Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
The Kohima Educational Trust is delighted to welcome our guest speakers E.R. (Emily) Lutken with David Lutken to this webinar, introduced by KET trustee Dr Robert Lyman.
Sabotage, surprise attacks, intelligence gathering, encounters with tigers, rafting uncharted rivers, tribal feasts and ceremonies, the terrible plight of countless refugees, and heroic as well as tragic events of the Second World War in Burma. In this presentation, the author’s son and daughter, David Lutken and E.R. (Emily) Lutken, give an overview of their father’s experiences as related in his memoir A Thousand Places Left Behind: One Soldier’s Account of Jungle Warfare in WWII Burma (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2023).
Peter K. Lutken, Jr. (1920-2014) joined the U. S. Army in 1941, was assigned to the Coast Artillery and sent to Assam to guard airfields. He was soon reassigned to the British V Force, and later, the American Office of Strategic Services (the OSS), after he volunteered for reconnaissance missions behind Japanese lines.
We hear how he walked into Burma from neighbouring Assam, learned the Kachin language, lived among and fought alongside the Kachins for over two years — a detailed and compelling account of his time in the V Force and in the OSS, gathering intelligence and engaging in guerrilla operations in Japanese-occupied territory in the crucial China Burma India (CBI) Theatre in 1943-1945.
Many years after the war Pete and other veterans of OSS Detachment 101 participated in efforts to help the Kachin people who had assisted them — and the Allied effort — so much during the war years. Pete took several trips back to Burma beginning in the 1990s to work again with his lifelong friends and their descendants. His beloved 'Project Old Soldier', an agricultural cooperative based in Kutkai, endured up until the current conflict.
We hear details about Pete’s wartime experience, as well as an introduction to the ‘making’ of the book, readings of excerpts, and a Q&A with Emily, an award-winning poet, and David, a stage actor.
The Kohima Educational Trust is delighted to welcome our guest speakers E.R. (Emily) Lutken with David Lutken to this webinar, introduced by KET trustee Dr Robert Lyman.
Sabotage, surprise attacks, intelligence gathering, encounters with tigers, rafting uncharted rivers, tribal feasts and ceremonies, the terrible plight of countless refugees, and heroic as well as tragic events of the Second World War in Burma. In this presentation, the author’s son and daughter, David Lutken and E.R. (Emily) Lutken, give an overview of their father’s experiences as related in his memoir A Thousand Places Left Behind: One Soldier’s Account of Jungle Warfare in WWII Burma (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2023).
Peter K. Lutken, Jr. (1920-2014) joined the U. S. Army in 1941, was assigned to the Coast Artillery and sent to Assam to guard airfields. He was soon reassigned to the British V Force, and later, the American Office of Strategic Services (the OSS), after he volunteered for reconnaissance missions behind Japanese lines.
We hear how he walked into Burma from neighbouring Assam, learned the Kachin language, lived among and fought alongside the Kachins for over two years — a detailed and compelling account of his time in the V Force and in the OSS, gathering intelligence and engaging in guerrilla operations in Japanese-occupied territory in the crucial China Burma India (CBI) Theatre in 1943-1945.
Many years after the war Pete and other veterans of OSS Detachment 101 participated in efforts to help the Kachin people who had assisted them — and the Allied effort — so much during the war years. Pete took several trips back to Burma beginning in the 1990s to work again with his lifelong friends and their descendants. His beloved 'Project Old Soldier', an agricultural cooperative based in Kutkai, endured up until the current conflict.
We hear details about Pete’s wartime experience, as well as an introduction to the ‘making’ of the book, readings of excerpts, and a Q&A with Emily, an award-winning poet, and David, a stage actor.
