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On the way to an ambush

The following is the first chapter from On the way to an ambush.

THIRTY BOY SOLDIERS from the Karen National Liberation Army shuffle off the General Secretary's bamboo verandah, down the stairs and into the night of Manerplaw, some to barracks and others home to their parents. As they leave, a slight young Karen woman in over-sized battle fatigues uncrosses her legs, leans back onto her left hand and, with barely a sigh, pushes herself up from the floor. She dawdles forward to the television, still stiff from sitting but with the assurance of petty responsibility, and jabs the buttons of the video machine to rewind a Rambo movie. Perhaps she is the General Secretary's daughter, or his batman, I don't know. I want to talk to her, but she's fixed on the appliance. I turn toward the General Secretary, at whose invitation I'm sitting here, but before I say a word, he pitches a question straight at me.

"Do you know Colonel Travis?" He must have held onto this through the entire movie.

I have no idea who Colonel Travis is, and can't think why I should. Even so, I go sheepish, like I'm holding back. It's so soon after the movie. The General Secretary is very important to me. On his nod, I'll get to go where I want. I'm eager to please, but can't think what to say.

"With us, with us," he half shouts. "From your country. SAS."

SAS? A New Zealander? He's got to be kidding. Sure, the Special Air Service reaches into some unlikely events. But the Karen? No one's been interested in the Karen in the forty years they've been fighting the Burmese.

"How long's he been here?"

Silence.

I look to the young woman and the rewinding tape, hoping still to catch her eye, but she swishes back her long black hair with a calculated aloofness that says don't bother. Travis, the General Secretary tells me, has been with the Karen three years. Right now, he's in Bangkok.

After a week at Mae La, in the wet heat and political undercurrents of the Karen trenches, I returned to Mae Sot back over the border in Thailand for a short spell at the Siam Hotel. I collected my letters from home at the post office and my faxes from an Indian drapery shop.

Tim, my seven-year-old, had faxed asking where he could find his birth certificate; he needed it to register for rugby league. I faxed back telling him to look in the third draw of the filing cabinet under Documents.

There was a letter from nine-year-old Jane telling me about a car smash she was in, on Orewa bridge near home, not long after I had flown out. Both Sally, my eldest, and Tim were in the car too, and a friend of theirs. "It was totally freaky," Jane said. They were okay, only a few scratches, but they could have been killed.

Afterwards, I bought a buttered waffle and an ice-cold Coke from an old woman two blocks away at a sidewalk stall. BRUCE CONNEW

In 1989, New Zealand photographer Bruce Connew spent five weeks in Burma, observing the Karen people's war with the Burmese government troops. At first glance, Connew's journey was completely crazy and impulsive. A photographer leaves his children in the care of a friend and hops a plane to a little reported war he caught a glimpse of on television. On his return to New Zealand, he succumbed to virulent malaria. His photographs and notes were put aside and almost forgotten - until several years later when fresh news of the struggle reawakened Connew's interest in the Karen's tragedy, and also caused him to question his own actions and motivations.

This is not your average, every day idea of escapism. What emerges is a traveller's story - a marvellous pastiche of personal insight, memoir and visual depiction. Central to to all its parts is Connew's recent loss of his wife in a road crash. Death and its random, sudden occurrence is Connew's subject. His narrative moves easily between the Auckland suburbs and the towns and trenches near the Thai border.

On one level then this is a journey through grief and loss mediated through an expedition with a guerilla party to ambush a truckload of young Burmese conscripts.

The book is peopled with brilliantly drawn characters, like the Karen soldiers Tee Moo and Captain Walter, an odd assortment of tourists and WWII veterans on nostalgic return trips, and above all Colonel Travis, the New Zealand mercenary who leads the ambush party. LLOYD JONES, author Biografi, The Book of Fame, Mr Pip

The object of Bruce Connew's book is at once about being a witness to human beastliness, being a photographer and being Bruce Connew.

Connew is a photojournalist and teller of tales. This is his record of time spent looking and thinking about what has been seen and what it might mean. Through a process I can only describe as an unfurling or unravelling, this war in Burma becomes a metaphor for Connew's own life.

When I had finished reading (the pictures and words), this book reminded me how attentive photographers need be, and how tenacious. Finally, the intelligence required to provide something of worth. Connew has these qualities. In a world filled with inconsequential sound and vision bites, informed by misinformation and gossip, it seems to me important to be offered authentic works like this. PETER TURNER (d. 1 August 2005), editor, Creative Camera magazine (1970s-1980s), and author of American Images 1945-80 (1985) and The History of Photography (1987).