The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011

by Dave Eggers

  It starts with war footage, guys shooting guns in tall jungle bush, and loud rocket fire, and a village burning down and screaming women running for their lives, before moving briefly to photo stills: a picture of villagers standing over a group of dead bodies, a picture of a dead woman with her shirt torn open, a picture of murdered children lined up in a row. Then the camera centers on the face of a seventeen-year-old boy with lifeless, unfocused eyes, a longyi (sarong) held up below his neck so he can't see his completely exposed lower leg bone, a bloody white stick still hung with a few slick and glistening black-purple sinews, protruding from a bloody knee—a land-mine wound swarmed by flies. Then he's in a thin hammock, with a man in cheap plastic flip-flops at each end of the bamboo pole from which it swings, and another walking alongside holding an IV drip dangling from another piece of wood, being carried through the mountainous terrain. For four days. Which is how long it takes the Ranger team to get him to a clinic on the border, where a proper amputation can be done.

  By that point I'd twisted my face into a permanent wince, and it didn't get any easier to watch. A husband and wife sit next to each other while he explains that their two sons and daughter were taken by Burma army troops. Local Karen leaders negotiated the return of the two boys, but they haven't seen the girl since. "We want her back," the woman says, smiling sadly, before dropping her face to her knees, covering it with her pink sweater, and starting to sob. There are people getting ready to run from an attack, little girls running around talking fast directions to each other while they throw shit in baskets and sacks they strap to their foreheads. A man on his back breathing fast and shallow as Free Burma Ranger medics jab their fingers and instruments into the bloody stump below his knee. Skulls and bones on the ground and a Ranger telling how he brought a bunch of children's presents donated by kids overseas only to find that there are no children in this village anymore. Rangers tearing out infected teeth with pliers. Rangers cleaning the gory, festering wound on a little kid's leg as the child stands still, calm, pantsless. Rangers delivering a baby in the darkness by the green glow of the camera's night mode, on the jungle floor. A shot of a Burma army compound, the camera zooming in shakily on the faces of the boys with rifles, the hiding cameramen whispering breathlessly to each other. A man rocking the tiniest sleeping baby; his wife died in childbirth during their flight through the jungle. He worries he has no idea how to take care of this child without her. Tears streaming hard and quiet down the face of a woman mindlessly fingering her jacket zipper with one hand, standing among the ashes of her old village, in which her husband was killed. A toddler barely old enough to stand picking his way through the jungle as his village flees, carefully parting the brush with his chubby little fingers and stepping through with his bare, scratched legs and feet. A Ranger team leaves a group of internally displaced persons and the IDPs call out please don't leave us, please come back. A man keeps hiding his face contorted with sorrow as he sobs convulsively, "I don't understand why they killed my children. They didn't even know their right hand from their left hand," while the woman next to him weeps silently and gnashes her teeth. The video ends with a quote from Galatians on the screen: Let us not grow weary while doing good. In due season we shall reap if we don't lose heart.

  "What do you think?" Lah Lah Htoo asked me when it ended.

  I thought I might like to close myself in the bathroom so I could punch myself in the chest, just a little, to try to release some of the tightness and weight there.

  "Good video?" he asked, because I was taking so long to answer.

  "Yeah, it's a good video."

  He nodded and waited politely for me to continue, but I just sat quietly, awkwardly, before simply nodding back at him. Eventually, I asked him what they did with the videos they made.

  "We send them. To human rights organizations, UN, news."

  "Do they ever use them?"

  Lah Lah Htoo shrugged.

  Make no mistake: Though most Americans are woefully uninformed about the shit going down in Burma, your federal lawmakers are on it. In 1997, President Bill Clinton barred new U.S. investment in the country. In 2003, Congress introduced the Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act, which banned any Burmese imports, opposed loans to the regime, froze any of its U.S. assets, and denied its leaders entry visas. In 2005, Condoleezza Rice awarded Burma a special designation as an "outpost of tyranny." Bush 43 gave it shout-outs in several State of the Union addresses. ("We will continue to speak out for the cause of freedom in places like Cuba, Belarus, and Burma.") There's a U.S. Senate Women's Caucus on Burma, and Obama just extended sanctions again and said this at his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance: "When there is genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo, repression in Burma—there must be consequences.... And the closer we stand together, the less likely we will be faced with the choice between armed intervention and complicity in oppression." Also blacklisting Burma: Australia, which won't sell the regime weapons and has financial sanctions against 463 members of the junta. And the EU has stripped Burma of trading privileges and put an arms embargo in place.

  The trouble isn't so much a lack of measures as their total ineffectiveness. Though U.S. investors have had to pull their money out of, say, the garment industry, they can still deal in Burma's oil and gas, which is where the junta's big money comes from. When Congress passed that 1997 law restricting new investment, Unocal got its gas fields grandfathered in. After Chevron absorbed Unocal in 2005, its lobbyists worked tirelessly to ensure that no sanctions would force it to divest. It appeared as though the 2008 Block Burmese JADE (Junta's Anti-Democratic Efforts) Act would finally force Chevron to give up its Burmese holdings, until the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, chaired by Joe Biden (whose former chief of staff was one Alan Hoffman, once a Unocal lobbyist), stripped out the provision and replaced it with a suggestion that the company "consider voluntary divestment over time."

  Okay, but if we only fashioned better—and better-targeted—sanctions, advocates say, Burma's economy would collapse and the government might just get packing. But whether or not you believe that sanctions were the straw that broke South Africa's back, you cannot believe that they would have worked in that country if half the world's governments had said, "We're not going to give you money for your stuff anymore" while the other half had said, "Awesome. More for us."

  Operation Rescue

  "Mordor is the [Burmese government], and guys like us are hobbits," Tha U Wa A Pa says by way of explaining why he built a training base for medics in a land-mine-infested war zone in Burma, where he lives with his wife and three children.

  Tha U Wa A Pa and his Free Burma Rangers document the atrocities of the Burmese army and provide medical and tactical help to those fleeing from it. It's a quest requiring almost inconceivable bravery and, in Tha U Wa A Pa's case, a conviction that God has chosen him for this task. Though he uses a Karen nom de guerre (meaning "Father of the White Monkey"—a.k.a. his daughter), he's the son of prominent American missionaries in Thailand, an alum of Texas A&M (BA, poli-sci) and a former U.S. Army Ranger. After graduating from Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, Tha U Wa A Pa became a missionary in Thailand himself. Which is where he was in 1997, when a major SPDC offensive sent a flood of Karen refugees across the border. Tha U Wa A Pa loaded up a backpack full of supplies and, together with a KNU soldier he met along the way, rushed into Burma as if it were a house on fire. The two men treated as many wounded as they could, carrying a guy who'd stepped on a land mine to a hospital to have his leg amputated. Over the next three weeks, they ferried supplies and patients back and forth over the border.

  Since then, the Rangers have trained more than no roving teams who provide medical assistance to (and document the plight of) the more than half a million internally displaced persons in the eastern Burmese jungle. Rangers have treated some 400,000 people for malaria, AIDS, dysentery, diarrhea, malnutrition, worms, anemia, skin disease, and infections. They pull teeth and deliver babies. Six have lost their lives on the j
ob. As the junta's violence escalates, so do their efforts; the Rangers' budget is up to $1.3 million a year, all donations, mostly from churches and their parishioners. "We're just little guys trying to do some good," Tha U Wa A Pa says. "On the surface it seems like Mordor has all the strength and power and might. But if our fellowship of hobbits stays united, good will defeat evil in the end."

  That's the reality in Burma, where China is building an oil pipeline so as to avoid the long trip around the Strait of Malacca. Thailand has the rights to 1.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in one concession alone. One Indian firm has signed up for 5 trillion cubic feet. Russia has several firms drilling. A single pipeline operated by France, Thailand, and, yes, Chevron earned the junta more than $1 billion in 2008. The South Korean company Daewoo International plans to earn more than $10 billion over 25 years from its drilling project in Burma's immense Shwe gas reserve; handling Daewoo's exploratory Burma drilling was the American firm Transocean. As a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Burma is included in a free-trade agreement with India that eliminates tariffs on thousands of products; India plans to invest billions of dollars in two Burmese hydroelectric dams. The EU is discussing a free-trade agreement with ASEAN nations as well, although the UK swears it won't make a deal that would benefit Burma—it's worth noting the UK already has oil and gas dealings there. In 2008 Burma saw a 165 percent increase in the number of Chinese multinational companies involved in Burmese mining, oil and gas, and hydropower development. The regime ran a $2.5 billion trade surplus in 2009, with $5 billion in currency reserves.

  The United States can better target its sanctions all it wants, but already they've pushed tens of thousands of Burmese textile workers out of factory jobs—and, as even the State Department has admitted, into sex work. And as Chevron has pointed out, if we pull out our remaining investments, someone else—perhaps someone less conscientious—will gladly fill the gap. The international community can't even agree to stop giving the regime weapons. Even if it could get China to play ball on that front, not so much North Korea. As long as there's money to be made in Burma, a cohesive or constructive policy of international financial disengagement—from an energy-rich country neighbored by the world's two most populous, energy-desperate countries—is never going to happen.

  You know a situation is dire when its best chance of a good outcome depends on action by the United Nations Security Council. At the 2005 UN World Summit, member nations resolved that if a government perpetuates or allows any of four "atrocity crimes"—war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, or genocide—the world body is responsible for taking "timely and decisive" action to protect that nation's people. When in 2007 a draft resolution on Burma was brought before the Security Council, some activists felt that there was a strong case for it to include charges of genocide against the Karen. The UN 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines "genocide" as an attempt "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" with at least one of five methods. One of them the SPDC isn't guilty of: "Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." But "killing members of the group"? Check. "Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group"? Check. "Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part"? Clearly. "Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group"? If you count gang-raping and murdering pregnant women, yes. Since the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, systematic rape has been recognized as a key feature of genocide. In Burma, it's systematic, institutionalized, and indoctrinated into soldiers, who are explicitly ordered, "Your blood must be left in the village."

  But not one government has officially leveled the charge at Burma, and some academics and even activists argue that these genocidal actions aren't genocide-like enough to count. We can't just be throwing the word around to describe any old horror. Or as my father put it when I tried to impress upon him the seriousness of my BA housemates' situation, "But how does it compare to Sudan?"

  If Sudan is the bar against which we're measuring genocide, okay: Burma was alongside Sudan on the list of the world's worst displacement situations for four years running. Sudan's mortality rate for children under five, a common measure of conflict epidemiology, is 109 per 1,000 live births. In eastern Burma, it's 221. In the Darfur genocide, 400,000 civilians have been killed. A junta chairman once estimated that the body count of Burma's civil war—the Karen are only one of seven major minorities that have been involved in dozens of armed insurgencies—"would reach as high as millions."

  It comes down to this: A draft resolution that compellingly charges genocide against a country is a draft resolution that's likely to get passed—because no one wants to be the nation that vetoes that. But the 2007 Security Council draft resolution to declare Burma a threat to international peace and security didn't contain charges of genocide. Nor ethnic cleansing, nor crimes against humanity, nor war crimes. China and Russia vetoed it.

  Since I first arrived at Burma Action's Mae Sot offices, four years ago, some 50,000 Burmese refugees have left Thailand for UN-orchestrated resettlement in Western countries. In 2007, the United States waived its material support prohibition for refugees who'd assisted the KNU, and the next year allowed in more than 14,000 refugees, including several BA staff members. In America, they try to make rent with welfare or factory wages, and talk, weirdly, about struggling to survive. I apologized to one, after he was moved to a suburb outside cold, gray Cleveland, for his crushing poverty and loneliness and the weather. "It's okay," he replied. "You can never find a good place to live in the world. Only in heaven."

  Though some of the documentary activists have emigrated, their footage and reports gather dust in Thailand, awaiting, the human rights community hopes, the day when they might be used at a trial of the junta or in a truth and reconciliation process. Some Burma Action footage made it out and into the opener for Rambo IV, whose producers paid—after some hard haggling—about two grand for it.

  Lah Lah Htoo is one of those activists who's stayed behind. At a going-away party my last weekend, he sat with a guitar in his lap. On a previous night he'd played a hard-twanging, pentatonic melody on a stringed Karen instrument while he sang, in flowing minor notes, a traditional song about a river, so haunting that I had nearly drunkenly wept. But now the guitar he held was idle, and he tipped his head back and looked at me through half-closed eyes.

  "Do you think that we will see each other again?" he asked, one arm dangling over the body of the guitar.

  "Of course we'll see each other again," I said. I looked at Htan Dah. "I'll come back to Thailand soon."

  "When?" several voices asked.

  "Probably next summer. I have to figure it out with work, and money."

  "So," one of the guys said, "we will see each other again maybe next year."

  "I hope," I said. "Hopefully next year."

  "When we see each other again," Lah Lah Htoo said, "it will be in Burma." The other guys cheered. "When we see each other again, you will come to Burma. And you will not need a visa to enter. And I will pick you up at the airport." His face was barely wide enough for his smile, and he was hollering a bit, over the approving shouts of the other guys. "In a car. In my car!" Lah Lah Htoo had left his village when he was a teenager, when he'd run away with the rest of his family and neighbors, and hadn't been back since. A silence settled over his coworkers in the wake of his fantastic predictions, and they all smiled softly and looked off or at the floor or at the wall as they considered cars and airports, and I thought about doomed POWs in movies who know their fate is sealed but talk anyway about how they're going to eat a big cheeseburger when they get back to America, and I kept quiet as long as the guys were quiet, bowing my head as if in reverence of something that had died.

  A Hole in the Head

  Joyce Carol Oates

  FROM The Kenyon Review

&
nbsp; STRANGE!—THOUGH DR. BREDE WORE LATEX gloves when treating patients and never came into direct contact with their skin, when he peeled off the thin rubber gloves to toss them into the sanitary waste disposal in his examination room, his hands were faintly stained with rust-red streaks— blood?

  He lifted his hands, spread his fingers to examine them. His hands were those of an average man of his height and weight, though his fingers were slightly longer than average and the tips were discernibly tapered. His nails were clipped short and kept scrupulously clean and yet—how was this possible?—inside the latex gloves, they'd become ridged with the dried rust-red substance he had to suppose was blood. He thought There must be a flaw in the gloves. A tear.

  It wasn't the first time this had happened—this curiosity. In recent months it seemed to be happening with disconcerting frequency. Lucas considered retrieving the used gloves from the trash to inspect them, to see if he could detect minuscule tears in the rubber—but the prospect was distasteful to him.

  In the lavatory attached to his office Lucas Brede washed his hands vigorously. A swirl of rust-red water disappeared down the drain. This was a mystery! Few of his patients ever "bled" in his office. Dr. Brede was a cosmetic surgeon, and the procedures he performed on the premises—collagen and Botox injection, microdermabrasion, scle-rotherapy, laser (wrinkle removal), chemical peeling, Therma Therapy—involved virtually no blood loss. More complicated surgical procedures—face-lift, rhinoplasty, vein removal, liposuction—were performed at a local hospital with an anesthesiologist and at least one assistant.