Word: montagnard
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...When they go mad in the film's second half, their transformations seem arbitrarily decreed by Coppola rather than dramatically justified. We feel nothing. Still, the crew members are almost Dostoyevskian in complexity compared with the deranged Kurtz. When we finally meet the renegade at his camp of Montagnard disciples, Apocalypse Now collapses into a terminal anticlimax. An overweight, bald Brando weaves in and out of the shadows of his temple headquarters, doing little more than spouting quotations from Conrad and T.S. Eliot...
...most heartbreaking moment, the journalists reported, came when the Khmer Rouge ordered the 500 Cambodians in the group to leave the compound and join the peasant revolution. Wives were separated from husbands, husbands from families. About 150 Montagnards, the mountain tribesmen from Viet Nam, also had to leave. One of them told American Businessman Douglas Sapper that since he had fought with them in Viet Nam, he was their blood brother. A Montagnard officer's wife pressed the American to take her five-day-old baby, asking him to raise it. "They asked me for help I couldn...
...thousands of refugees spawned by 30 years of war--seeking escape from bombings, marches and retreats, free-fire zones and protective-reaction strikes; or ripped untimely from their homes by "strategic-hamlet" programs and "forced-draft urbanization's"--will start to go back to their homes now. The Montagnard tribesmen, alternately cajoled and maltreated by a Saigon administration uninterested in their problems or their culture, will begin to live with a government with at least some commitment to fighting traditional Vietnamese varieties of racism...
...Viet Cong" and "Communist-led forces," and the Republic of Vietnam, now little more than an enclave around Saigon, was still "South Vietnam." In United Press International's dispatches, North Vietnamese troops and the NLF "overran" province after province. And Time attributed many of Saigon's difficulties to Montagnard tribesmen "who, as despised fourth class citizens in South Vietnam, were ripe for exploitation by the Communists," and who now "infested" much of the country where they were fourth-class citizens...
EVEN IN WHAT they did report, American papers left their readers to guess at Key connections and supply crucial facts themselves. Montagnard involvement in the conquest of Ban Me Thuot received some play, but no one pointed out that the tribesmen--however ripe Time now considers them for Communist exploitation--generally fought in the past for France and the United States. Is the apparent Montagnard defection another sign of the end of Thieu, a portent of a new national Vietnamese unity that will embrace racial minorities or just a matter of different groups of tribesmen? The Guardian, a Maoist news...