Word: montagnard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...until the Communists began concentrating troops in the Central Highlands was there another battle of Starlight's scope. Worried that their supply routes might be in danger, 6,000 Viet Minh and Viet Cong on Oct. 19 pounced on a Special Forces camp manned by 400 montagnard tribesmen and twelve U.S. advisers at Plei Me, near where the Ho Chi Minh trail snakes out of Laos and Cambodia into South Viet Nam. But for 600 sorties that littered...
...Vietnamese regiments. Working in darkness just 40 yards from the camp's wire-strung perimeter (see aerial photo), the cautious bo doi (infantrymen) cut trenches and L-shaped firing pits, hauled the dirt away in baskets and camouflaged their labors with brush. Though the camp's 400 montagnard defenders were patrolling assiduously up to ten miles away, no one thought to poke around his own front yard. Into each Communist pit went tidy stacks of ammo, a Chinese automatic rifle at one end, an ugly, snub-snouted 12.5-mm. antiaircraft machine gun at the other. Every emplacement...
First hit was a montagnard patrol-it was decimated by a scythe of small-arms fire. Then a 20-man outpost in a clearing below the fort was overrun-the defenders died in their bunkers. At the main fort, U.S. Special Forces Captain Harold M. Moore radioed for help. Soon flare ships were splashing naked light over enemy positions as the Reds' recoilless rifles slammed round after round through the camp's longhouses. The 2,300-odd montagnard women and children living at Plei Me disappeared underground for a week-long hibernation. All, that is, but the older...
...honorary member of the Rhade tribe. It was a memorable experience. First his combat boots were washed in rice wine from a ritual jar into which the flesh of a sacrificial buffalo had been dipped. Then, as the beast's severed head and tail lay near by, a montagnard sorcerer summoned divine spirits to witness an oath of friendship, and a rebel officer swore allegiance to Saigon Finally, to seal the pledge, two smiling girls presented Ky with a tray of cop per bracelets, and he was handed a symbolic weapon-a U.S. Army M-l carbine...
With that, Ky accepted the surrender of some 500 of the most rebellious warriors of the 30-odd largely illiterate montagnard (hill people) tribes that are scattered through the empty high lands-half of South Viet Nam (TIME Oct. 2, 1964). Trouble could break out again, for the rebels demand more aid and more jobs as well as autonomous statehood for the lightly populated areas they occupy. But pointing to dozens of government posts recently handed to the montagnards, Ky for the moment had damped the smoldering discontent. His ultimate aim: to use the breathing space to bring...