Boy Soldiers’ Lunch
A scene from the Thai/Burma border January 1995, where the military junta of "Myanmar" is increasing pressure on ethnic minority civilians and armed resistance groups who, in turn, flee to the jungles or cross into Thailand. Gathering one of the world’s worst human rights records through routine use of forced labor, forced relocation of towns and villages[orders emphasized by random beatings and executions, arson and pillage], arbitrary demands on citizens for supplies and "taxes," and unrestrained torture, rape and murder, the regime, which currently has decreased health care spending but devotes 30% of its budget to the military, offers "great business opportunities" to international corporations such as ARCO, Texaco and UNOCAL. [Addendum: in 1997, the military junta moved 100,000 troops into the minority groups areas along the border, crushing the people all the more.]

While her husband
from higher up the river bank
mobile-phoned to contact
our next truck ride toward the city,

she and I shared the patch of shade
one surviving tree offered the sand and gravel
in the hundred meters between
the forested bank
and the southerly slide of the river.

Where the longboats had left us,
a truck-track in the clay
broke through the flood-stage face of overburden
and spread to a corduroy of mahogany logs
set in the gravel for cargo ramp and boat landing.

Fifty paces from the low water line
a ten-by-ten stack of hundred-kilo sacks of rice
waited for longboat delivery to the refugee camps upriver.
Here and there, tiny cascades of rice
hourglassed from rips in the burlap
onto the hot gravel.

In the sliver of shade left
by the leaning trees and bamboo thickets
gripping the edge of the cutbank,
the port crew watched its one pot
boil chicken and chilies with rice.

The half dozen teen porters and boy soldiers
joked among themselves in the home tongue,
and we foreigners wondered, as is human,
what they had to be saying about us.

Did they know we had brought medicine upriver?
Were we simply obscene, having money to come and go,
some of us overweight in new clothes,
here among the ill-clad and semi-starved?

One of the boy soldiers, M16 left in the shade,
ambled through the noon heat to the rice sacks,
gathered a handful of spillage, came back,
and scattered it for the two red-brown chickens
remaining tied into a bamboo basket.

With their former companion gone to pot,
the survivors had room to maneuver
heads through the open-weave
and pick at the dropped grains.

Her husband still had not come back into sight.
Our other team members
skipped rocks on the water
or waited on a driftlog near the rice pile.

The hens tilted their combs,
wattles wagging, to focus the lay
of the next rice grain to beak off the sand.

Shaking her head, she nudged a few grains
closer to the basket with her left boot.
The hens squawked,
then fell to pecking lunch again.

The port crew began spooning
watery shares of rice-and-chicken gruel
into their individual tin cans.

This kind of rice, she said,
my people never eat this --
Only give it to pigs
and sell to refugees.


R. S. Carlson

River port with rice supplies for refugee camps along the Moei River, Thailand, January 1995.