Episode #46: Going Rogue: A Doctor on the Front Lines
Coco’s career path wasn’t supposed to end up this way. Having just turned 30, he had spent his entire adult life training to be a doctor, following in his father’s footsteps, and was now looking to continue his practice in the UK or Australia. A medical degree was preordained, as he notes bluntly: “As an Asian, so it's sort of like family pressure, and I was the firstborn, the elder. So there were a lot of hopes and dreams coming into my life and a lot of pressure as well.”
But on February 1st, for Coco and so many others, “all of the dreams just got wasted away.”
In his childhood, Coco had accompanied his father setting up makeshift clinics in impoverished communities; he saw his father play a combination of almost being God-like in his ability to cure diseases no one else could, along with being a “naughty professor” who did anything he could to get patients and their families to accept his treatment.
But now, like nearly every Burmese, Coco’s projected career path has been blocked or at least stalled. And again like everyone else, he has been left wondering how to respond to the sudden loss of freedom. For the first week following the coup, he followed the growing protests daily online; however, he was hesitant to step outside himself. “I have seen what this Generation Z has not seen and have not heard of,” he notes, “so I'm going to be honest with you, I was actually afraid to go out on the street.”
But with the encouragement of a friend, and increasingly feeling like a hypocrite, Coco decided to venture outside, dressing himself up in any protective gear he could get his hands on to the point that he felt like a “Power Ranger.” Then suddenly, the first shots rang out, and Coco described his reaction:
“The first time I hear it, it is like, ‘bam, bam, bam, bam!’ I almost pissed my pants, to be perfectly honest. I wanted to run, but instead of running, I just sat down, because at that time, my legs cannot actually carry me. So I just dropped down on my knees and tried to breathe normally. And it wasn't like in the movies, where everything slows down. Everything was so fast. People were running, there were a lot of loud noises everywhere, and everything was so chaotic. I just sat down on my knee, and I thought to myself, ‘Okay, so this is it. Now we're getting shot at. I don't know with what, but what am I going to do?’”
Then Coco saw young girls and boys, some no more than 15 years old, showing courage in the face of such mortal risk, and this somehow helped him to collect his wits. After it was over, the young people comforted him, admitting their own initial fear as well as anger during those moments, and reminding Coco how normal these feelings were. But they also noted that their wider mission was to win back democracy, and those paralyzing emotions aren’t helpful in working towards that greater goal. As Coco puts it, “What they wanted was to win. And not just this battle. So that's how they found their calmness.” As he went on to say, they had come to not fear dying, but rather dying in vain.
So Coco began to reflect upon how he could best serve the movement, and with his training the answer was obvious: something in the medical field. Ironically, a hidden benefit of the COVID pandemic was that it connected many doctors throughout the country, and those networks were now being activated to discuss how their profession could best offer their services in these fraught times.
Initially, doctors began to set up medical stations, and bring ambulances to just behind the front lines, ready to administer service to protester and soldier alike, in line with their medical vows. Regardless, the military decided to specifically target medical volunteers, with some beaten to death and others taken out by sniper shots to the head. Coco explains that doctors and nurses are at the forefront of the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), and soldiers have an outsized anger to punish them. As a result, doctors have needed, in Coco’s words, to “go rogue.” Ambulances, red cross insignias, medical stations, and even scrubs have been ditched, and urgent medical attention delivered in either secrecy or when it is clearly safe, insofar as this is possible. Hospitals are monitored, and if no soldiers are seen in the vicinity, they can be used in secret; however, if soldiers are spotted, then they have to search for alternatives. Although Coco and his fellow doctors had seen their share of gruesome injuries before the protests, nothing could prepare them for what they now encounter: missing limbs, headshots that had literally blown the face entirely off, triage battle conditions, and administering aid while taking live fire.
All this led some doctors openly reflecting whether they could save more lives with a scalpel or a gun, highlighting the fragility of the nonviolent movement. For Coco, the initial need for nonviolence was rooted in wanting to make a statement to the world that the Burmese are not an aggressive people, as he felt that this characterization had stigmatized the country in international eyes since the Rohyinga crisis. As Coco acknowledges, “We can't apologize enough that we were dumb enough to believe that story. It is a terrible half-ass story. We can't stress this enough, how sorry we are and how sad we are for actually believing this side of the junta.”
But now, Coco is unsure how long the adherence to nonviolence can be sustained, as the Tatmadaw continues to show greater depths of cruelty, while the international community has shown no further willingness to engage. Coco is not unfamiliar with the military’s culture and history, and notes how the fascist tendencies we are seeing today were inculcated by the training that many of the founders received under Tojo’s Imperial Army in World War II. Since then, brutality and discipline have been celebrated as virtues, as are following orders without question. So in his estimation, some soldiers actually believe that they are killing protesters for their own good.
Coco references one soldier who said the following to him: “If you do something stupid again, I'm going to shoot you. I am doing this for your sake and for your own good. In order to get you guys back into line, we will not hesitate to shoot you. I came all the way from Rakhine State to do this.”