The Paris Review's Spring edition has an interview with Tashi Passang, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, by William Dalyrmple. While the content is mainly what appear's in a chapter called The Monk's Tale in his recent book, Nine Lives, it does not replicate the book exactly, choosing instead to present the story in a question and answer format. Passang had, like many other monks, taken up arms when his country was invaded by China.

What I didn’t know was that the monastery was full of informers. As soon as the Chinese heard that I had taken my gun and gone to the hills, they came to my family’s house and began beating my mother, asking her where I was. They were cruel. They beat her feet, and dragged her by her hair so that she was left almost bald. They tied her to a stake outside our house, stripped her, and threw cold water over her. They left her there overnight so that the water froze to her and she nearly died of exposure.
They came back every day, each time devising new ways to torture her so that she would tell them where I had gone. But I was in the mountains, and it was more than a month before I came to hear of what had happened to her.

INTERVIEWER
How did you actually end up fighting?

PASSANG
I heard about what had happened to my mother. My uncle, the monk, found me in the mountains and told me that she had been tortured. He asked me to surrender my gun in order to save my mother. Of course I did so immediately. The uncle took the gun to the Chinese and they finally left her alone. But then I met up with some of my brethren who were also hiding in the hills, and we decided to walk to Lhasa so we could warn the monks there of what was happening.
We walked for eight months. At first we traveled only at night, but after a while, when we began to near Lhasa, we felt more secure and walked during the day too. There were many checkpoints, but there were lots of other pilgrims and monks on the roads. We told everyone we met that we were pilgrims heading to Lhasa for the Monlam ceremony, when the Dalai Lama gives daily addresses for two weeks.

[..]

PASSANG
On the evening of March 15, 1959, I was one of twenty-five monks who were told we would have the chance to meet His Holiness. We assumed we were going to join the crowds gathering at Norbulingka. I was excited since I thought I might get to hear His Holiness give one of his public teachings. But we didn’t stop at Norbulingka. Instead we continued straight into the darkness. We crossed the wide Tsangpo River in a small boat, and for the next two days we walked and walked, through empty plains, with only hard balls of tsampa to eat. The monks who were leading us refused to tell us where we were going or what we were doing, and since we were all very junior monks we had no option but to obey.
We finally stopped to rest at the village of Chi Thu Shae, a three-day walk from Lhasa. After two hours a party of Khampa horsemen turned up. Among them, to our amazement, was His Holiness, with a rifle strapped to his back.