Tough Fighters Hanging on in Vietnam

Tough Fighters Hanging on in Vietnam

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/tough-fighters-hanging-on-in-vietnam/

Excerpt: The region’s indigenous people, the Montagnards, took extraordinary punishment during the war, eventually losing not only their nation but also their way of life. Their name, a holdover from French colonialism, translates roughly as “people of the mountain,” and accounts for a swath of Malayo-Polynesian tribes. They are ethnically, culturally, linguistically, and, once as animists but now increasingly as Christians, religiously distinct from Vietnam’s kinh majority. They are also easily singled out for another attribute. Around 70,000 Montagnards fought alongside US Special Forces against North Vietnam, serving as infantrymen, paratroopers, guides, and spies. “The [U.S.] military asked me, and I just joined.” Dim, a 71-year-old former paratrooper, told me. “Everybody joined. The Montagnards took part in this effort because they believed the Americans would deliver them some form of political autonomy, or even American resettlement, as some Special Forces promised. But the Montagnards suffered greatly: more than 250,000 of their men died, according to community leaders and historians, and by 1975, 85 percent of their villages in ruins or abandoned