Word: buon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...inhabitants of Buon Yun supplement their spare diet of present comforts with the rich legends from a past that is never very far behind them. The birth of each child precipitates a search for the proper dewdrop, containing the spirit of the appropriate ancestor, to place on its tongue. Spirits swarm through the village, susceptible to human requests but never recriminations; when disasters occur they only mean that the prayers of the living have been improperly presented. A'de, their creator, is still in his heaven, holding Buon Yun up by means of a sturdy rope...
...dangles the village perilously close to Cambodian supply routes favored by the Viet Cong, and the blades of arriving American helicopters threaten to snip Buon Yun from its mooring. A detachment of twelve U.S. soldiers settles in to protect the village from...
...equally eager to guard Buon Yun from the Americans' embrace. Both are strangers to the Montagnards, but characteristically the villagers even have an ancient legend to describe this fearsome confluence of alien protectors: the story of the barking deer, coveted both by Kra the tiger and Bru the eagle. As they fight over who will give the deer the warmer home, their claws and talons turn the prize into "a red splotch on the ground...
Author Rubin, who worked with Montagnards as a Special Forces sergeant from 1962 to 1964, uses this simple parable to stunning effect. Through it, the catastrophe that falls upon Buon Yun assumes the inevitable rhythm of high drama. Like the eagle and the tiger, the Americans and Viet Cong tell themselves-and for the most part are convinced-that all they are trying to do is protect the village. The few who sense disaster waiting behind a tangle of motives are powerless to reverse the story line of the Montagnard legend...
...terrified of his astrology chart and unwilling to endanger his career by resisting an NLF attack. It becomes apparent, slowly (but quicker than it should, since Rubin at his subtlest is pretty elephantine), that these and other people's interaction is building towards a catastrophe: the destruction of Buon Yun and the American soldiers it welcomed at the hands of an NLF assault team and a miscalculating American bomber pilot...