Now Refugees, Once U.S. Allies : For Mountain Tribesmen, Viet War Memory Lingers

A group of Montagnards gathers around the radio here each Sunday night to hear the Rev. John Newman broadcasting from the Philippines.

For more than 15 years, Newman and other radio preachers have been the sole American connection for the mostly Christian Montagnards, the mountain tribesmen who fought alongside U.S. Special Forces during the Vietnam War.

“Until this week, I had not talked with an American since 1968,” said a stocky, balding man named Thoraban, a spokesman for a group of 190 Montagnards who recently moved to this refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border.

His last contact with an American, he said, was with a Maj. Lamar, a military adviser with an outfit designated B-50 at Ban Me Thuot, Darlac province, in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. It was the year of the Communists’ Tet offensive in South Vietnam.

“During the war, we sacrificed many lives fighting with the Americans,” Thoraban told a reporter. He reeled off the places his people had fought with their Special Forces (Green Berets) advisers in the highlands--An Khe, Phu Tuc, Ba Sarpa and others near the more familiar highlands towns of Kontum, Pleiku, Ban Me Thuot and Dalat.

He remembered his Green Beret team leaders only by their rank and surnames: Capts. Abernathy, Daniel, Wood and Carter and Lt. Chamberlain.

An American here who served in the highlands said, “The Special Forces considered the Montagnards our most effective ally in Vietnam.”

The Americans trained the Montagnards to fight against the Communist Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, but the Viet Cong had occasional success in turning the Montagnards against the U.S.-backed government in Saigon. Relations between Saigon and the tribes had always been tense.

“We don’t dislike the Vietnamese people, but they are always trying to genocide us,” Thoraban said.

The struggle reaches far back into Vietnamese history, when the Montagnards, who had come from the Malay-Polynesian islands to the south, were pushed into the mountains by later migrations from the north.

Treated as Savages

The 190 people at Site Two, including 17 women and 23 children, call themselves the Dega people. The name Montagnards, or mountain people, came from Vietnam’s French colonialists. The Vietnamese dismissed the tribesmen as moi , or savages.

Their history involves sporadic attempts to achieve some sort of autonomy within Vietnam, where the Montagnard population is variously estimated at 700,000 to 1.5 million. The Montagnards here proclaim themselves the Liberation Front of the High Plateau, followers of the late Y-Bham Enoul.

They say they have never stopped fighting the Vietnamese, until now.

“The Vietnam War is over. We are only 190. We don’t know where to go. One hundred and ninety. We cannot defeat the Vietnamese,” Thoraban said.

He said his group, once part of a guerrilla force of 2,000, was driven out of Vietnam in 1979 and reached the Thai frontier the next year by traveling across Cambodia along the Laotian border. In 1982 and 1983, Thoraban said, groups of his men tried to recross Cambodia (apparently unsuccessfully) with supplies for their compatriots who stayed behind in Vietnam.

Although the Montagnards have occasionally been helped in their travels by Cambodia’s Communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas, Thoraban insisted that the Montagnards do not agree with Khmer Rouge policies. A strong connection with the Khmer Rouge, whose brutal rule of Cambodia was broken by the Vietnamese invasion of December, 1978, could damage their hope for resettlement in the United States.

Want to Go to U.S.

“Our only choice now is to go to the U.S.A.,” said Y-Ghok Niekrieng, the Montagnard leader at Site Two.

Thoraban said they turned their weapons over to Thai soldiers shortly before the Montagnards were moved to Site Two in early October.

In a letter to Thai authorities explaining their bid for resettlement, the tribesmen said, “Because of our poverty, lack of opportunity in every field, we fight with bare hands . . . (with) no aid and support from the foreign countries. We feel that we don’t have enough strength and ability to liberate our own people and territory from Vietnamese control.”

Refugee officials at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok are studying the case. But the Montagnards, the first known to have reached the border, are settling in for what, at best, may be a long wait.

One day recently, the bamboo skeletons of Roman Catholic and Protestant churches were being erected on the Montagnard plot at Site Two. Most of the Dega people are Protestants, converted by an American evangelist named Smith who came to the highlands in the mid-1930s, according to Rmah-Dock, another spokesman.

The radio preachers broadcast in the language of the tribesmen, but the Montagnard leaders want their people to learn English. They eagerly accepted copies of American magazines and said they need grammar textbooks.

There are more than 130,000 refugees at Site Two. The Montagnards occupy only a small corner of the camp--just another group of Indochinese people tossed up on the Thai border by years of war, their years as warriors apparently at an end.

“We stop the struggle,” said Y-Ghok.