Word: montagnard
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...have always been sure that enough talent could work such magic, and in The Barking Deer Jonathan Rubin shows considerable talent. Even so, the author wisely does not try to capture the war in its dreadful magnitudes of size and duration. He ambushes a piece of it from a Montagnard village in the central Vietnamese highlands, circa 1964, just before the machinery of destruction began to dwarf its human masters...
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...
...Welcome to Quang Due, the most remote place on earth," says the briefing officer. A quick 40-minute hop from Saigon in a C-130 transport, it is hardly that. But the filmy gray clouds wafting across the silent blue hills and the weathered faces of Montagnard tribesmen staggering along the airstrip with their worldly goods on their backs certainly convey a sense of primitive isolation...
...Patricia Smith, 46, has lived and worked in the Highlands capital of Kontum for 14 years. A graduate of the University of Washington Medical School, she has spent that time working with the Montagnard tribesmen, operating an 87-bed hospital that is funded by contributions from the U.S. Soft-spoken and portly, she drives about Kontum in a red Honda sedan. Dr. Smith has survived many minor disasters and at least two major ones. In 1968, her hospital was badly shot up during the Communist Tet offensive; four years later, the ARVN 23rd Division set up a fire base...
...into the countryside to supervise the still shaky truce in South Viet Nam, an inspection team from the Four Party Joint Military Commission (the U.S., South Viet Nam, North Viet Nam and the Viet Cong) alighted from American helicopters in a soccer field at Ban Me Thuot, the Montagnard capital in the Central Highlands. Suddenly they were surrounded by a milling crowd of several hundred people, who threw stones and roughed up eight of the Communist representatives. A Saigon spokesman later apologized for the incident but claimed that the people had been "infuriated by Communist violations of the cease-fire...