All In (12 page)

“Thank you,” I said as I finished writing. “You are very kind.”

Later that night on the bed in my smelly hotel room, I replayed the events of the day. I thought about the hands I wished I'd played differently and plotted what I'd do the next time out.

The next time out.
I smiled.
I'm going to have a next time in the World Series of Poker.
I laughed out loud.
Wow, I really do have a shot at going far in this thing. I can do this. I can compete here.

I soaked up that thought for a few minutes.
This is unbelievable
.

Then I grabbed the phone and called Sue to give her the play-by-play of my day.

“Do you compete again tomorrow?”

“No, the last group has their opening day, so I have the day off. I don't go back until the second day of the second round.”

“What are you going to do between now and then?”

“I'll go back to the Rio and get a few more autographs. But mainly, I have to get ready to play again.”

After we talked a little while longer and said good night, I hung up and took a deep breath.
All right, Jerry, let's get focused here. It's time to plot strategy for the next round.

Somewhere in the corner of the room, roaches scurried. Out on the street, a prostitute and a man, perhaps her pimp, yelled at one another. I hardly noticed. I had too much work to do.

Days turned into nights, nights into days as my family escaped through the jungle of Laos. When the sun rose, we found a place to eat and sleep. When the sun set, we broke camp and marched in the dark. Time had turned itself upside down and backward, which seemed appropriate. My life, the sense of comfort and familiarity that had wrapped around me since the day I was born, no longer existed. Why should time be any different?

I adjusted quickly to the strange new schedule. Going to sleep in the daylight came easily after walking all night.

We came upon an abandoned farm but couldn't risk staying in the house. Instead, my father led our group into a field just beyond the farm. He made a bed out of palm leaves for my brother and me. I could have slept standing. As soon as my head hit the leaves, I passed out.

When I awoke several hours later, I didn't experience the
jolt of reality I had the day we'd left. I didn't expect to see my house around me. I don't know why. I guess my mind had already turned loose of the familiar. Other children were already awake and playing. I didn't dare join them. My father warned my brothers, my sister, and me about making too much noise and giving away our position to the Communist soldiers.

I looked around the field for my father and finally spotted him on the edge of our camp. He leaned against a tree, his rifle across his lap. Even though all the men in our village took turns standing watch, my father couldn't bring himself to let his guard down even for a moment. While we were in the jungle, he never slept more than a couple hours at a time. Even then, he was always ready to spring into action with reflexes that must have been developed during his time in the army.

Daytime in our camp dragged on forever. I didn't have anything to do except wait … and wait … and wait. I occupied myself as well as I could. My older brother and I would help our mother by keeping our younger siblings content or getting things ready for a meal. With so little to eat, that chore didn't take long. I spent most of my time sitting on the ground tossing pebbles against a tree.

At least it was preferable to spending time among the people of my village. It's not that they did or said anything that made me want to keep my distance. No, the thing that frightened me, the one memory I cannot shake so many years later, is the look on their faces, especially the men's. All of these brave hunters, many of them former soldiers in General Vang Pao's army, sat in the field, waiting for darkness to fall, with terror in their eyes.

It wasn't just terror, though. Everyone, from the oldest man to the youngest child, wore an expression of despair. None of us had any illusions about the situation we faced or bright hopes for tomorrow. No, we wondered if we would live to see the next day.

From time to time during the long days of waiting, my buddies and I got together. We wanted to be as we had been just one week earlier, back in our village, when our only concern was how to have fun.

Sitting in a jungle camp, waiting for the sun to set, none of us felt like having fun. We didn't laugh. We didn't joke. Honestly, we pretty much just sat there and stared at one another. Once or twice one of them pointed at a long scratch on my arm and said something like, “Did that hurt?” or we held up our feet and compared cuts and scars. After a while, we drifted back to our families to prepare for another night of walking through the jungle.

Though we had no choice but to eat random leaves on the trail, I came to regret it. A sharp pain hit low in my stomach. “I don't feel so good,” I told Xay, who was walking in front of me.

“Me either.”

I kept walking. I didn't have a choice, but the sharp pain grew stronger. I had never been so thankful for anything in my life than when my father finally let us take a brief rest stop. I darted off to one side, found a secluded spot, and relieved myself.

The pain didn't go away. In fact, it stayed with me the rest of the way. I wasn't the only one who got it. If I had to
guess, I would say most of the children and a good number of the adults came down with diarrhea within our first couple of nights on the trail.

To make it to the Mekong without getting caught by the Communists, we needed to move as quickly as possible. As more and more people got sick, we had to stop more often and for longer periods of time.

Keep in mind, we were walking through the jungle, hiding in the dark, doing our best not to be discovered by the Communist soldiers patrolling the area. It wasn't like we could go home, lie down, and let the ailment run its course. We didn't have Pepto-Bismol to pass around, and there weren't any rest stops in the jungle. Throw in the oppressive heat and humidity, and you're left with a miserable group of people.

The next night, I walked along the trail, holding on to my brother's shirt as he walked in front of me. My stomach hurt, my feet ached, and all I wanted was to find a quiet place, lie down, and go to sleep. All of a sudden, a piercing cry shot through the jungle. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Then another answered it from the other side of the trail.

Before I could ask what was going on, a dark shape flew past. I screamed. Another dark shape swung by and another and another.

Small children cried. Adults let out startled screams.

I started to lose my hold on my brother's shirt and wanted to take off running, but the thought of getting lost in the jungle frightened me more than the dark shapes.

Another dropped to the ground close to me, and I could finally see what was getting everyone so upset: monkeys. A troop of fifteen or twenty had dropped from their usual spots in the tops of trees, and we'd walked right into the middle of them.

My brother turned and laughed at me. “You screamed like a little girl over nothing but a monkey. We've eaten monkeys for dinner.”

He kept laughing, and I laughed with him.

Apparently a lot of the families in the village had eaten monkey. The startled screams turned into shouts of “Let's shoot them and eat them.”

“No, don't shoot,” my father yelled. “Do you want every soldier in the whole country to come running? How stupid can you be? That gunshot will echo for miles. Just leave them alone, and let's keep going.” My father truly was a great leader, not allowing our empty bellies to distract us from our primary objective.

The monkeys kept jumping around and scaring the children, but we continued walking. We had a lot of ground to cover that night.

The mood in the camp took a sharp turn. On the third or fourth day, I woke up to the sound of that distinctive death cry I'd grown to fear. People ran past me, so I jumped up and followed them. The crowd stopped, but I was small enough to push through and see exactly what was going on.

Once I finally made it to the front of the crowd, I saw a young mother sitting on the ground, rocking back and forth, wailing, clutching her two-year-old son. Her husband stood
behind her, and even though he tried to keep it together, he started making the cry himself.

My village was small. Everyone knew each other, and I knew this family. They lived near our house. Even though he was much younger than me, I'd played with this little boy. In my mind, I could still see him running and laughing like a normal two-year-old. He'd had the same kind of stomach virus that had plagued most of the people in our camp. I'm pretty sure he'd been sick already before we'd started through the jungle and didn't have the strength in his little body to fight off the illness that was ravaging our camp. His mother had awakened and found him lying next to her, cold.

The cry grew louder as other people mourned with the boy's mother and father.

The wailing didn't exactly fit into our plan of blending into the jungle to avoid the Communist patrols. My father took control of the situation. “No, don't cry. You have to be strong. We'll give you some time to spend with the child. After that, we'll help find a place to bury him.”

A couple hours later, the men from the camp carried the boy's body to a secluded place away from our camp. The parents wrapped their baby in palm leaves and laid him in the ground. After covering him, we placed large rocks over the grave to keep the animals from disturbing it.

I wish I could say this was the last fatality during our escape through the jungle. It wasn't. Nine or ten people from my village never made it to the Mekong River.

The first death, though, was the worst.

When the sun went down, we headed out, walking through the jungle as usual. No one had to remind us to be quiet. No one talked or made a sound of any kind. The whole demeanor of our people had changed. Everyone was so sad, even more hopeless than before.

The pains in my stomach returned, as they did for a lot of people. On our next stop, a few people complained of fever. Our march turned into more of a shuffle. I thought we would never make it out of the jungle.

The rains came, making the jungle even darker. On the clear nights, the moon and stars gave us enough light to distinguish the trail from the trees. Once the rain came, though, I could barely see my hand. And the rain made it so cold.

But worse were the leeches.

Before normal life had ended, my parents would bring a small bag of salt whenever we traveled through the jungle. If a leech attached itself to one of us, my mother or father would drop a little salt on it, and the leech would fall away.

On this trip, we didn't have extra room for salt.

The rain made the leeches pop out everywhere. In the dark, I couldn't see them; I could only feel them. When we finally stopped for our first short rest of the night, I threw off my clothes and found four leeches in the worst possible place for a boy to find them.

The rain started pouring in sheets. The narrow path grew slick with mud. I slipped and fell again and again. All around me, little children cried.

Finally, my father said, “We can't keep going like this. We need to find a place to camp until the rains stop.”

Before long, we came upon a steep cliff with a sharp out-crop of rock that looked a little like an awning.

“This will work,” my father said. “All the women and children can get out of the rain here. Everyone else, take shelter under the palm trees.”

As strange as it may sound, finding that rock changed my whole outlook on the trip. I knew it was more than a coincidence that we found it. In all our days of walking through the jungle, we never saw anything like it again. It was as though God placed that rock there just for us right at the moment we needed it. I saw it as an answer to prayer. We prayed a lot on this journey. My father said a prayer with every step he took.

I tried to sleep, but I was so cold and soaked to the skin. I huddled against my mother.

The jungle was completely silent, except for the sound of the rain and children whimpering.

In the darkness, my ears perked.

Someone had mentioned my father's name.

“I don't think Youa Lo and the others know what they're doing. We should have made it to the Mekong by now.”

Someone agreed. “We should have stayed home and taken our chances with the Communists.” Then the person cursed my father and the other leaders of our village.

I wanted to jump up and tell them we would all be dead by now if it weren't for my father. I wanted to tell them every-one should stop whining and work together and help make life
easier for all of us. I wanted to say a lot of things, but little boys weren't supposed to speak up.

Instead, I pulled closer to my mother and prayed the rain would soon end.

The next morning, the rains finally stopped. We camped under the rock until the sun went down, then started walking. Again.

The pain in my feet and legs grew so severe I couldn't take another step. My father swept me up and placed me on his shoulders, all the while carrying my baby brother in a basket in one hand. My grandmother carried my younger brother, and one of my aunts carried my sister. Somehow, my oldest brother managed to keep walking.

On the sixth or seventh day (it's hard to say which because the days and nights all blended together in the jungle), we reached the end of our bamboo thermos supply of pork, and we were nearly out of rice. The meager portions my father had handed out to us the first couple of days had been like a Thanksgiving feast in comparison. Now we needed to rely even more on whatever we could find.

At this point, we ate anything even remotely edible. Having to forage for food slowed us even more. The sight of an animal brought the entire group to a halt so that the men could try to trap or shoot it with one of their crossbows. I ate tree frogs, monkey—anything.