Changes

The story has stayed in my mind and it's provoked a lot of thought. Keggie Carew sums up my first reaction: ''I am ashamed of what we haven't done with our freedom and their victories … With our central heating and our power steering and our fast food and our leaf-blowers and our shopping malls.'' Instead , we have a situation where you don't have to listen very carefully to hear fascism marching towards us.

There's a sobering thought too: if the operations which Tom Carew led took place today and were directed ''against'' us, what he did would be called terrorism. This took me on to the thought that we don't treat returning soldiers well: it's bad enough that we expect them to risk their lives for us, worse still that we ask them to kill for us, but then we don't look after them well when we return. There need needs to be some acceptance of the fact that the daredevil guerilla isn't suited to peace. I don't know the answer.

For more on present-day Burma, have a look at [[Burma: A Nation at the Crossroads by Benedict Rogers]] and [[The Lady and the Generals: Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma's Struggle for Freedom by Peter Popham]]. You might also appreciate [[Travels With My Father by Karen Jennings]] and [[Just Another Girl on the Road by S Kensington]].