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The Ghost Road (Cont.)
By the time the United States entered the Second World War, Imperial Japan had been penetrating ever deeper into China for more than a decade, gaining control of nearly one-third of that weakened giant. In the first five months of 1942, Japanese forces rapidly subjugated much of Southeast Asia: the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and a large swath of Burma. If China fell, all of Asia was threatened, from the rice fields of India to the oil fields of Baghdad. America had been attempting to bolster the Chinese Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek by supplying his forces via the back door, through India. Pilots were flying ordnance and ammunition from India to China over "the Hump"—the dragon's tail of the Himalayas that hooks south into northern Burma. But China was still losing. General Stilwell, commanding general of the China-Burma-India Theater, believed these supply flights weren't enough. A tough, wiry West Point graduate who had spent years on clandestine missions in China, Stilwell was a military traditionalist. He was convinced that in order to adequately supply the Chinese, an all-weather military road had to be created from India through the unknown mountains and swamps of northern Burma. This 478-mile road, dubbed the Ledo Road, would connect with the old Burma Road, a convoluted 717-mile track built by the Chinese that ran northeast from Lashio, Burma, to Kunming, China—creating an 1,100-mile supply route called the Stilwell Road. (Today, it's popularly, if erroneously, known as the Burma Road.) British prime minister Winston Churchill characterized Stilwell's endeavor as "an immense, laborious task, unlikely to be finished until the need for it has passed." Stilwell was undeterred. Completing the road cost $150 million and required the labor of 28,000 American soldiers, almost all of them black, and 35,000 ethnic workers. It was a dangerous job; casualty rates were so high that it was dubbed "the Man-a-Mile Road." Japanese snipers, monsoon floods, malaria, and cholera took the lives of 1,100 American soldiers and untold numbers of Asian workers before the Stilwell Road was completed, in January 1945. Over the next seven months, 5,000 vehicles and 35,000 tons of supplies traveled it. Then the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Japanese surrendered. In October 1945, the U.S. abandoned the road. Churchill had been right. Over the following decades, the old Burma Road across southwestern China remained in use, but the stretch of Stilwell's highway that crossed the remote fastness of northern Burma reverted to a blank on the map, an enigma that became my obsession. Detouring on the way home from various mountaineering trips, I managed to travel the entire Chinese section of the road by the early 1990s. I would sit on the roofs of listing, overloaded trucks grinding up and down hundreds of switchbacks across the gorge-scarred Yunnan province. It was my own private adventure. I didn't talk about it, didn't write about it. But minor triumphs gradually set the foundation for great expectations. Over the years, my desire to get into Burma and traverse whatever was left of the Stilwell Road began to displace my passion for mountain climbing. Mountains were simple, predictable beasts, compared with nations. I knew the unknowns—the brutal cold, the avalanches. I knew how to suffer, how to summit, and how to fail. What I didn't know was Burma, a different kind of impossible challenge. In late 1993, during an expedition into eastern Tibet, I tried to enter Burma from the north with a partner. We were caught by the Chinese border patrol, interrogated, and jailed for a couple of nights. We signed a confession and were released. In the spring of 1996, I traveled to the Indian state of Assam to write a magazine article about wildlife poaching, then veered off to Ledo to try my luck again. Two weeks after leaving the Namsai monastery and traveling most of the 20-mile stretch of the Stilwell Road through Arunachal Pradesh to the India-Burma border, I was nabbed. I was detained for three days in Tezu and politely interrogated (tea and scones were served) by Indian army officers, all of whom assumed I was a CIA agent. On the fourth day I was placed in a jeep with two armed guards, driven to the banks of the enormous, mud-brown Brahmaputra, put on a leaky tug dragging a mile-long raft of timber, and deported downstream to Assam. Still, I felt that I'd successfully completed my apprenticeship in duplicity. I knew how to operate alone, how to lie, how to stay calm while looking down the barrel of a gun. I had completed the Chinese and Indian sections of the Stilwell Road. All that remained was the 458-mile ghost road in Burma.
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