an appointment with U Tin Winn, Myanmar's ambassador to the United States. I did my political homework before our meeting.

General Aung San, leader of Burma's Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League, demanded independence from Britain in 1947. While writing the constitution, Aung San, along with six of his ministers, was assassinated, igniting a series of bloody coups and bringing Prime Minister U Nu into power when independence was granted, in 1948. In 1962, General Ne Win overthrew the civilian government and abolished the constitution. A gallows hood was dropped over the face of the nation. Through coercion, repression, state-sponsored murder, and Stalin-style domestic terror, Ne Win maintained control for nearly 30 years. By 1988, conditions were so unbearable that pro-democracy demonstrations erupted throughout the country, led by returning exile Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of Aung San and head of the National League for Democracy (NLD). These demonstrations were brutally crushed by the dictatorship—between 3,000 and 10,000 peaceful protesters were killed—and the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), a cabal of Burmese generals, was created to run the country.

In 1989, SLORC declared martial law and placed Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest. Diplomatic pressure and agitation by the NLD forced SLORC to hold general elections the next year. When the NLD won a landslide victory, the generals declared the results invalid and subsequently imprisoned hundreds of NLD members. In 1991 Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize—perhaps the main reason she is still alive. In short, Myanmar has the dark distinction of being one of the last totalitarian regimes on earth.

At my meeting with Ambassador Tin Winn, I outlined my plan for traveling the Stilwell Road across Burma, tracing the route on a WWII-era U.S. Army map. Ambassador Tin Winn was enthusiastic about my "daring historical journey" and introduced me to an embassy official named Thaung Tun, who was to arrange a special visa and assist me in navigating the Myanmar bureaucracy.

On the phone and in a series of letters, Thaung Tun was invariably gracious and upbeat. "Everything looks good—we're on course. Proper papers are assembling," he told me. "Things take time only." At first I believed him, but as the months passed, I came to recognize this behavior as classic puppeteering. After more than a year of strategic confoundment, Thaung Tun suggested I break the impasse by seeking permission in person. He knew who I should talk to. I flew to the capital, Rangoon (renamed Yangon), in the fall of 1997.

For three days I sat in a hot, dank hallway waiting to meet Thaung Tun's government colleague. Making you wait is how bureaucrats exercise dominance. I took to bringing bread crumbs for the rats that scurried along the walls. When I finally met the man, a pinched homunculus with nervous eyes and no eyebrows, he pushed me right out of his office.

"Stilwell Road gone!" he screamed. "Disappeared! No possible!"

This only served to incite me. Stilwell and his men had faced countless obstacles, too—torrential rains that raised rivers 20 feet, titanic mudslides, jungle diseases—and Stilwell had been repeatedly told that it was impossible to build a road across Burma. I began to envision defying the Myanmar junta as not merely just, but obligatory. I was still young enough to believe—bewilderedly, arrogantly, passionately—that through sheer force of will, I could bend the world to my ambition.

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