Philadelphia Weekly

To understand Pisey Tan you'd have to know his mother. And to understand her you'd have to know something about cost.

You'd have to know the cost of war, and what can happen when a country turns upon itself in limitless bloodthirsty hatred. You'd have to know the cost of life, of your own pounding heart and that of the unborn child inside of you. And you'd have to know the cost of freedom, what it means to fight and die for it, and especially what it means to survive.

For these things Bo Mao and Pisey Tan have paid what to most would be an unthinkable price. To them, it's a matter of honor.

"I can't tell you everything about my mother because her life has been worse than mine," says 26-year-old Pisey, sitting on the couch in the Olney row home where he's lived since his family moved from South Philadelphia when he was 11. "She's done a lot more in life than a lot of people here can ever do or see."

Pisey's mother Bo is a Cambodian immigrant. She arrived in this country in 1980, a refugee of the Vietnam War and of the Khmer Rouge, the rebel organization that tore through Cambodia in the late '70s, murdering about 17 percent of the population. Bo was able to escape to the U.S. when she was 20 years old and four months pregnant with Pisey, the first of her two sons.

Now relaxing in her modest, dimly lit living room after a long day of supervising industrial battery manufacturing at Philadelphia Scientific, she's telling the story of her life.

Bo is petite and quiet--the latter a result of her tentative English, not for lack of something to say. She pauses frequently when talking, searching for words to describe the horrors she's experienced.

Occasionally Pisey, who speaks Cambodian, fills in the gaps or helps with translations.

"My mother spends so much time thinking of the words, she forgets parts of the story," he says. He's heard the stories before, but with each telling Bo mentions something new.

She speaks of days without food, of being separated from her family, of working in child labor camps and of seeing other children shot or starved to death. But it's not until she gets to Pisey's story that she starts to cry.

A year and a half ago Pisey Tan, a powerful bear of a man, was at the wheel of an M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle in Iraq when it was ambushed by gunfire and hit by an improvised explosive device.

Though severely injured, Pisey remained conscious until doctors at a medical checkpoint put him under anesthesia. He woke up in the ICU at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., three days later, and looked down to discover he was missing both his legs.

"I didn't realize where I was, but I did see my legs wrapped up in bandages," he remembers. "That was when I just broke down. I just couldn't believe what had happened to me."

When he first woke up on Aug. 9, 2005, he was alone in the ICU. "I thought it was all a dream, but it was there. And I just lost it. I lost my sanity right then and there. Just thinking, 'What am I gonna do now? I don't want to be a burden for people to take care of me. I don't like that. What are my finances going to be?' During the Vietnam era, some of these people were out on the street. I was terrified."

A day earlier, when Pisey lay unconscious at a military base in Landstuhl, Germany, an Army general called his home in Olney. Pisey's 21-year-old brother Dara answered the phone, and the general asked for Pisey's next of kin. Dara explained his mother was at work and spoke poor English, but the man refused to provide information until she could be reached.

"At that point," Dara says, "I thought we'd lost him."

The general called Bo at work.

I said, 'I don't speak no English,'" Bo recalls, dabbing tears from the corners of her eyes. "So they called Dara, and Dara translate for me. They said they had to cut off the legs. And I almost fell down. I felt like I lost everything in my mind. And I just screamed, cried. If I lost my body, it's better than losing my son's, you know?"