Word: montagnard
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Communist terrorism is carried out at random. Thousands of Vietnamese have died in well-planned massacres. In 1967, Montagnard tribesmen, who had fled the Communists a year earlier, were set upon in their new home at Dak Son 75 miles northeast of Saigon. Six hundred Viet Cong, 60 of them armed with flamethrowers, invaded the village, setting fire to the huts and shooting the inhabitants as they fled their burning homes, then executing 60 survivors of the assault. Altogether, 252 unarmed Montagnards, nearly all of them women and children, were murdered, 100 kidnaped, 500 listed as missing...
Like Khe Sanh and Con Thien to the north, Ben Het, which was completed in 1968, is an isolated fortification of bunkers and barbed wire that sits astride an important infiltration route. Inside its perimeters were 500 Montagnard irregulars led by a South Vietnamese Special Forces team of twelve and twelve U.S. Green Beret advisers. Initially, Ben Het could rely for added protection on the U.S. 4th Infantry Division, which was operating in the surrounding highlands. As part of a redeployment, U.S. infantry forces withdrew from the Ben Het area in April. The responsibility for the base passed...
...visitors often found the sights and sounds of Viet Nam more moving than words. On their field trip, they clambered into cockpits of Air Force Phantom fighter-bombers at Cam Ranh Bay, 200 miles northeast of Saigon, and drank rice wine through bamboo reeds with Montagnard tribesmen in the Central Highlands. In Pleiku, they visited a hospital filled with Vietnamese civilians who had been injured by Viet Cong rockets. Circling in helicopters, they watched an allied air strike against the enemy...
Bamboo flutes tweedled, brass gongs thrummed, and Montagnard maidens twisted ceremonial copper bracelets round the wrists of President Nguyen Van Thieu, Premier Tran Van Huong and other South Vietnamese dignitaries. Stoically, the visitors sipped from the brimming urns of mnam kpie, a sour-tasting homemade rice wine. Then they moved on to lunch in the comfortable former summer residence of exiled Emperor Bao Dai, in the highland provincial capital of Ban Me Thuot. The Saigon dignitaries, together with a host of American officials, were joining in ceremonies marking what they hoped would be the end of a tribal rebellion...
Viet Nam's Montagnards have never mixed well with the Vietnamese, who tend to scorn them as savages. French colonial authorities generally left the Montagnards alone. Few Vietnamese display much interest in or knowledge of the roughly 1,000,000 tribesmen living in the remote, heavily jungled high plateaus. The Montagnards take a lot of knowing, for they comprise an extraordinarily complex ethnolmguistic mixture numbering at least 20 tribes and many more splinter groupings. They have for centuries resisted the cultural influences of the Sinic and Hindu peoples that have flooded into the IndoChinese peninsula. Saigon leaders, from President...