Fight and Flight

Episode #628: “We started with emotions, not with the basic fundamental facts.” Nay Chi Min Htun was a university student and hotel receptionist in Yangon before the 2021 coup. Within months, she had left the home of her police-officer father, joined an underground resistance network, and begun transporting explosives. She later moved into Karen State, where she produced ammunition, trained as a drone operator, and participated in frontline operations against military positions.

The physical details stayed with her. Ammunition production repeatedly burned her fingertips, marks she wore with pride because other resistance workers had lost limbs or died in accidents. Her first bomb-carrying fixed-wing drone nose-dived back toward her own team and landed within feet of them without exploding. During another battle, her team lost contact with a loaded drone flying across villages and resistance positions until a commander improvised a repair using a motorcycle battery.

Over time, technical competence brought greater responsibility. Nay Chi trained new recruits and became head of a resistance column’s news and information department, where she raised funds and had to take on her most challenging duty yet, which was to publicly announce comrades’ deaths and oversee their funerals. By April 2026, after family trauma, the end of a long relationship, declining physical health, and growing doubts about whether she possessed the knowledge required to lead others, she left.

Her moral certainty has also become more complicated. Meeting a detained suspected soldier, his wife, and their infant forced her to confront the humanity she had tried not to see while fighting. She still believes the resistance is justified and may return to the armed resistance, but she no longer thinks courage alone is enough. The unresolved question is now what she must learn so that other people can safely depend on her decisions as a leader.