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.