Category Archives: Cheo Reo

Tiger Medicine

Central Highlands, Cheo Reo

The local civilian militia (CIDG) claimed they’d just happened to hear something walk through their night ambush site. More likely the only thing they’d ever been planning to ambush was animal, not human. The giveaway was the condition of the hide: if they’d shot it by mistake, it would have been riddled with holes. Instead, the tiger had gone down with just one perfect shot. The pelt was valuable, but the real prize were the teeth and organs, destined for the local apothecary.

The pharmacist in the town market in Cheo Reo worked hard to impress townspeople with the potency of his remedies, prepared from organs and excretions of powerful creatures like the tiger, or the reptile curled up on top of the barrel. A bear’s head and hide are just out of sight. My personal favorite: a brew of rice wine mixed with bat’s blood that was supposed to combat tuberculosis.

The Middle of Nowhere

Central Highlands, Cheo Reo, Montagnards

I set the novel Red Flags in an area I knew well – Phu Bon, the most remote province in Vietnam. Roughly the size of Delaware, Phu Bon was beautiful and desolate, underpopulated by Vietnamese – maybe 11,000, mostly resettled unwillingly from the north — but the ancestral heartland of the Jarai tribe of what the French called Montagnards, “people of the mountains,” and the Vietnamese called moi, “savages.” Sixty thousand Montagnards lived in Phu Bon’s 5000 square kilometers.

Not counting the tigers, snakes, crocodiles and the steady flow of tourists from North Vietnam  trekking toward the coast or setting up rest areas to recuperate from their long journey on the Ho Chi Minh trail, that worked out to just under thirty-five people per square mile. When I was there, a grand total of seventy-six residents of the province were American soldiers, missionaries and the occasional CIA spook. Seventy-six of us in the middle of nowhere.