LUSK - Wyoming's most feared freedom fighter sits hunkered down over a bowl of lukewarm chicken noodle soup, slurping his words along with the broth in his spoon.

He once was a wide-eyed optimist, serving his country, fighting to eradicate communism both as an enlisted member of the military and as a mercenary-for-hire in the African jungle and the Panamanian rainforest, where he routinely stared down military men with more egos than ethos.

They blinked. In six decades of life, Thomas Bleming never has.

"I've lost count of how many wars and conflicts I've been in," he says, as if strapping on an automatic weapon and fighting for a cause were as common in Wyoming as climbing a drilling rig.

But as he sits in a ramshackle cottage bulging with the bric-a-brac of a cowboy from the Old West - saddles, tack, leather vests, the requisite weathered cowboy hat and paint-by-numbers Western artwork - Bleming isn't basking in his red-blooded American past.

In fact, he's willing to give it all up - the medals and commendation he was awarded in Vietnam, the ranch he retired to in Lusk several years ago, even the last of a bowl of soup from a can - for a chance to help another country gain the independence, freedom and, most of all, the way of life he said has been lost on Americans in a post-Sept. 11 world.

There are just a few loose ends Bleming must finish first.

Should he decide to leave his windswept, unfinished 8 Mile Ranch and a second in-town abode behind, Bleming will do so only after explaining his side of a story he has kept under wraps for a quarter-century.

Bleming has just finished a tell-all book about his time as a captor under dictator Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega that lays bare Bleming's thoughts about his fight for freedom against an oppressive leader of a banana republic in the early 1980s. The self-published book became available Friday for purchase.

"Panama: The Echoes From a Revolution" details how Bleming, on a mission to install a democratic government in the crook-shaped country, spent nearly two years as Noriega's captive and how, to this day, the former Panamanian strongman refuses to own up to his actions, even as he fights extradition to France after completing a prison sentence in Miami on Sept. 8 on drug-trafficking charges.

Once he has made his peace with the man, perhaps then Bleming can work on his newest crusade - the fight for freedom in the jungles of Myanmar - turn his back on the lifestyle that temporarily made him a 21st century cowboy, and return to the swashbuckling, battle-tested warrior without a country.

"I always wanted to be a cowboy, live my life on a ranch, under the stars," said Bleming, who grew up a half-hour north of Philadelphia and moved to Lusk in 1995, where in between trips abroad, he's building a log cabin ranch eight miles outside town.

For a while at least, collecting Western memorabilia and sharing a compound with his overgrown dog, Talon, wasn't a bad way to live out his retirement years. Heck, on any given day, Bleming, with a faded hat that recalls the kind once worn by former Gov. Mike Sullivan, looks as if he's a wizened old ranch hand.

"I know that dream will never be fulfilled, because I have a higher calling," he said.

Like it has so many times before, a revolution pulled the old rancher back into a fight for freedom.

"In Lusk, I feel like I'm half-dead," the old warrior said. "When I'm overseas, I feel like I have a purpose for life.

"Most people say 'Let's go to Disney World or Baja' for vacation," he said. "I say, 'Let's start a revolution.' …There's something about those (Karen) people that has added years to my life. Some people take Geritol - I take a trip to Asia and become a new man."

Journey to Myanmar

It's a long way from Lusk to the jungles of northeastern Myanmar, where the indigenous Karen people subsist in much the same way their ancestors did. Today, many carry semiautomatic rifles along with their rice bowls.

For six weeks this past spring, Bleming took a tourist entry card and burrowed his way from western Thailand into the Myanmar jungle, where he found himself comrades-in-arms with the people of the fledgling republic of Kathoolei, an area of eastern Myanmar bordered by Thailand. The Karen people have been burdened by autocratic rule living as they are in an area recognized as an independent country by exactly one other nation on the planet.

While there, he strapped on a rifle and brandished a machete, notebook in hand to document the five-decade plight of the people in the Karen state inside Myanmar for independence from the country known to most of the world as Burma.

It's a fight against a regime that, until the United States took notice recently, had been relegated the inside pages of papers like the American Free Press or a few Web sites. Searches for "Republic of Kathoolei" or Karen National Liberation Army, the military branch of indigenous people fighting for what they believe is their country, turn up little on Internet sites.

Only recently have the so-called mainstream media picked up on the fight between the multiple indigenous peoples inside Myanmar and the military junta that keeps a lid on dissent in the country.

Nevertheless, it's a fight Thomas Bleming now believes is his life's work and where he hopes to someday return.

In Myanmar, he says, "I can contribute. I feel totally alive over there, that I knew I had a purpose," he said, slowly peeling away the years of bitterness he feels because of what he says was his misguided tour of duty in Vietnam and the United States' current political tilt.

"I feel totally divorced from this country. I don't feel like I have a say in this country," he said.

In the nascent Republic of Kathoolei, where natives live under both thatched-roof huts and the constant watch of the dominant Burmese army, Bleming is a friend, confidant and chronicler of their 58-year struggle for independence.

Bleming's feelings bleed all over his spread in tiny Lusk, where his home is a shrine to the 7 million largely Christian-based people forging a new identity.

A giant felt flag with the Republic of Kathoolei's colors - blue, white and red - is tacked up on Bleming's living-room wall. He's fashioned his own "Karen National Liberation Army" coat of arms patch, stitched to an Army-green jacket he wears frequently. Medals and letters given to him by the on-field leader of the resistance movement - a man who has become a dear friend - litter a desk in his home.

It's an odd menagerie, situated as it is next to saddles, tack and cowboy hats in the main sitting room of his cottage in town.

"I can assimilate to (the culture of the Karen people) much more than they could ever assimilate to mine," Bleming joked.

After reading an article about the Karen people in the Casper Star-Tribune more than a year ago, Bleming said he felt compelled to travel there and did so without a detailed plan in February after spending a few days in Bangkok, Thailand.

For a man who sprung from a tour in the U.S. Army in Vietnam only to land in Rhodesia to unsuccessfully beat back a Communist uprising in the 1970s, this mission to the subtropical jungle served as a return to his mercenary roots.

He brought with him to the village of Mae Sot a compass, a pack of Swisher Sweets, binoculars, combat knives and 2 kilograms of pipe tobacco as gift to a man now leading a second generation of independence-seekers.

Mae Sot serves as the home base for the Karen National Liberation Army. Its field general is Col. Ner Dah Mya, an American-educated soldier with young children whose father led the fight for independence for several decades before handing the reins and a hungry, if callow, army to his son.

Many in the army wear combat boots. Some wear flip-flops. Some, said Bleming, are as young as 10 years old.

The colonel walks about with an assault rifle and a giant blade as his sidearm.

"I was just awe-struck by the charisma of the man," Bleming said. "The people I met there were very simple folk, but very attuned to the world stage."

"The Burmese are the oppressors of our people," the colonel told Bleming upon his arrival. "We'll never give up. We'll come back to reincarnate to fight them again and again."

The fight for a Karen state has become Burma's own Vietnam, Bleming says. From Feb. 13 until March 16, Bleming was, in a sense, reliving a similar quagmire he'd experienced 40 years earlier.

There is a difference in this battle, in the jungle, far from anyplace Bleming calls home.

"The reason why I don't think this battle is going to continue is because they've found Thomas Bleming," he said. "It's my duty to stop it."

Joining the battle

Bleming's comrade-in-arms is a 40-year-old, U.S.-educated Burmese national living in Thailand who attended college in California's Napa Valley at a tiny university run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Col. Ner Dah Mya of the Karen National Liberation Army took up the cause after his father, Gen. Bo Mya, effectively retired after decades on the front.

Bo Mya fought alongside the British in World War II and in Burma against Japanese occupation of the country. His son is a well-spoken representative of the movement that spans more than a half-century of battles.

"My hope for my children is to see freedom," the colonel said in a phone interview from his home base at the Thailand/Burma border. "Hopefully, in their time, we will see a democratic government in Burma."

The colonel knows well of Western ways, having lived in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1980s and early 1990s, graduating in 1994 with a bachelor of arts degree in liberal arts from tiny Pacific Union College in Angwin, Calif., nestled in the hills east of the Napa Valley where most of the people, adhering to religious doctrine, neither dance, drink or smoke.

Mya returned to Burma several years ago, he says, to pick up where his father left off.

Bleming has become a trusted friend and Mya's link to the United States. The two speak frequently on the phone and give updates about their struggles in their respective countries.

"The moment I met him," said Mya, who armed his friend with an M-16 and a combat rifle upon Bleming's arrival, "I knew he was willing to help.

"He did what he could. He encouraged the people to carry on. He's a motivator," Mya said in heavily accented but nearly flawless English. "He told them: 'I have a heart for you, and I will fight for you.'"

Bleming was generous, Mya said, bringing mosquito nets and hammocks for soldiers, in addition to the Swisher Sweets and three decades worth of combat expertise.

"He got along very well with us … even though we didn't know him very well. In the end, it was like we'd known him for a long, long time," Mya said in a springtime telephone interview from his home in Thailand.

While he was there, Bleming often slept next to Mya, an assault rifle between the two.

The Karen people, Mya said, are not typically militant folk. They are a peaceful people who are struggling to diversify their agricultural-based economy and gain a sense of nationalism.

Education, the colonel said, is the key for his region's children to rise out of the jungle, away from the subsistence farming and fishing that serve as staples for the Karen people.

"We know that education is very important. We can do community development, but the problem is the political situation," Mya said. "All we want is to be free from the military dictatorship of Burma."

At night, Mya and his warriors sit under candlelight, knowing that opposing forces aren't far away.

When he was able, Bleming taught the Karen people how to place land mines and connected key Karen leaders with weapons suppliers.

For the Karen people, it's an uphill battle, literally and figuratively, out of the darkness of the jungle into the light of independence.

"Every day I was there, I heard gunfire and heavy explosions," Bleming said, noting that he was shot at once and another time, approached to within a half-mile of Burmese army lines.

Within days of arriving, the Burmese fired rifle shots into base camp.

"It was living life on the edge," he said. "For me, it was very demanding, physically and emotionally."

In early March, Bleming's camp suffered a bomb and mortar attack. In camp, attacks are intermittent, which permits the Karens to live their daily lives. "I've never seen so much positive in such a condition as we were in," Bleming said.

Often, when the day ended, Bleming and his comrades feasted on giant pots of rice cooked in the outdoor camps over an open flame.

Bleming's 61st birthday was a festive affair, with drinking, smoking, a roast and merriment in the battlefield.

"We always find the time to laugh," Mya said. "We don't have good medicine, so we make you laugh. Tom's a good man, and I believe we can work together and we can make a difference here."

Bleming is writing a second self-published book, "War in Karen Country: Armed Struggle for a Free and Independent State in Southeast Asia" about his experiences and says he would like to ask the United States to enter discussions with the Republic of Kathoolei about establishing some sort of formal relations.

To date, Norway is the only country on Earth that recognizes the nascent republic.

This summer, Bleming contacted the office of U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi in hopes of establishing a place of contact in tiny Lusk, where the Karen people might use Bleming's services as an agent of the region to pay for war bonds to finance the conflict.

Told that most people in the world - let alone Wyoming - have never heard of this fledgling country, Bleming hardly notices the comment. After all, this is a crusade 40 years in the making, after years of hopping from country to country, trying to inject himself into causes he sees as just.

So yes, Bleming is hoping for some kind of recognition for the region from someone in Wyoming.

Though it's a far-fetched idea, Enzi spokesman Coy Knobel said the senator sent a letter April 13 to the U.S. Office of Protocol, asking what needed to be done so that people over in Burma belonging to the Karen state could send money to benefit their cause.

Generally, the United States will not set up a consulate office unless it has formal relations with a country, Knobel said. The U.S. has a tenuous relationship with Burma, but not with the area described as the "Republic of Kathoolei."

That's of little consequence to Bleming, whose tired eyes sparkle at the mention of the place he considers his new home, where Ner Dah Mya has made him an honorary member of the 6th Brigade, Battalion 201, Company 3 in the Karen National Liberation Army.

As he dons the coat with the army patch, Bleming explains that his duty to fight for independence in a country recognized by almost no one mirrors that of revolutionary colonial forces fighting the British in America's drive for independence more than 230 years ago.

"In the end, the ones that won, they founded this country and were looked upon as heroes," he said, before quoting one of his own heroes, Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara: "When you fight to liberate people, you fight to liberate yourself."

"I'm trying now, at my age, to go and save a part of the world so that I might live there … to guide them, so the mistakes that we are making as a nation now, they won't have to make," Bleming said.

He dismisses those who might think his ideas as crackpot dreams. They don't know the man or his new quest for freedom, halfway around the world.

After all, this is a man who speaks most fondly of a place almost no one has ever heard of. Of the new republic, he simply says, "It's my country now."

To view a video of Bleming's take on the current crisis in Myanmar, please click here.