Category Archives: Central Highlands

14 pounds of dwarf

Afghanistan, Central Highlands, Montagnards, Vietnam Veterans

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by fellow veteran Tom Glenn for the Washington Independent Review of Books. Glenn’s review of Red Flags is here.

What prompted you to write Red Flags now, more than forty years after your deployment to Vietnam?

No one had yet written about our running battle with the South Vietnamese, our hosts at the war we were paying to attend. I wanted to get into their elaborate, even treasonous corruption and our complicity in it. The Vietnamese were diverting our supplies – medicines, gasoline, ammunition, weapons, rations — to the black market and on to the enemy, and we looked away. They also  avoided engaging the North Vietnamese invading their territory, and left it to their civilian village militias and our forces to bear the brunt of stopping them. Finally, I felt I owed it to the Montagnard tribes people to describe their mistreatment at the hands of the Vietnamese, persecution that got so bad it led to violent mutinies, which in turn caused terrible conflicts for their American advisers who actually felt a greater loyalty to the aboriginal tribes than to Saigon.

What parallels do you see between Vietnam and Afghanistan?

A lot. I can’t believe the US Agency for International Development (USAID) is back at it again, trying to win hearts and minds with paved roads and concrete wells. It’s all too familiar. A sanctuary for the enemy just across the porous border of Pakistan. The corruption – all the way up to family members of the heads of state, the missing millions, warlords with private armies, a besieged government out of favor with Washington, fixed elections, institutionalized heroin trafficking, and another undeclared war against insurgents. How we were inveigled into it also bears an uncanny similarity. Like Kabul, the black-market and aid-corrupted government in Saigon was mainly focused on a) self perpetuation, b) diverting economic and military aid for personal profit, c) the transshipment of illegal drugs, using their military aircraft to haul most of it, and d) oh, yeah – doing just enough about the insurgents to placate the Americans so the cornucopia would stay open for business. Reading about police and Afghan military turning on their American instructors and actually killing them is also alarmingly familiar. As are the recent stories of failed Afghan safe-haven villages (called “strategic hamlets in Vietnam) where our civic assistance has neglected to provide the inhabitants with so much as water.

In the last year, the stream of new books about Vietnam has grown. What are your thoughts on why?

I think the interest is spurred by the constant press references to the similarities with our earliest counter-insurgency war in Southeast Asia. Recently declassified material is also fueling it; many documents are finally seeing daylight. I mean, did you know the first Westerners to covertly attack North Vietnamese territory during the war were Norwegian contractors? Also, we finally seem open to hearing from our former enemies. L. Borton, for instance, has translated a fascinating memoir, due out next year from Persea Books, by a North Vietnamese combat doctor in the highlands. No polemics, just what happened.

For the vets, there is probably an emotional corollary to this uptick in books. My Army friend Harry Pewterbaugh says that guys—like five of us who had served together — started looking for one another as we hit our 60s. There’s a spike on Internet vet forums of old friends looking for each other.

The fiction craftsmanship in Red Flags is exemplary, but your career has been in publishing. Where and how did you master the craft?

I’ve spent my adult life working with writers. My late wife, Laurie Colwin, was an accomplished writer and our daughter is showing signs of carrying her genes. I’ve been around it forever as an editor, mostly working on fixing whatever was ailing an author’s book. I harbored the ambition but had little time to devote to it. The first one took forever as a result. And Red Flags wasn’t so swiftly done either. I obsess about getting the details as right as possible and it slows me down.

Red Flags is beautifully organized, paced, and written. How long did the book take you? How many drafts did you do?

From final first draft to the final-final-draft took two years, but I’d been working on the book for two years before that. Number of drafts? I’ haven’t  counted them up but the forests of North America stand grateful for my computer. Certainly another whole book’s worth of text landed on the cutting-room floor.

You and I were in the highlands at the same time (1967-1968), but our paths never crossed. Did you foresee then how the war was going to end?

I moved around three provinces and passed through all the major coastal bases, so we might have bumped into one another.

Did I see the inevitable end coming? Yes. We had the planes, tanks and technology. But they had General Giap and the ingenious strategies. The American command kept trying to taunt, lure, trap the North Vietnamese forces into big unit battles but rarely succeeded. The NVA didn’t cooperate.  Even when we did manage to interest the VC in this sort of combat, the outcome seemed not to matter. The Vietnamese people didn’t care. They just wanted it to stop. Especially the bombing and the artillery. Their government never came up with some ideal to rally around, as had the North. Forget communism. The rallying cry was independence, a unified country free of foreigners. Ho’s Viet Minh fought the Japanese. Giap flat out defeated the French, and Hanoi promised to wait out the Americans indefinitely. We didn’t often lose battles (assaults really– nothing was ever held) but we absolutely didn’t win the revolution.

I’ve known for a long time about what I call “Vietnam Addiction”—so many of us couldn’t get enough of Vietnam despite the horrors of the war. Your character Miser seems to suffer from the malady. Did you know people who were Vietnam-addicted?

Lots. We teased our “Miser” by running him for mayor of the local town. There were non-coms like him who’d been in Vietnam for seven or eight years, and rarely came closer to the U.S. mainland than Hawaii. They were like centurions who had soldiered around the Asian rim for too long. They were more at home there than in their own culture. They’re still out there too, doing security work in exotic places for three hundred a day, running bars in Bangkok, or living quietly in retirement in South Korea.

Many black noncoms stayed because there were no impediments to making rank in a combat zone, as opposed to serving stateside or in  garrisons in Europe. Their courage was recognized and rewarded promptly, especially by those whose asses they saved. Their experience was needed and respected. Even so, it wasn’t always enough to get them into the mostly white elite outfits like Special Forces.

The seriously addicted ones were the guys who liked bearing arms, liked the actual weapons, the responsibility and the power, the life-and-death risk- taking. Everyone who has ever sighted a weapon for real has felt that kick but it dissipates mighty fast for most of us. For a few the thrill never lessened.

For ordinary mortals Vietnam marked us for life and draws us still.

Do you have any desire to return to Vietnam? If you went back, where would you go? Who and what would you see?

I have a Quaker friend who’s lived in Hanoi for twenty years. I’d liked to see her — and Saigon. I’d liked to see the Montagnards but I wouldn’t like to see what’s happened to them. And it’s unlikely I would be permitted to, either. The highlands were closed to foreigners after the tribes people began protesting their mistreatment. I wouldn’t want to walk around remembering.

What do you most love and regret about your Vietnam experience?

Regret? Marriage number one, I suppose, and that she didn’t write me a Dear John while I was still there (she delivered the news in person on my return). If she had, I would have stayed in Vietnam, mustered out there and maybe signed on with some news outfit as a stringer…maybe gone after an interview with Colonel Kurtz upriver. I would have loved to interview Col. George S. Patton IV, the son. What do I miss most? The guys.

You’ve now written two successful novels. What next? More novels set in Vietnam?

Maybe one more, set in 1963 in Saigon. Then one in Europe, with lots of Nazis.

What part of the Vietnam story needs more attention from writers? Put differently, what books about Vietnam would you like to see written?

Definitely the story of the Montagnards’ mutinies against the South Vietnamese in ’64 and ’65, and in the last hours of April ‘75 as South Vietnam tanked. I’d like to read about the repercussions against their Special Forces leaders who, rumor has it, were scattered afterward for fear of where their loyalties lay. Also, the story of the Special Forces’ agent who they discovered to be a double, maybe triple agent, so they got him drunk, shot him dead and threw him overboard into the South China Sea one night — which resulted in the arrest of the top Green Beret commander. No one’s ever gotten the inside story. And at least a magazine piece on the covert Norwegian contractors’ nocturnal work in the Gulf of Tonkin. Want scandal? How about the cover-up of poison gas that killed Marines at the DMZ? That one’s still deep in the vaults.

Do you still believe in war?  Does it have a purpose that will ever be accomplished?

I was born in a war, grew up a homeless refugee in camps in Germany where our playgrounds were the abandoned, eroded training trenches of Hitler’s army. I was far more skeptical about Vietnam than my peers and had no illusions about warfare. Still, when I saw it up close I was dumbstruck at the audacity of the Johnson administration that they could pose on the lip of the erupting volcano that was Indochina so late in the game, and think they could will it to stop by threatening the lava with superior firepower and Lend-Lease aid. Utter hubris. The one good thing the fall of Vietnam might do, I thought, was discredit such thinking.

Our kids may grow up on video war games but the first military academy in Vietnam was already up and running at the time of Christ. I never thought we would again dare lecture ancient peoples about waging war, certainly not folks whose boys receive AK-47s as birthday presents.

With my mother and sister in Germany, 1947.

Does it surprise you that such an enlightened species still resorts to violence?

Somewhat. The Canadians get it. The Germans and Japanese have learned, albeit the hard way. Why can’t we? But then we don’t know the violence we are suborning. If a photographer covering the Middle East takes truly unnerving photos or pictures of American dead, he’s tossed from the theater. So he doesn’t. Network TV footage versus Al Jazeera’s? – no comparison. If you’d seen Japanese photographs from the Vietnam War, you would think the images from the My Lai massacre were greeting cards. Recently a seventy-dollar medical book on the military’s radical new trauma surgeries was nearly censored lest the public see them. We are insulated. Nor do we have any real sense of being in a state of war — because we’re not. “The army is at war,” says historian David M. Kennedy. “We have managed to create and field an armed forces that can engage in very, very lethal warfare without the society in whose name it fights breaking a sweat.”  Which is why – God help me – we need the Draft back. We would’ve been out of there nine-and-a-half years ago.

What surprises me more is that an enlightened country sends an army thousands of miles after terrorists who’ve attacked New York and Washington and later tried for other domestic targets. I would have expected we install real airport security, radiation detectors in our ports, secure our reservoirs, power plants, nuclear reactors, trains and mass transit, and distribute anthrax antidote doses to every citizen in the country — as Homeland Security started to do but was stopped because it would constitute illegal distribution of a prescription drug. Go figure. I still don’t understand how putting a conventional army there would stop unconventional attacks here. Is any train safe in this country? Apparently a question Bin Laden and his friends were contemplating too before his untimely death. You think our trains are safe now that he’s eliminated.

What would literature be without the literature of war?

Funny. Uplifting. Real. Most war literature is a kind of pornography. Dick Lit. It is to war what a Playboy foldout is to an actual woman. Someone asked me what it was really like guarding a perimeter at night. You can imagine what it would be in a movie or novel. I told him to go home, take his lawn ornament into his bathroom, step in the tub with it, have his wife douse the lights and close the door. Then turn on the shower and stand there for two hours holding the fourteen pounds of dwarf.

Who Are The Cowboys?

Central Highlands, Montagnards

General Westmoreland gets Montagnard bracelet as part of tribal initiation at Mai Linh, camp A-226, 1966. Photo:  Ed Sprague

Some higher-up had decided that movies maintained morale. So every large military installation, base camp and tiny outpost in Vietnam was supplied weekly with reels of film for our viewing pleasure. The usual shipment of canisters contained two half-hour television series shows, like Combat and Batman, and a three-reel feature. Often as not, the three reels were mixed up and from different films, but the troops watched them anyway for a lack of anything better to do.

The Montagnard soldiers at the far-flung Special Forces camps enjoyed the feature films immensely, even though they didn’t understand English or – when the reels didn’t match up — the incoherent jumble of stories. While for the most part they understood that the images were probably an illusion, they regularly lost themselves in the dramas and went proactive, shooting up the screen in a kind of real-life precursor of the combat video game. Projecting the movies onto a whitewashed wall proved a problem: their bullets punched holes through the screens — and often through the walls. So the Americans improvised, using a white sheet or bleached mosquito netting hung in front of stacked sandbags to absorb the hits and keep discharged rounds from flying everywhere.

Westerns were a particular favorite of the tribespeople, who naturally enough sided with the Indians (their situations being so similar). But sometime after 1967 their loyalties shifted and they decided the Indians were Vietnamese (whom they didn’t trust or like after years of persecution) and shot them up when they appeared. Suddenly the Yards identified with the cowboys and the cavalry.

I wondered for years what lay behind this shift, and only recently found the answer to the mystery in a moving essay by George “Sonny” Hoffman.  His is the best description I’ve ever read of the “Mountain People” and the jocular physicality (especially compared to the fastidious, reserved Vietnamese) that endeared them to the Green Berets they fought alongside. You’ll have to read his essay to find out which lone hero caused this sea change in the Montagnards’ attitude toward cowboys when he accepted initiation into the Rhade tribe. It certainly wasn’t General Westmoreland.

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.

Tour Guides for the NVA

Central Highlands, Montagnards, NVA

The Montagnards were our allies, but they also worked for the North Vietnamese, who promised them autonomy over the highlands after the war. The Montagnard gentleman standing next to me in the old uniform shirt and hat, carrying the machete-ax, was either trekking home or off to tend a North Vietnamese shelter. There was no telling.

North Vietnamese soldiers traveled the infiltration trails that ran through Phu Bon province, heading east in small groups toward the populated lowlands along the coast. Sometimes, having already trekked for a couple of months from North Vietnam through Laos into South Vietnam, they used the northern part of the province for R & R.

The NVA soldiers traveled mostly at night, led by local Montagnard guides who knew the trails and stream crossings like this one. They covered seven to nine miles a night, depending on the difficulty of the terrain. Midway between shelters a new Montagnard guide would take over, escorting the group to the next rest shelter. At dusk they’d set out with their new guide, who would hand them off again at the next midway point. Other Montagnards serviced the rest huts with water and food for the infiltrators.

One of our team’s missions was to count heads along the trails, and sometimes to gather intelligence by intercepting a few of the infiltrators, which invariably made the local Viet Cong insurgents unhappy with us. Since we were laughably outnumbered, there was always the risk that one day they’d get unhappy enough to decide to wipe us out.

The Montagnard Smile

Central Highlands, Montagnards

The narrator of Red Flags is warned not to smile too broadly at the Montagnards he meets – to them, our full Western teeth looked feral. Their standard of beauty required teeth to be chiseled down, sometimes into crude points, and lacquered black – or dyed black naturally by the frequent chewing of betel nut (a mild narcotic). I certainly remember the shock the first time a beautiful Montagnard woman smiled at me.

Montagnard women did all the farming and all the heavy lifting, but they also owned everything, including the men. A groom went for about two dollars and a couple of water buffalo. The husband entered his wife’s clan, took his bride’s name and moved into her family’s longhouse. Their kids belonged to her clan; she arranged their marriages. Men had no power; her clan made all the big decisions. His role was to service her relatives. He hunted small game, trapped exotic birds or monkeys. If they divorced, she kept everything.

As fit as they may look, most Montagnards suffered from half a dozen chronic tropical diseases. Treatments existed, but medical care for the tribespeople was close to non-existent. The Vietnamese, who despised the Montagnards, simply wouldn’t treat them, and Western doctors and nurses were few and far between. In the era in which Red Flags is set, Montagnard life expectancy hovered around forty. I doubt it’s any better today.

The Boy in the Batman Shirt

Central Highlands, Montagnards

Montagnard kids, joyous and disarming. Note the loincloth on the boy with the Batman t-shirt. The further you got from town and from the missionaries who gave the kids Western clothing, the more primitive the attire.

My friend Mike Little was an Army MP patrolling Route 19, forty miles upstream from me in Cheo Reo. Burned out on the war, Mike lost his heart to the Montagnard kids frolicking in the local river. Soon he was visiting their village, bringing them gifts and supplies, and forging a remarkable bond. These Montagnard kids and their families “redeemed” him, Mike says. He has gone back nine times since the war to visit his extended family of 172 villagers, even taking his own seven-year-old son, Sean C. Little. At nine, Sean wrote his wonderful account of the experience,  They Don’t Speak English Here.

Mike’s trips have grown difficult since the tribes in the Highlands rose up to protest human-rights violations. Since 2003, he’s been turned back, detained, interrogated, arrested, his former three-day visits cut down to four hours. But he hasn’t given up.

Like Mike, many American soldiers (myself included) developed much closer ties to the indigenous Montagnards than to our nominal allies, the South Vietnamese. As one of the characters in Red Flags says, it’s pretty impossible not to love people who are “innately honest, don’t have a calendar, can’t read or count, rely almost entirely on barter to get by, and insist that everyone get drunk at their ceremonies.”

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.