After a bomb killed Ho Van Thanh’s wife and two of his sons during the Vietnam War in 1973, Ho made a radical life-choice. He took his one-year-old son, and ran into the jungle–never to return–until this week. Now 82-years-old and too weak to move, Vietnamese officials were able to convince Ho and his son to leave the Central Vietnamese jungle and the treehouse they’d been calling home.

Thanh Nien News reported, that Ho and his son, now age 41, survived on a diet of animals they hunted and wild plants, cassava roots, corn, and sugarcane. The two grew much of what they ate on their own 2.5 acre field.

A modern-day Tarzan, the men wore loincloths made of bark and lived in a treehouse 16 feet off the ground.

The Telegraph reported the two spoke little, with Ho’s son speaking only a few words, and Ho himself none at all.

Thanh, who was fighting for North Vietnam when the bomb exploded, left behind another son, Ho Van Tri. And tough Times Live reports they were found by villagers who were searching for firewood and alerted authorities, their existence apparently wasn’t entirely unknown to Ho’s youngest son, Ho Van Tri.

“My father is very weak and the doctors are taking care of him, but my brother’s health is fine even though he looks very thin,” said Tri, who was six months old when his father fled into the jungle.

Ho’s youngest son — who was a newborn when Ho disappeared — found the two more than two decades ago, but couldn’t persuade them to accept him or rejoin society, despite annual gifts of salt and oil.