Names for Light: A Family History by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint

Author:Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint [Myint, Thirii Myo Kyaw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General
ISBN: 9781644450611
Google: o0q_zQEACAAJ
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2021-08-17T23:35:40.473441+00:00

My father’s favorite story to tell was the one about how my grandfather’s life was saved by a chicken. One day, a nearby village sent over a chicken for my grandfather and the other two officers to eat. A live chicken. A rare meal in those days of hiding in the jungle. The Burmese soldiers were not starving the way the Japanese were, but they were not eating well either.

My grandfather did not trust his men to cook the chicken for him. He did not trust that they would not eat most of it while they cooked. My grandfather was a glutton, my father said, so he took on the task of cooking the chicken himself. As he was tending to his pot of chicken, a villager brought news of ten Japanese soldiers nearby. My grandfather and the other officers had a hundred men between them. A hundred men against ten Japanese soldiers. They knew that their men wanted to fight, that they were tired of only killing men who were nearly dead. The other two officers decided to fight, but my grandfather’s chicken was not yet ready, so he stayed behind. All one hundred of the men left.

In a little while, before the chicken was even ready, they stumbled back to camp, the survivors. There was only a third of them left, maybe thirty men. They said to my grandfather, Lieutenant, we have to run. The ten Japanese soldiers that the villager had reported were only the scouts. There were three hundred more men behind them. Three hundred well-armed and well-trained Japanese soldiers. The Burmese men had no training, the officers themselves had none. They were all slaughtered. The other two officers died, shot and killed. Most of the men under my grandfather’s command died as well. Those who were left, his men and the men of the two officers who had died, fled deeper into the jungle, higher up the mountains. But my grandfather did not leave the chicken behind. He had two of his soldiers lug the pot between them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.