Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) Read Online Free Page A

damp, malarial mountains and valleys of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, first by the Cham and Khmer peoples, most of whose descendants now populate Cambodia, and then by the Kinh, the lowland Vietnamese whose ancestors migrated southward from China and multiplied into Vietnam’s majority ethnic group.
    The first Europeans to encounter the diminutive, dark-skinnedmountain tribesmen were seventeenth-century Jesuits. These French missionaries noted that while the more numerous Kinh had lighter skins, an advanced culture, and a sophisticated language closely related to the neighboring Chinese, the mountain people were seminomadic, Bronze Age primitives subsisting on hunting, gathering, and slash-and-burn agriculture. Possessed of no written language, they worshipped local spirit pantheons and spoke in a babble of tongues. French missionaries dubbed them “Montagnards,” mountain people, and set out to convert both them and the Kinh to Christianity.
    The Jesuits modified the Roman alphabet and added diacritics to accommodate the Kinh tonal language (six tones in the north, five in the south), as well as certain vowels and consonants, then translated the Bible into this
quoc ngu,
alphabet. They won many converts among the Kinh, especially in the hunger-haunted, hardscrabble northern regions, but few among the shy peoples of the misty highlands. This was mostly because, every six or seven years, each Montagnard clan abandoned its tiny farmstead, burned its thatched huts, and moved a few miles to another clearing, where they hacked new fields from the thin jungle soil and started over. Missionaries found it hard to maintain contact.
    If they clung tenaciously to their old gods and animist spirits, if they resisted change, most Montagnards nevertheless regarded the French as friends, or at least not as enemies. Then and now, however, the Kinh, whether North Vietnamese or South Vietnamese, regarded the mountain people as
moi
, literally savages—inferior, even subhuman creatures—and proceeded to murder and subjugate them, meanwhile shamelessly exploiting their lands and resources. To put it plainly: The Kinh view the various Montagnard tribes much as nineteenth-century Americans reckoned the indigenous peoples of the Great Plains—the Lakota, the Pawnee, the Arapaho, the Comanche, the Kiowa, etc. To most Kinh, the only good
moi
is a dead
moi
.
    North America’s indigenous peoples were considerably better fed than the Montagnards. They were taller, more muscular, longer lived, better suited physically and temperamentally to war, and far quicker to adapt European ways—notably, the horse—in defense of their homes. Neither theNative American nor the Montagnard had much success resisting the more technologically advanced cultures that invaded them.
    Starting in the seventeenth century, France colonized Indochina. After World War II, she granted political autonomy to Montagnards in the Central Highlands’ five provinces. The tribes were in no way prepared to capitalize on this: They had been oppressed for so long that they had few educated people, and fewer still that were capable of governing or administering. Despite their supposed sovereignty, nothing changed for them.
    In 1952, Vietnam’s French puppet emperor, Bao Dai, abolished Montagnard autonomy but allowed them to retain their lands. Two years later the Viet Minh communists drove the French out; the 1954 Geneva Accords placed all Montagnard tribes under the authority of the new South Vietnam government. When Ngo Dinh Diem was elected president in 1955, he immediately labeled the Montagnard, Cham, Khmer, and Chinese peoples “ethnic minorities.” Under the pretense of bringing them into Kinh culture, oppression became systematic and open. Nearly a million lowland Vietnamese were resettled in the highlands on Montagnard lands.
    While the highland tribes feared and distrusted the southern Kinh, the northerners presented a greater and