Celebrate First Thanksgiving : Montagnard Refugees Find New Life in U.S.

It was early Thanksgiving morning, and members of three congregations had gathered for a spirited church service to welcome their community’s newest arrivals. As a white-robed choir sang, members of the audience turned and smiled at 16 Montagnard refugees from Vietnam sitting quietly in the last pew.

Words of welcome rang from the pulpit and the First Lutheran Church organ shook the room with a mighty hymn. But for one of the refugees, the religious ritual and holiday mood seemed miles away. His eyes were weary, his hands shook occasionally and a look of exhaustion spread across his face.

‘Good for Our Hearts’

Minutes after the service, Rahma Dock, 44, explained that he had been thinking--and grieving--about the long, tortuous journey he and his comrades had made from the jungles of Southeast Asia to their new homes in America.

“We have been welcomed here by the United States, and it is good for our hearts,” he said. “But there has been so much pain, so much suffering. My people feel forgotten. We can never forget what has happened to us.”

Last week, amid great celebration, Dock and 212 of his tribesmen were flown to the United States from a refugee camp in the Philippines. The band of Montagnards, many of whom fought alongside American Green Berets during the Vietnam War, were the first large group of refugees to escape from Vietnam’s Central Highlands to immigrate to the United States.

And they had a story to tell. Left behind by the U.S. government when the war ended, thousands of Montagnards were killed because of their allegiance to the American war effort. Many others were thrown into prison and have languished there since 1975.

The tribesmen who arrived last week displayed the shrapnel wounds on their arms and legs. They were the remnants of a 5,000-man fighting force that fled to the jungle after Saigon fell in 1975 and took up arms against the Vietnamese Communists, first in Vietnam, then in Laos and Cambodia.

Decimated by war, hunger and disease, the rebels fought their way to the Thailand border last year and were granted asylum as refugees. The U.S. State Department allowed the Montagnards to immigrate to America this year, after a strong public relations campaign by former Green Berets and others who worked with the Montagnards during the war.

Promised Jobs

At first, the refugees seemed overwhelmed by their good fortune. They had been promised jobs, housing and medical counseling by a variety of church groups in Greensboro and two other North Carolina cities chosen to resettle the Montagnards. Former Green Berets had offered them land to farm and cars to drive.

Above all, civic dignitaries reminded them of America’s gratitude for their role in the Vietnam War, in which an estimated 300,000 Montagnards died. Some said the United States had abandoned its Montagnard friends when the war ended--and owed them much.

The mood was festive and upbeat. But every now and then, a look of worry, a moment of painful bewilderment flashed across the refugees’ faces, as if to say that the past could not be forgotten or forgiven so quickly.

“These refugees are spirited, which is amazing considering what they’ve been through,” said Amy Beckman, a New York social worker and graduate student who interviewed the Montagnards last year at a sprawling refugee camp in Thailand.

‘A Broken People’

“But they also are a broken people. They feel that their homeland is gone forever, and their history bears that out. More than most refugees, they are truly adrift in the world,” she said.

For centuries, long before the Vietnam War ravaged their remote highland villages, the Montagnards lived in peaceful seclusion, cut off from the rest of Indochina. Amid green mountains and lush jungles, they developed an agricultural society dominated by colorful tribal rituals and the worship of nature.

The Montagnards--a generic term for about 29 tribes inhabiting the Central Highlands--prided themselves on their isolation. Many of the Montagnard men wore loincloths and hunted with spears, while the women wore little more than skirts and played a key role as landowners in several tribes. By and large, the tribes were considered peaceful and non-threatening to their neighbors.

But the highlanders’ seclusion came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of World War II.

Forced to Take Sides

As fighting broke out between the French, who had colonized most of Indochina, and invading Japanese troops, many Montagnards had their first brush with the modern world. Although the French had allowed many of the Montagnard tribes to live as they chose, the war forced them to take sides, usually on the side of the Allied armies.

More significantly, the aftermath of the war triggered the outbreak of bloody fighting between Vietnamese Communists and the French. Although some Montagnards cast their lot with the rebel Vietminh forces headed by Ho Chi Minh, a majority sided with the French.

The Vietnamese civil war raged on until 1954, when the French finally conceded defeat. At a Geneva peace conference, the country was divided into North and South Vietnam, with the pro-West Saigon government given control over the vast Central Highlands--and nearly 1 million Montagnards.

“Much of the later tragedy of these tribal peoples stemmed from that decision,” said Gerald Hickey, an anthropologist who has written extensively about the Montagnards. “Up until that point the South Vietnamese knew little about the Montagnards, and certainly had never governed them.”

Viewed as Savages

Indeed, the Vietnamese to the south had historically referred to the Montagnards as moi, or savages, and viewed their culture with contempt. Within a matter of months, the Saigon regime launched an effort to assimilate the Montagnards into the mainstream of Vietnamese society, often with disastrous results for the highlanders.

Almost immediately, for example, the government moved thousands of Catholic refugees from North Vietnam into Montagnard regions and urged them to farm the land. Although Montagnard leaders protested that they had owned the land for centuries, the Vietnamese brushed aside their complaints.

In short order, Vietnamese officials closed Montagnard schools, banned tribal languages and ordered local courts of law shut down. Most important, the Saigon regime discouraged the tribesmen from attending professional schools and gave the highlanders only token representation in the newly established government.

Treatment of Indians

“There is a similarity between the way the Vietnamese treated the Montagnards and the way American settlers treated the Indians,” said Frank Childs, an economist who worked with several American aid organizations in Vietnam during the war.

“In each case, an indigenous culture that simply wanted to be left alone was swept aside, and treated very unfairly. Land was taken without compensation, with no sense of justice.”

The Montagnards put it more bluntly.

“They (Saigon officials) stole our land,” Dock said. “They tried to crush our people, to tell us we were primitive. They tried to destroy us.”

Gradually, Montagnard leaders realized that they had become dangerously isolated. They could expect little or no understanding from the Saigon government, and the Communist leadership in Hanoi remembered how the tribesmen had sided with the French. The highland culture seemed in danger of extinction.

Welcomed Americans

But all of that changed when U.S. military advisers began appearing in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam during the early 1960s. Although it would later come back to haunt them, the Montagnards welcomed the Americans with open arms.

The bonds that developed between the two sides were easy to understand. American Special Forces teams needed allies to help gather intelligence on Viet Cong movements and to fight the growing Communist insurgency. Meanwhile, the Montagnards believed that their new American friends would protect them against threats from both North and South Vietnamese--and guarantee their autonomy after the war ended.

At first, the relationship paid dividends for the highlanders. Spurred on by American advisers who worked with the Montagnards, U.S. officials launched several economic development projects in the region, helped build hospitals and encouraged the Saigon regime to give the highlanders a greater role in the government.

Grudging Concessions

In time, the South Vietnamese government began making grudging concessions to the Montagnards, allowing more of them to attend professional schools and take on government jobs. Dock, for example, was graduated from the National Institute of Administration and helped direct public works projects near his native city of Pleiku.

But as the war intensified, less attention was paid to the plight of the Montagnards. Massive American bombing raids devastated the Central Highlands, a policy that Hickey said was “totally misguided, if we wanted to keep these people on our side. It was insane.”

Later on, American herbicide spraying of the highlands with Agent Orange and other chemicals took an enormous toll on the Montagnards, destroying crops, fish and cattle, killing children and spreading intestinal disease throughout the region, according to a study made by Hickey.

At the same time, North Vietnamese troops pouring down the Ho Chi Minh Trail began infiltrating Montagnard villages and battling with the tribesmen. By 1972, American military officials estimated that nearly 200,000 Montagnards had perished in the war, and nearly 85% of their ancestral villages had been destroyed or uprooted.

Saw No Other Choice

Looking back, some Montagnards believe that they had no choice but to side with the U.S. soldiers. “Who would be our friends other than the Americans?” asked Han Tho Touneh, a former Montagnard government official now living in Sacramento.

But other people are not so sure. Daniel Ellsberg, a former U.S. official who worked with pacification programs in Vietnam, said the war had a devastating impact on the tribesmen and that they should never have played such a prominent role on the American side.

“They paid a heavier price for their involvement than anyone else, as it turned out,” said Ellsberg, who later stirred controversy with his release of the “Pentagon Papers.”

“Truly, the war was not fought over issues that directly involved them. If we had been looking out for their best interests, especially by 1967, we would not have asked them to make such a terrible sacrifice,” Ellsberg said.

Hickey, noting the Montagnards’ casualties, said that catastrophe was comparable to the Cambodian holocaust, in which the Pol Pot regime was alleged to have murdered nearly 2 million of its own people.

“But what is worse,” he added, “is the shameful way we treated these people when it became apparent the war was lost. We just up and left the highlands in a shambles, and abandoned our best friends.”

Leaders Began to Panic

By early 1975, when the last U.S. Embassy officials were leaving Saigon, Montagnard leaders began to panic. They asked American officials to help them flee the country, fearing that they and their families faced death or imprisonment if left behind. But the help never arrived.

Ed Sprague, a former Montagnard adviser for the U.S. State Department, recalled that he had arranged a sea evacuation for about 300 tribesmen before he left the Central Highlands in March, 1975. He later learned that a U.S. boat that had been assigned to rescue the tribesmen--many of whom fought beside U.S. soldiers--never carried out its mission.

“I’ve lived with the shame of that ever since,” he said. “For years, I found it even difficult to talk about the highland people and what happened to them.”

Meanwhile, other Montagnards sought American military assistance to keep fighting in the jungles after the Saigon regime fell. Several tribal leaders met with U.S. Embassy officials on the afternoon of April 4, beseeching them for help.

Diplomatic Subtleties

Records indicate that American officials said they “would need time to consider (the request) carefully before responding.” However, Touneh and other Montagnards present at the meeting said they had been led to believe that American military aid would be forthcoming.

Sprague, who also attended the meeting, said the Montagnards did not understand the subtleties of diplomatic language and failed to realize that their request had, in effect, been denied.

“I remember coming out of the meeting disgusted, knowing there was no way they’d get any help. The Americans who were answering them didn’t want to say, ‘No, we will not help you.’ They were too ashamed.”

The Montagnards’ worst fears were realized when the new Communist government came to power. Scores of leaders were executed and thousands were imprisoned in so-called re-education camps. Government troops moved into the Central Highlands and kept careful watch on villagers believed to have fought with the American and South Vietnamese armies.

Never Fired a Gun

Rahma Dock, for example, was imprisoned near Pleiku because of his association with the South Vietnamese government. Although he had never fired a gun in the conflict, party leaders “said I was a betrayer. . . . They said I was a very bad man.”

Three years later, Dock escaped, leaving behind a wife and four children, who are reported to be still alive. Assigned to work in a rice field, he and several comrades broke free from their guards and fled into the nearby jungle. There, they joined thousands of other Montagnards who had taken up arms against the new regime.

By 1980, the rebel army had scored some surprising victories, ambushing Vietnamese troops “like terrorists. We would blow up cars, cause trouble, harass them,” Dock said. The soldiers dug up buried caches of weapons left behind by Americans and stole weapons whenever they could.

But the Hanoi regime had superior firepower, Dock recalled, “and soon we were badly hurt. We could not fight so well with them. Many people died.”

Confronted Khmer Rouge

Scattered throughout the jungle, the Montagnard resistance forces were driven out of Vietnam and sought refuge in Laos. During the next year, they were surrounded by Vietnamese troops and fled hundreds of miles on foot, at night, into neighboring Cambodia. There, they confronted the murderous Khmer Rouge for the first time.

Common Cause

At first, the Montagnards believed that they might have a common cause with the Cambodian soldiers, since both groups bitterly opposed the Vietnamese. The highlanders hoped to eventually win safe passage to the Thai border, so they could get messages to friendly governments--and win a new supply of weapons.

But the Khmer Rouge grew suspicious of the Montagnards, and at one point placed them in a detention camp deep inside Cambodia, Dock said. The camp was ringed with mine fields and “we couldn’t go anywhere. This was very frightening, because they did not trust us,” he recalled.

By now, starvation, war and disease had taken their toll on the rebels, and the fighting force had dwindled to fewer than 250. Exhausted by the conflict, the highlanders waited for an opportunity to flee their captors and seek asylum in Thailand.

That chance came in the winter of 1984, when a heavy Vietnamese bombardment of the Khmer Rouge camp allowed the Montagnards to escape. Traveling on foot without maps or weapons, they finally arrived at the Thailand border.

Months of Delays

After several months of delays, the group was allowed to enter the country and stay in a sprawling camp inhabited by more than 130,000 Cambodian, Lao and Vietnamese refugees. For weeks, the Montagnards were considered just another group of homeless victims “with no real future, no prospects,” according to one camp official.

But all that changed when one of the Montagnard refugees, Ha Doi, wrote a letter to Jim Lienghot, an assimilated Montagnard living in Los Angeles. He asked if Lienghot knew the whereabouts of Donald Scott, an American who had befriended him during the war.

Lienghot knew that Scott had been a former medical administrator in the Central Highlands and quickly forwarded the letter to him. Scott, a Maine businessman, said he was “floored” when he got the letter.

‘It Was Astounding’

“Ha Doi was a dear friend of mine, and for years I had assumed he had been executed, like so many of his countrymen,” Scott said. “It was astounding to think that a group of Montagnards had survived by traveling nearly 700 miles on foot across Southeast Asia.”

Scott flew to Bangkok, got permission to visit the refugee camp and discovered that Ha Doi and 212 of his fellow tribesmen were indeed alive. He resolved to help them come to America, believing that U.S. officials would readily approve the Montagnards for immigration, based on their historic role during the Vietnam War.

“But I was wrong,” he said. “I encountered a lot of young civil servants in the State Department who perhaps don’t remember the war. They meant well, but they didn’t know what I was talking about. One asked jokingly if a Montagnard is something you eat or drive.”

After several months of frustration, Scott found a receptive ear in Lacy Wright, who directs U.S. refugee programs out of the American Embassy in Bangkok. Wright said he and other officials “quickly appreciated” the significance of the Montagnards and tried to accelerate their passage to America.

Spread the Word

Meanwhile, Scott spread the word to Vietnam veterans organizations and former Green Beret groups that the highlanders were languishing in the Thailand refugee camp. Soon, a “Montagnard grapevine” spread throughout the country, producing phone calls and letters to government officials on behalf of the refugees, he said.

Early this year, the U.S. State Department agreed to let the Montagnards immigrate, after spending six months in the Philippines to become better acquainted with American culture.

“It was the least we could do for these people, who sacrificed so much for us,” said Scott, who now plans to launch a similar drive to bring thousands of Amerasian children still in Vietnam to the United States, as well as the estimated 200,000 to 400,000 Montagnards still living in Vietnam.

“If there was any vestige of decency and integrity left in this country, we had to do right by these people, whose only crime was that they were our friends,” he said. “They deserve everything they’re getting in their new homes.”

First Thanksgiving

Back in Greensboro, Dock and his fellow tribesmen were getting ready for their first Thanksgiving dinner in a church recreation room. At first, they had difficulty eating large slabs of turkey and slices of pumpkin pie with chopsticks, but soon got the hang of it.

Asked about the meaning of Thanksgiving, Dock smiled.

“I have heard that Americans first came here with nothing. The Indians gave them food, and gave them hope,” he said.

“It is much the same for us, I think. We have nothing. We have lost so much. But we are here, and now we begin. For that, we have thanks.”