Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 A bronze drum
- 2 Boar Tusk's children
- 3 White collar Flowerland
- 4 True Love at home
- 5 Water child, land child
- 6 A simple man
- 7 Fighting mean, fighting clean
- 8 Great Lake and the Elephant Man
- 9 Bartholomew's boarders
- 10 The three seasons
- Interlude: from the Kok river
- 11 Last of the longhouses
- 12 A delicate bamboo tongue
- 13 True Love in love
- 14 Fermented monkey faeces
- 15 Perfect hosts
- 16 Old guard, young Turks
- 17 True Love and White Rock
- 18 Insurgents in a landscape
- 19 True Love and sudden death
- 20 Portraits
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
19 - True Love and sudden death
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 A bronze drum
- 2 Boar Tusk's children
- 3 White collar Flowerland
- 4 True Love at home
- 5 Water child, land child
- 6 A simple man
- 7 Fighting mean, fighting clean
- 8 Great Lake and the Elephant Man
- 9 Bartholomew's boarders
- 10 The three seasons
- Interlude: from the Kok river
- 11 Last of the longhouses
- 12 A delicate bamboo tongue
- 13 True Love in love
- 14 Fermented monkey faeces
- 15 Perfect hosts
- 16 Old guard, young Turks
- 17 True Love and White Rock
- 18 Insurgents in a landscape
- 19 True Love and sudden death
- 20 Portraits
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Karen will never be your slaves.
When the very stones float on the water
they'll wave flags for Kawthoolei.
This is our land, which our forebears knew;
dead or alive, it will always be ours.
Recorded for me by Riverside teachers.‘What does “expendable” mean, Jo?’ said True Love one afternoon. I asked him the context. ‘It comes into Rambo, about soldiers being expendable. And there was another film I remember seeing in Burma, about soldiers.’
John Ford's They Were Expendable, perhaps, which concludes with Douglas MacArthur's defiant, ‘I shall return!’ I told True Love what the word meant and he thought about it for a moment.
‘Sometimes I worry about my commanding officers. Some are very good, they love their men and we love them. But there are some … I don't know. Maybe they don't really care about their soldiers. Sometimes they ask us to take risks, and I cannot always see the point.’
Silver's pregnancy was concentrating his mind.
‘I came to Kawthoolei prepared to die for my people, but now I am to have a family. Should I not think about that? Should I not think about surviving, for their sakes? That is not cowardice, I think. I know that Silver worries about this, too, when there is talk of my going to the Front. Her family has been forced to flee the Burmese once.’
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- True Love and BartholomewRebels on the Burmese Border, pp. 359 - 371Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991