Choosing the Red Pill
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“I am trying not to be the one I hate.” These are the words of the self-named Neo, inspired by the protagonist of The Matrix.
Neo grew up in Yangon, living the kind of life that millions once knew before Myanmar’s fall into darkness. He ran a small convenience store beside his family home, took remote jobs, and filled his nights with music, friends, and beer. “I worked and I played and I drank,” he says simply of the time. “Life was good, but things change.” Back then, Neo believed in better days ahead. On the night of January 31, 2021, he stayed up late composing a hip hop track mocking pro-junta agitators. As dawn broke, the internet went dead. “They cut off every connection,” he recalls. “Telephone lines, internet, everything; yet my wifi didn’t get cut. Maybe they forgot that service.” For three days he stayed online while the rest of Myanmar was blind. Through that fragile signal, he confirmed the impossible: “Daw Suu was detained. They really did a coup... I got the confirmation they really did that shit!”
Neo remembers the critical question his father asked him that week: “Do you want to fight back, or you want to go abroad and study? You choose, just do not live under those bastards. I cannot let my children waste their lives under military boots.” Neo didn’t hesitate. “I immediately answered, 'I'm going to fight back.' I chose it since then.”
In the first stunned days after the coup, no one knew exactly what to do; Neo went door to door calling friends to protest. They carried water bottles (for protection from tear gas) and joined the crowds in Yangon’s streets. But things changed as suddenly as they did irrevocably, when “peaceful protesters got shot and got killed." After this, Neo knew what he had to do. “We must tame [the soldiers], because they’re not human,” he recalls thinking. “They’re only going to listen to that explosive son of the gun [Min Aung Hlaing].” From that moment on, he started searching for military training.
Yet there was one glaring problem: Neo had no relevant contacts. “I intentionally cut myself away from politics and military,” he says of his pre-coup life. A friend, a youth leader in Yangon, tried to help but was caught and detained at Zero Mile outside the city. “That was lucky for me, because he left me out,” Neo adds. After weeks of cautious calls through various intermediaries and using a disposable SIM card, he finally found his route. In early May 2021, Neo left Yangon and reached Myawaddy, on the Thai border. “Since I left my house, I haven’t been to [back home] for a couple of years.”
At the training camp, the rules were absolute. No phones. No comfort. Days began before dawn and ended in collapse. “We were not well prepared, except our mental. We only had our spirit,” he says. They trained in the jungle, learning to crawl, shoot, and patrol. At night, Neo wrote hip hop. “Some days I got four or eight bars; somedays I got only one or two. Someday I got the whole [verse].” After six weeks, he recorded two songs: Pinkies vs. Guns and Nonprofit Soldier. The first, he notes, was a declaration. He translates one part: “They betray their nation... a big wave of moths who gonna evolve into butterflies... [They] are gonna see how we'll survive when we evolve.” The second was an answer to that promise: “We grew wings. We got evolved...” he translates, adding, “It is literally a war song.” Its title, Nonprofit Soldier, reflected their ethos: “We’re not going to have any salary. We just want our people to have the life they deserve... we don’t long for any profit.”
Neo’s verses blended defiance with rhythm. Hip hop, he believes, is the perfect language of revolution, and the ideal medium for speaking truth to power. Every line, he notes, “is like a very short version of an odyssey, a history book... in just a few bars. It can say the whole history! It can state a decade, even a century.” Neo references being inspired by old spirituals such as “Wade in the Water,” which once guided enslaved Africans to freedom. “Those tracks played a vital part for the end of African slavery,” he shares. “People like me try to explore what they experienced.” He also mentions being inspired by Eminem, Tupac, Biggie, Jay-Z, and Mos Def, and calls out “Rappers Delight” and “Children’s Story,” as two tracks he has on repeat.
Life on the front hardened him. Food was scarce; they often crushed instant noodles and ate them raw. “If we had something to eat in the kitchen, we didn't have to shoot around [at animals]... we didn't have to go hunt. That’s the killing part.” Neo carried supplies to forward posts— eggs, medicine, meals— and hauled the wounded back. “If someone got hit, a typical squad would break their formation, and they get lost,” he says. “But in our column, if a friend got shot, the ones who's responsible to carry [him], would do his job properly, quick and tight. At the same time, the other ones, they doubled the gun power. That's the spirit of Cobra Column.”
Indeed, Cobra Column became his family, and he became particularly close with his commander. “He would rather lose the post than lose any of his soldiers... not even a toe, not even a pinky!” he says. “He takes full responsible for our lives. If one of us is in danger, he’ll do that shit, no matter what victory comes out of it.”
Still, the fighting itself proved to be a slog, and tested every part of Neo's resilience, and that of his comrades. “It’s like trench warfare,” he says. “In some battles, the range is just five feet. Sometimes the junta's soldiers steal our food! Then, when the enemy comes, you feel happy because you get to shoot.” He adds that for weeks at a time, they lived soaked in rain and mud, fighting not just the enemy, but also malaria, diarrhea, exhaustion.
Neo insists their mission is not vengeance; and that it is more about perseverance than elimination. “It is not about how many you kill, it is about how many you save,” he says. He references soldiers who defected were treated well, and then contrasts that with the army’s brutality: “They’re not going to kill you easily [if they capture you]. They’re going to make you wish you were killed.” Neo hopes that these military torturers one day feel what mercy really means. “I want them to be caught and feel how we treat them,” he says.
Neo speaks passionately about solidarity among his unit. “The only [thing that] matters, it’s which side you’re going to stand on,” he says. “You’re going to stand with the people, not the guys who harm the people.” Within the ranks, he adds, there is simply no room for division. “If you’re Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, that doesn’t matter. Everyone’s the same.” He notes that many of his comrades had once been strangers from different corners of Myanmar— young men and women who, in another life, might never have crossed paths. Yet now they are all in the resistance, literally eating from the same pot, enduring the same rains, and sleeping under the same makeshift roofs. For Neo, that is what it means to fight for the people.
This theme of unity runs deep throughout Neo’s reflections. He describes how the junta’s “divide and rule” tactics—pitting ethnicities and religions against one another—had long kept Myanmar fractured. “The junta always tried to make us apart throughout history,” he notes. “But this time, no such action will be effective, because we are united right now, like we haven’t been before.” For him, the shared experience of war forged a solidarity stronger than politics or religion. He describes how resistance fighters from every region—Bamar, Karen, Mon, Kachin, Rakhine—now fight shoulder to shoulder, tied together by purpose and survival. “We’re comrades. Whether you come from any race or religion, if you stand with the people, you’re one of us.”
When asked about politics, Neo's tone hardens. “Do not trust the junta's new election,” he warns. “They could destroy us, both in a diplomatic way and military way.” He believes the junta’s attempts to stage an election is not a step toward democracy but another tactic of control, and to him, this is the next front of the war— a battle not just with weapons but with truth and legitimacy. Yet, even amid distrust, he holds onto faith in their mission. “We are progressing. We are seeing this spark getting bigger," he says. "After the liberation of this whole area, we will advance.”
Shifting focus from the outer battlefield and towards inner reflection, Neo admits he has gone through quite a process these last few years. “I am not the same as I was before the coup,” he admits, remarking on the transformation that came with war, and the moral and emotional weight of violence that he has endured. Before the coup, for example, he couldn’t imagine taking the life of even a small animal. “I couldn't have killed a chicken or a bird before the coup,” he notes. “But now, things change.”
Still, there are certain boundaries he still strives to maintain, such as endeavoring to act without cruelty or hatred. “I can’t say I’m a good man,” he admits, “but I can say I am trying as much as I can not to be bad.” Throughout all of this, Neo acknowledges that his father still remains his compass. “My father never taught me, but he made me learn by myself, by watching him — how he keeps his morality,” he says. Sometimes he imagines himself fifteen years in the future— older, perhaps a father— and he asks himself what kind of man he wants his children to see. “What would I answer when they asked, ‘What were you doing in your 20s or 30s?’ Well, I am not going to leave this war with a bad name.”
Neo also reflects on the power of shame in Burmese culture—a force that could define legacies. “‘Min Aung Hlaing,’ that name is gone!” he exclaims. “If you’re a kid named ‘Min Aung Hlaing,’ he must change his name, because he’s going to get bullied.” Neo explains that these days, even innocent children unfortunate enough to have the same name as the junta leader face ridicule. “Not because it's their fault,” he adds, “just because of their name.” To him, this is a stark warning of what happens when one lives without conscience. “That’s how a bad name lives on,” he notes. It is for this reason that he wants his own name, and his chosen name—Neo—to mean something different. To die clean, without shame.
Indeed, his chosen name continues to bring relevance and meaning. “I think that I have already chosen the [red] pill,” he says. “So there is no going back.” This is what he thought during that very first night in Lay Kay Kaw. In that moment, Neo was reborn and his name christened—a symbol of defiance and transformation. He had taken “the pill” like his cinematic namesake, accepting the truth of his country’s reality and his role within it. The soldiers around him laughed at the coincidence: Leo is the name of a popular Thai beer, making his alias easy to remember. But for Neo, the name carried a deeper resonance. It was a statement of identity, of awakening, and of no return.