Free For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question by Mac McClelland Page B

jawline.
    “Yeah. I think that’s true. I think it’s generally for people who are bald, though.”
    “Do you have that?”
    “Hair-growing cream?”
    “Yes.”
    “Yeah, totally.”
    Htoo Moo and Htan Dah’s eyes widened at the prospect of a beard. “Really?”
    “Oh, yeah. I use it on my ass.”
    The sarcasm seemed to translate; as disappointed as they must have been, the two laughed for minutes.
    We made Ta Mla a MySpace profile, and he and Htan Dah started giving the other guys in the house tutorials in Karen as they wandered into the computer room. My work was done here. When I finally tried to leave, it was hours past my usual bedtime.
    “You cannot go to your bed,” Htan Dah said. “The Blay called and said he will have a very important meeting with you when he return.”
    It was ten-thirty. I looked at Htan Dah skeptically.
    “Yes,” Htoo Moo piped up. “He will be back soon. He said, ‘Do not let her go to sleep. I have very important matter to discuss with her.’” As I made my way through the living room, I could hear them calling after me that The Blay was going to be very disappointed.
    The other day, when I’d asked my students what they did for fun, I’d had to explain the concept of “fun” for about five minutes before anyone could answer me, and then the answers were “Nothing,” “Nothing,” “Watch TV,” and three “Talk”s. If college kids with all the freedoms in the world were pumped about social networking, these peers of theirs, who were effectively under house arrest with no games and few books, were fucking elated. And they managed fine at it without me. Still another profile had been created by the time
I finished brushing my teeth, and when I went upstairs, every computer screen was lit, the guys gathered around and talking to each other quietly about what they’d found, looking at pictures of girls and boys Japanese and Brazilian, and scrolling through the faces of Burma, a window into a world they considered home but where some had never been and most would probably never be a part of.

VI.
    “EVERY GUN that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” President Dwight Eisenhower famously said in his speech “The Chance for Peace.” “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” True story. By 1950, Burma was in progressively rougher shape. Where there’d been world war, there was now deeply divisive and ceaseless civil war that had brought anarchy and rebels and bandits and a total collapse of infrastructure. And things really didn’t improve when the Truman and Eisenhower administrations flooded the country with weapons, driving the government to build the military machine that commands Burma to this day.
    Under the chaotic circumstances after independence, Burma was vulnerable to the worst sort of people who might be interested in it: commies. “Communist control of Burma would be a great strategic advantage to both the Chinese Communists and the USSR,” the CIA warned. “It would drive a wedge between India-Pakistan and Southeast Asia, facilitate Communist penetration into Indochina
and the other countries of South and Southeast Asia, and in a psychological sense give impetus to the claim that Communism in Asia is an irresistible force.” Preach on, State Department:
    British and American officials generally agree that the situation in Burma is deteriorating at an alarming rate, that Burma is the ‘soft spot’ of Southeast Asia and that because the Government and people of Burma are apathetic to the Communist threat and highly suspicious of British and American motives, it is