Myanmar: Ground Rules
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- 2 min read
Insight Myanmar
“If you can maim them, you can get multiple people off of a battlefield, and it’s also a terror tactic as well.”
As Collin Mayfield, an American journalist and documentary filmmaker, explained to the Insight Myanmar Podcast, he spent months embedded with the resistance group People’s Defense Force Zoland in western Myanmar’s Chin State during visits in 2023 and 2025. After stepping on an M14 “toe-popper” mine during his second trip, he came to understand the weapon not only through the moment of explosion, but through the chain of people, supplies, surgeries, and years of care required to keep one survivor alive. A mine may detonate once, but its damage continues through a medical system the Myanmar military has deliberately deprived of resources.
In this episode in Insight Myanmar Podcast’s Navigating A Minefield series, Mayfield describes the landmine contamination now facing Myanmar, and his own personal journey of trauma and recovery.
Even before his own injury, Mayfield encountered the threat across Chin State. Locals repeatedly warned him away from mined sections of towns and villages; rain sometimes exposed devices in the soil, and during one journey an explosion in the distance turned out to be a cow stepping on a mine. He personally knows roughly a dozen soldiers who have lost legs, and he doubts that anyone in the state remains untouched by the weapon through family, friends, or neighbors.
The logic of Myanmar’s military extends beyond removing one person from a battlefield. A wounded fighter requires evacuation, first aid, clinical treatment, rehabilitation, and the work of other soldiers, while a wounded civilian draws on the same resistance-run hospitals and clinics. These groups are not only fighting; they are trying to operate schools, medical facilities, and local administrations. Mining villages sympathetic to the resistance therefore punishes civilians while consuming the limited resources of the structures attempting to govern them.
That threat also disciplines ordinary movement. People continue farming and tending animals because survival leaves no alternative, but a path known to be safe becomes a boundary that cannot casually be crossed. “People have to be exhaustingly vigilant and exhaustingly careful,” Mayfield says. If a cow wanders into an uncertain forest, a family may still have to retrieve it because their livelihood depends on the animal, turning an ordinary decision into a wager against the ground.
Mayfield had already seen what losing that wager meant in 2023. During a reconnaissance mission near Kennedy Mountain, a PDF-Zoland soldier stepped on a mine and suffered a shredded left leg. With no operating room available, medics amputated on a plastic tarp in the forest, searching for torn veins and suturing them while he drifted in and out of consciousness. The scene remained with Mayfield when he returned two years later.
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