It was the life of the “real Tarzan”: he died eight years after coming into contact with civilization.

Its story has traveled the world not only for surviving in the midst of a jungle and isolated from civilization for decades, but to be a testament to the aftermath of the Vietnam War, which still hangs over today. Ho Van Lang He and his father had survived the American bombings of those years and hid in a small hut where he had lived for 40 years from what he had managed to collect and hunt, in the best style. “Tarzan”.

After being “rescued” and adapted to social life eight years ago, he passed away last Monday from an Liver cancer. The news, in fact, shocked because although isolated in the middle of the jungle, he did not know what it was like to share life with other people, he looked for ways to survive the adversity. .

His father had managed to escape attacks in the midst of the war and left the desert in 1972, when half of his family was killed in the bombings. Over the years they both believed the war was never over and it wasn’t until 2013 that they made contact with Vietnamese society by entering a village asking for help as the father, Lan Ho Van Thanh, he was very ill.

For four decades, men survived the adventures of the jungle. They gathered fruit and cassava and planted corn. In the middle of the forest, they bundled up with what they could and covered themselves with leaves and tree bark like “Loincloth”. A wooden cabin was his home, just five meters above the ground. This life in the midst of nature lasted until eight years ago, when some collectors noticed his “strange” way of acting and warned the authorities.

After locating them, rescue organizers detected that the father could speak in the tongue horn, although her son could only utter a few words. According to the testimony of a friend of this man, an explorer named Alvaro Cerezo (who lived a week in the jungle with Ho Van Lang), the fact of having tried to “civilize” him after so many years living in the jungle, could have been a point against him, with fatal consequences.

“I am very sad to see him go, but for me his death is also a liberation because I know he has suffered in recent months,” he said. Cerezo and said he never liked to see how they sought to adapt man to civilization and modern life: “He had spent his whole life in the jungle, then he came to live in the civilized world where he started to eat processed foods and sometimes even to drink alcohol ”.