It is part of Myo Myint’s mission to describe again and again the terrible things he has witnessed and the terrible things that have happened to him.

This is not easy for the Burmese refugee and Fort Wayne resident, who is the subject of a documentary by Irish photojournalist Nic Dunlop called “Burmese Soldier” that debuts Wednesday on HBO2.

“Before I accepted to tape the documentary,” Myo Myint said in an interview, “I told Nic Dunlop … ‘I already know about what things we (will) report, what things we want people to know and to listen to and to watch …but these are the things I don’t want to think about myself.”

“Because when I think about myself these things, I feel torture … I get the depression,” Myo Myint said.

When Myo Myint was 17, he joined the Burmese army as an engineer, meaning that it was his job to keep track of where the land mines were buried.

He witnessed atrocities committed against ethnic minorities by his fellow soldiers, many as young as or younger than he was.

“For them, it is just as normal as eating and drinking,” Myo Myint says in the documentary.

Eventually, Myo Myint was hit by a mortar and lost a leg, an arm and most of the fingers on his remaining hand. After he was discharged with a small pension, he had plenty of time to begin to question the things he had been taught his entire life about the actions of his country’s government and its military.

“I had lost my leg but I still had my mind,” he says in “Burma Soldier.”

Myo Myint started a small lending library of banned books and eventually began to protest openly.

He took the podium at a protest outside a military base and addressed a crowd of 7,000 to 8,000 people.

He was rewarded for having taken this great risk when four or five soldiers in civilian clothes came to him later to say that they wanted to join the demonstrators, but they did not know how to go about it.

But this flagrant show of defiance against the dictatorship also earned him 15 torture-filled years in Burma’s deplorable prison system.

After his release, Myo Myint fled to Thailand and eventually joined his younger brother and sister in Fort Wayne.

Dunlop had started filming his documentary while Myo Myint was still in Thailand.

Myo Myint said he first saw the completed film at his brother’s house.

“The first time I watched the film (was) in a private screening in my brother’s home,” he says. “That time, I felt very sad. I cried very bitterly.

“Now I feel opposite feelings,” Myo Myint said. “Now … I am the one and only guy who can tell people across the world about human rights violations in Burma.”

Even though the film’s American broadcast debut is still days away, “Burma Soldier” may have already been seen by as many as 10 million Burmese living within and outside of the country, according to the film’s producer, Julie LeBrocquy.

LeBrocquy added that a Burmese-language copy of the film with the credits removed has been available for online viewing and for download on Vimeo since March.

Thousands of copies have been “ripped” from Vimeo, burned onto disks, and secretly distributed inside Burma.

“One guy in one country made 2,500 copies and he is personally handing them out to members of the Burmese community,” LeBrocquy said.

The film has been beamed by satellite into 5 million Burmese homes eight separate times thanks to the Democratic Voice of Burma based in Norway.

Documentarians who make activist films usually can only dream of this sort of success.

But now that the Burmese government has taken notice of the film, greater caution must be exercised, LeBrocquy said.

LeBrocquy said everyone associated with the film is now more wary about the information they give out, especially information about where the film’s many downloaders reside.

“We don’t need to give the regime anything,” she said. “We don’t need to help those bastards.”

LeBrocquy said she likely won’t be producing any more movies about Burma, but her activism will continue.

“I sort of feel like we as Westerners can’t do an awful lot more,” she said. “But there are a couple things I can do to help make Myo Myint’s voice get a bit louder.”

Myo Myint recently attended a state department screening of “Burma Soldiers” and was able to plead for his oppressed countrymen from a uniquely persuasive perspective.

“I had a chance to talk with them,” he said. “I talked with them about the political prisoner issue, about the Burmese refugee issue, about the Burma army human rights violations issue and then about the struggle for democracy issue.”

“So they listened very carefully,” Myo Myint said. “I heard a lot of encouraging words from them.”

Myo Myint, who is engaged to be married to an American woman, said he now writes for and helps edit three Burmese publications based in Fort Wayne and Norway and records a weekly broadcast for Radio Free Asia.

He said he usually writes four or five short stories or articles a week and also contributes to a blog.

This work ethic furthers his cause, Myo Myint said, but it also calms his soul.

“I think about my past life and thinking about these kinds of things tortures me,” he said. “Thinking about these kinds of things makes me mad or crazy. So I like keeping busy myself. Writing, reading, editing and reporting helps me concentrate my mind … and I have no time to think about the past.”

But he said he must continue to revisit his past so that he can help create for Burma a better future.

“Though I feel very sad and unhappy whenever I talk about these things,” he said. “I must do what I have to do for my people and for my country.”