THE REVOLT OF THE MONTAGNARDS
Little good news came out of South Vietnam in the early 1960s. Military reverses in the fight against communist troops, the November 1963 assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem, coup plotting and inept juntas paralyzed the country’s government. The performance of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or ARVN, was lackluster despite increasing numbers of U.S advisers and the influx of modern equipment. One bright light was the recruitment of ethnic minority Montagnards, a French phrase for “mountain people,” into militias supported by U.S Army Special Forces. Together, they protected villages and thwarted attempts by the Viet Cong to expand their control in the Central Highlands.
The alliance between Montagnard tribes and the South Vietnamese government, however, was fraught with upheaval. Among the Montagnard militiamen were dissidents who wanted the tribes to have complete autonomy from the government, and in September 1964 they revolted against the South Vietnamese units in charge of them. Negotiations brought the rebellion to an end after 10 days. But tensions remained, and a strong united force of the ARVN and Montagnards, who had a reputation as tough fighters, never materialized—another missed opportunity during the long war.
U.S. aspirations for a closely woven ARVN-Montagnard force emerged in 1961, when Col. Gilbert B. Layton, an Army officer at the CIA office in Saigon, conducted an in-depth study of the 1946-54 Indochina War that gave Vietnam its independence from France. Layton noted that French colonial administrators cultivated good relations with minorities, about 20 percent of the citizenry. Some indigenous groups saw an alliance with France as a way to nurture their own nationalistic hopes, while others sought protection from their traditional lowland enemies, the Vietnamese.
In 1951, Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the senior French officer in Indochina, used those affiliations as weapons against the Viet Minh, the organization created by Ho Chi Minh to lead the
