Word: montagnard
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...Viet Nam War as a grim fairy tale, ruefully seen from a Montagnard village trapped between alien protectors...
...have always been sure that enough talent could work such magic, and in The Barking Deer Jonathan Rubin shows considerable talent. Even so, the author wisely does not try to capture the war in its dreadful magnitudes of size and duration. He ambushes a piece of it from a Montagnard village in the central Vietnamese highlands, circa 1964, just before the machinery of destruction began to dwarf its human masters...
Author Rubin, who worked with Montagnards as a Special Forces sergeant from 1962 to 1964, uses this simple parable to stunning effect. Through it, the catastrophe that falls upon Buon Yun assumes the inevitable rhythm of high drama. Like the eagle and the tiger, the Americans and Viet Cong tell themselves-and for the most part are convinced-that all they are trying to do is protect the village. The few who sense disaster waiting behind a tangle of motives are powerless to reverse the story line of the Montagnard legend...
...because there was a guerrilla war going on in Southeast Asia, and hi those innocent times I wanted to be part of it." He went to Viet Nam in 1962 with one of the early U.S. groups trained in counterinsurgency. He learned the language of the Rhade, a major Montagnard tribe (the one portrayed in The Barking Deer), and some-tunes acted as an interpreter between Montagnards and Vietnamese. The Rhade culture fascinated Rubin, and the villagers' perilous exposure to the more "civilized" Americans and Vietnamese saddened him: "I could see as early as 1962 that the Montagnards...
...Welcome to Quang Due, the most remote place on earth," says the briefing officer. A quick 40-minute hop from Saigon in a C-130 transport, it is hardly that. But the filmy gray clouds wafting across the silent blue hills and the weathered faces of Montagnard tribesmen staggering along the airstrip with their worldly goods on their backs certainly convey a sense of primitive isolation...