Lousiana dentist risks his life to smuggle in medicine, healing, hope to desperate villagers seeking aid in the war-ravaged foothills of the Burmese Himalayas

By Michelle Krupa St. Tammany bureau/The Times-Picayune
www.nola.com -12/24/02

The nighttime heat in Burma can almost choke a person, like the muggy smother of a mid-August evening in southeast Louisiana. It is buggy and stifling and 95 degrees, and it never eases, even after the rain pours out of the jungle sky.

Something about the humidity there, on the Salween River that separates Burma from Thailand, makes the darkness more oppressive, more suffocating than the thickest night on the Louisiana bayou. It is as if the air is angry and holds the moisture out of spite.

Hiding on a longboat under thick canvas and taking shallow breaths so the soldiers would not hear, Shannon Allison concentrated on the heat. In Burma, it is the one sure thing.

But as he lay along the bottom of the four-foot-wide longboat last March, Allison's mind filled with questions: What kinds of weapons are the soldiers carrying? How many are out there, checking under the bags of rice and clothes for stowaways? Could I roll over and slip into the water if the shooting starts? Could I hold my breath long enough to reach the bank?

Above him, steering the boat and talking to the soldiers, were the men who hours ago had hidden Allison. Beside him under the tarp was the American friend who brought him to this warring land. All Allison could see was the shadowy underside of the canvas, which roasted the trapped air and made his head feel light.

Allison knew from previous trips across this river that these soldiers were battling the people he was trying to help, the ones waiting in villages at the foothills of the Burmese Himalayas for the dentist from Louisiana to bring gauze and antibiotics and a battery-powered drill to bind their wounds and heal their infections and extract their decaying teeth.

He knew, too, that answering his mind's racing questions would do him no good. Neither would his Army training, nor the stamina he built during years of long hikes. On this boat, he was the enemy, and they would shoot and kill him on sight, escape plan or not.But this boat was the only way to get to those strangers who needed Allison so badly, the ones who had nothing to offer him for taking this unthinkable risk. And it was where life's twists and fated encounters had positioned him, even after he built a stable life on the other side of the world.

So, as the soldiers poked the bulky fabric mounds with their gun barrels, Allison took another short breath, careful not to disrupt the static canvas. Then he closed his eyes, put himself in God's hands and thought about the heat.

A world away

For Allison, Burma is much farther than 9,311 miles from Mandeville. It is a world away from his typical days, shuttling between the eight reclining chairs at his private practice to fill cavities borne of too many pralines and to warn moms who drive minivans that their blond, pig-tailed daughters will need braces soon.

At home on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, Allison is the 41-year- old dad who carts his three young kids to soccer practice in a Chevy Avalanche. He's the boss who gives his staff a two-hour lunch every day and who, when he runs out for a cheeseburger, changes from slacks and a white lab coat into shorts and a T-shirt because he does not prefer work clothes.

Allison is the tall man from northern Kentucky with broad shoulders and a gray crew cut who stayed around New Orleans after graduating from Louisiana State University's dental school because he married a Metairie girl whose family wanted her nearby. That was something he understood.Allison would have known nothing of Burma if not for Dave Eubanks, the man with whom he one day would share the steamy underside of a canvas tarp. Allison met Eubanks in 1988 at a training session for the elite Army Special Forces at Fort Bragg, N.C. Allison was there to repay his federal scholarship to dental school. Eubanks, an infantry officer, wanted an adventure.

The two men often sat in the last row during class, ignoring the instructors and making plans to sneak off the base at night for trips to the beach or 15-mile runs. On those excursions, they talked about adventure races and mountain climbing. Sometimes, when the limits of conversation fell short of the distance left to jog, Eubanks would shift the discussion.Allison knew his friend was a devout Christian, a man who always had a Bible at hand and who believed following God was not so much about evangelizing as helping people without expecting repayment. To Eubanks, that conduct taught as much about God's will as quoting line and verse.

Eubanks was never pushy when he talked about faith. He did not want promises that Allison would give his life to Jesus or apologies for his lack of spirituality. "He would just ask me questions: Where was I in my life? What were my motivations in my life? What did I want to do?" Allison recalled.Already, Allison had graduated from dental school and had married Suzanne Saucier, a dental hygienist. They planned to open a dental practice and to start a family when Allison came home from the service. All the really big questions in Allison's life seemed to be answered. And yet Eubanks' inquiries made him take pause.

"I was kind of full of myself. It was all about me. I felt that I could control everything around me just through will and character. I was one of the guys who thought I would get everything I wanted just by doing the right thing," he said. "I didn't realize that sometimes there's a bigger plan at work."

After his military assignment, Allison returned to Mandeville and opened Northlake Dental near U.S. 190. Eubanks entered the seminary, then went to Thailand as a missionary.The two stayed in touch through e-mail and phone calls, and Allison continued to ponder Eubanks' questions, wondering if building a home and a stable family was his lot in life, the totality of God's plan for him. He was not restless, only curious.Then, in 1997, the call came from overseas.

Eubanks had explained about Burma, a jungle nation in southeast Asia. For 50 years it had been ruled by a military junta that, according to Amnesty International, forced native families to desert their homes, jailed and tortured political dissidents and killed suspected criminals without putting them on trial.

Also called the Union of Myanmar, it was a country rich in natural resources and snared in crisis. Burmese soldiers had forced 100,000 members of more than a dozen native tribes into refugee camps in Thailand, and they looted and burned villages people had managed to maintain inside Burma, human-rights groups reported.

The fighting was not well publicized, some said, because Western nations had few economic interests in Burma and because the nation's plight invited unpleasant memories of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. A Nobel Peace Prize laureate even had discouraged tourism to force reforms.

During his mission, Eubanks had met the Free Burma Rangers, a group of native men and women who had escaped slaughter or draft by the Burmese army and converted to Christianity. Together, they traveled to native villages, trying to figure out where the enemy might strike next. They also aided the sick, and now they needed help from doctors trained to treat the infections suffered by their people.

Eubanks explained about the danger. Burmese soldiers did not like outsiders. The Free Burma Rangers drove trucks a half-day through Thai backwoods before painting their faces in camouflage and walking six hours through the jungle to the eastern bank of the Salween.

There, the natives boarded longboats and hid the Americans under tarps, where they waited as long as six hours for soldiers to inspect the vessels. If they made it, they strapped on 100-pound packs of supplies and trekked along narrow, land-mined trails from one village to the next for two or three or four weeks until the packs were empty. Then they sneaked back to the other side.

Eubanks asked his friend to come to Burma to fill cavities of people who had never brushed their teeth. Allison agreed.

"When he asked me to go, I had absolutely no trepidation about going, which is really weird because you would think that with all the stuff going on I would be really nervous about it," Allison said. "I just wasn't."

Suzanne Allison worried that her husband's enthusiasm was for the physical challenge -- weeks of hiking through the steamy jungle, eating only rice and practicing medicine in the most formidable of circumstances.

"I was afraid maybe he didn't realize the danger, that he wanted to do it for the adventure," she said.Shannon Allison figured his unnatural calm was a sign that all the pieces finally were fitting together -- dental school, military training, meeting Dave Eubanks with all those questions.

Allison would use his skills as a dentist to help people as he did in Louisiana. Only in Burma, he would ask for nothing in return. He would face the semiautomatic weapons and hike in boots bloodied from his own broken blisters and treat people whose small toothaches grew into flesh- eating diseases for lack of simple treatments.There would be no salary, no corporate backing, not even a promise he would come home alive.

"It's just meeting the needs of people that nobody else is going to meet," Allison said. "When God asks you to do something, you just do it."

Cayenne and rice

Hiding under the sweltering canvas, waiting for the soldiers to shove their gun barrels into his gut and make him grunt, Allison knew last March what to expect if he and the other 10 Free Burma Rangers made it safely to the western bank.

It was his fifth trip to Burma in as many years, and he had become a veteran. The drill he had rigged to run on a lantern battery was better assembled this time, and he had Tony Chachere's Cajun seasoning in his pack so he would not starve in a few weeks, when one more spoonful of plain rice would make him want to vomit.

Allison did not know as he lay there that Eubanks would ask him to return for a monthlong trek with the Free Burma Rangers two days after Christmas. Allison would, of course, agree to go, even though the 36-hour flight from New Orleans would leave so soon after the holiday, when his kids would be home from elementary school and want to play with their dad.He would, as usual, amass boxes of supplies -- children's toothbrushes, single-use needles, Lidocaine and Epinephrine, Lipton instant chicken noodle soup -- for another trip like this one across the Salween.

As he lay there in the heat, Allison heard the soldiers step off the boat. Convinced that the mounds of canvas were benign, they allowed the men on deck to drift down river. There, Allison and Eubanks emerged from beneath the tarp. Minutes later, the Free Burma Rangers hurled huge packs onto their backs and headed into the night.

During the next two days, they spent 24 hours hiking along trails that rose 10,000 feet into balmy mountaintops, then descended again. They trudged through streams and pushed the edge of dehydration. Around 10 in the morning on the third day, they encountered a hamlet with five bamboo huts. Smoke rose from fires inside the homes and hung in the humid air like the dancing ghosts of a thousand ancestors. This village, Allison learned, was newly established by families whose old settlement had been set ablaze by Burmese soldiers.

"The native people, they're like willows," Allison recalled. "They're getting pushed from one side, and they have to bend. They get as far away from the bad guys as they can and then move back in when they're gone."

Some villagers brought Allison a bamboo mat to lay on the muddy ground. He let the children touch his pale skin as he spread out his instruments, then waited several minutes until the village chief stepped forward from the gathered crowd.This man, the one charged with making sure everyone had enough rice and would not starve, could hardly eat. His upper right molar was abscessed from loss of bone around it. He laid down and rested his head in Allison's lap.

The dentist, as he might with any patient in Louisiana, put his gloved hands inside the man's mouth and, after 10 minutes of nudging, pulled out the rotting tooth. His pain already easing, the chief stood up and looked at Allison, then dropped his gaze toward the ground. He was embarrassed, a translator said, because he had nothing to offer.

So Allison nodded his head and looked to the crowd for his next patient. . . . . . . .
Michelle Krupa can be reached at mkrupa@timespicayune.com or (985) 645-2853.