"They Shoot at Everything."
Last year, when speaking with Sayadaw U Jatila, he offered a disturbing observation: that so many of the soldiers he was encountering were not right in their mind. Perhaps in order to get through another day of following commands instructing them to burn, kill, and torture, they turned to a range of intoxicants to stop feeling the painful emotions that get in the way of them completing their job of terror. And yet for meditators reading this, can you even begin to understand what it would feel like to have uncontrolled, rampaging soldiers shooting weapons randomly during a silent retreat and kicking down doors of female meditation huts? And yet that’s exactly what Sayadaw describes, as he finds ways to meet this terrible menace at his doorstep.
“They shoot at everything, wherever, every day, at everyone they see. So even when they come to my meditation center, they are still shooting, you know?”
“The army soldiers are very drunk; they get local drugs, alcohol. They don't have a human mind! You cannot talk to them in any normal way; they cannot listen, cannot understand somebody easily. So, even when they see ordinary people, they shoot them!
So, they shoot at everything, wherever, every day, at everyone they see. So even when they come to my meditation center, and we already explained that at the meditation center, no one is doing anything against the Myanmar army, they are still shooting, you know?
“With the bamboo on the trees, they thought they were the democracy fighters hiding somewhere. So very, very hard, very difficult. The Army soldiers they take a lot of drugs, alcohol - so they don't have their normal human minds.”