The screaming engine is pushing the long-tailed boat against the powerful current and whirlpools of the Salween River. A few miles ahead, a Burmese military post is set on the heights of a grey sand beach. The boat slows down. […] Hardly 48 hours earlier the 39-year-old American had been kissing his wife Suzan and their three children goodbye as he prepared to set off on a long and boring 30 hour journey. Leaving his dental practice and his middle-class house in Mandeville, Louisiana behind, his first of several flights took him to San Francisco, en route to this remote corner of Asia. […]

When he arrived at Bangkok's Don Muang International Airport, intrigued customs officers spent three hours searching his aluminum cases and bags filled with medical equipment. ‘They asked me if I was doing business. I told them it was for a humanitarian mission, so they let me go’, he recalls. What Allison conveniently forgot to mention was that the mission would be organized in Burma after illegally crossing the Thai border. […] The next morning, after a night on the sand on the right bank of the Salween, the expedition including nurses, medics and guerrillas, as well as about 30 porters loaded with medical equipment and medicines entered a labyrinth of paths into the jungle.