Vietnam's High Ground

Armed Struggle for the Central Highlands, 1954-1965

J. P. Harris

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780700622832, 9780700622832
• eBook ISBN: 9780700622849
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

During its struggle for survival from 1954 to 1975, the region known as the Central Highlands was the strategically vital high ground for the South Vietnamese state. Successive South Vietnamese governments, their American allies, and their Communist enemies all realized early on the fundamental importance of this region. Paul Harris’s new book, based on research in American archives and the use of Vietnamese Communist literature on a very large scale, examines the struggle for this region from the mid-1950s, tracing its evolution from subversion through insurgency and counterinsurgency to the bigger battles of 1965.

The rugged mountains, high plateaus, and dense jungles of the Central Highlands seemed as forbidding to most Vietnamese as it did to most Americans. During 1954 to 1965, the great majority of its inhabitants were not ethnic Vietnamese. Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime initially supported an American counterinsurgency alliance with the Highlanders only to turn dramatically against it.

As the war progressed, however, the Central Highlands became increasingly important. It was the area through which most branches of the Ho Chi Minh Trail passed. With its rugged, jungle-clad terrain, it also seemed to the North Vietnamese the best place to destroy the elite of South Vietnam’s armed forces and to fight initial battles with the Americans. For many North Vietnamese, however, the Central Highlands became a living hell of starvation and disease. Even before the arrival of the American 1st Cavalry Division, the Communists were generally unable to win the decisive victories they sought in this region.

Harris’s study culminates with an account of the campaign in Pleiku province in October to November—a campaign that led to dramatic clashes between the Americans and the North Vietnamese in the Ia Drang valley. Harris’s analysis overturns many of the accepted accounts about NVA, US, and ARVN performances.

1

Vietnam and the Central Highlands to 1954

The Peoples Involved

The main participants in the struggle considered in the pages that follow were the Vietnamese, who became engaged in a civil war; the Highlanders (the original inhabitants of the region), who were sucked into it (in many cases against their will); and the Americans, who intervened because their leaders saw the conflict in Vietnam as part of a global struggle against communism. It is presumed that for most readers the Americans need no introduction. The provision of a little background on the Vietnamese and the Highlanders seems in order, if only to show why they were so different and why the relationships between them were often so fraught.

The Vietnamese before the French Conquest

For much of their history, the Vietnamese had little knowledge of the Central Highlands region. They as a distinct people and Vietnam as a political entity had originated hundreds of miles to the north in the region known as Tonkin, especially in the delta of the Hong (or Red) River. For about a thousand years, between the late second century BC and the early tenth century, the ancestors of the modern Vietnamese were under the control of the Chinese Empire. By the time they were able to break away and form a distinct kingdom in the early tenth century, the Chinese had exerted a very powerful—indeed, formative—influence on their language and culture.¹

Over the centuries successive rulers of China attempted to regain control over the Vietnamese. It is important to the Vietnamese national consciousness that, in some very bloody wars, they ultimately defeated these efforts. Displaying impressive military prowess and great determination, they also expanded their territory southward along the coastal plain between the Truong Son mountain range and the sea. By 1471 they had largely broken the power of the once mighty Champa, a group of Hindu kingdoms forged by the Cham ethnic group.²

Even though Vietnam was divided into northern and southern states for a lengthy period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its southward expansion continued. By the late eighteenth century the Vietnamese had conquered the Mekong Delta, taking it from Cambodia.³ The Nguyen Dynasty, the last imperial dynasty in Vietnamese history, gained control of the whole of Vietnam in the early nineteenth century and ruled from Hue in central Vietnam. Initially it seemed powerful and splendid. But as that century wore on, like the Manchu Dynasty in China, it could neither isolate Vietnam from the European powers nor match their naval and military technology.⁴

The French Takeover of Indochina

In the second half of the nineteenth century Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia all fell under French rule, and the Nguyen Dynasty’s emperors became no more than puppets of the French. The French conquest began under Napoleon III, whose forces captured Saigon in 1859. By 1867 the French had taken control of the whole of Cochin China, roughly the southern third of Vietnam. They also secured a protectorate over Cambodia. The French conquest of Vietnam was completed under the Third Republic, after the fall of Napoleon III’s Second Empire during the Franco-German War of 1870–1871. In 1883 France used military force to get Emperor Tu Duc to accept a protectorate over the rest of Vietnam. In 1893 the French rounded off their empire in Indochina by establishing a protectorate over Laos. Although Cochin China was technically a colony and the rest of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were protectorates, the French endeavored to establish a fairly unified administrative system throughout the area they ruled.⁵

The Nguyen rulers had claimed a sort of suzerainty over the Central Highlands and had established settlements on the region’s eastern edge. But the Vietnamese had not yet colonized it on a substantial scale. The reasons are not hard to understand. The main economic basis of Vietnamese life was wet rice agriculture. The main direction of their expansion over the centuries had therefore been south, along the coastal plain and into the wetlands of the Mekong Delta, where the terrain was particularly suitable for that activity. To many Vietnamese, the Central Highlands, by contrast, seemed distinctly alien—the abode of evil spirits. The French would explore the region thoroughly for the first time and open it, for better or worse, to development and colonization.⁶

The Traditional World of the Highlanders

Before they fell under French rule, the peoples of the Central Highlands were certainly primitive compared with the Vietnamese or the Cambodians. But they were Iron Age rather than Stone Age peoples and could not be considered “precontact” populations in the sense of having had no relations with more sophisticated societies outside their forests. Champa had in fact maintained outposts deep in the Highlands, had sought tribute from Highlanders, and had traded with them for a variety of commodities, including areca nuts, betel leaves, precious hardwoods such as ebony and eaglewood, cinnamon, elephant ivory, and rhinoceros horn.⁷ After Champa’s destruction the Vietnamese took over this trade. But the illiterate Highland societies seemed to the Vietnamese to fall well below their Chinese-influenced standards of what it meant to be civilized. Highlanders often wore little clothing, in some cases had darker skin, and practiced body modifications such as filing their teeth and plugging their earlobes. The Vietnamese called the Highlanders Moi, which means savages, and often made little effort to conceal their disdain.⁸

Although the Highlanders were not precontact peoples before the French arrived, they were to a large extent prehistoric. With the exception of the Chru, a small group that adopted the Cham script, they had no written language of their own, and what the lowland peoples of Indochina recorded about them was extremely limited. Linguistic research undertaken in the twentieth century indicates that some Highland peoples, such as the Rhade and the Jarai, speak Austronesian languages. The speech of other groups, the largest being the Bahnar, belongs to the Mon-Khmer group of Austroasiatic languages (which have rather more in common with Vietnamese).⁹

Western scholars have also undertaken ethnographic and anthropological studies, and a certain amount is known about the traditional customs and ways of life of the various Highland groups. Once French colonization gained pace after the First World War, however, these customs tended to change quite rapidly. With large-scale Vietnamese immigration to the Highlands from the second half of the 1950s and with war raging there from the early 1960s, it was very hard for traditional ways to survive.¹⁰

Even the most thorough and scholarly studies of the Highland peoples are strikingly vague on some issues. Little is known about when most of the groups arrived in the Highlands, where they came from (except in the most general terms), how they moved around over time, or the history of their relations with one another.¹¹ The Highland peoples are often regarded as divided into tribes, but the term “tribe” needs to be used cautiously. The Jarai, the most numerous of the Highland peoples, were certainly capable of identifying who among their neighbors was Jarai and who was not. But there were a number of Jarai subgroups that had different customs and spoke somewhat different dialects.¹² At the time of the Second Indochina War, the Jarai, like most other Highland groups, had no “tribal” chiefs or policy-making bodies above the village level.

The Jarai did have some priest-like or shamanic offices that, though not passed down from father to son, were held continuously over centuries. These shamans were called kings: the King of Fire, the King of Water, and the King of Wind. The first two commanded respect over a large area of the Highlands and apparently not just among the Jarai. But their authority involved primarily relations between human beings on the one hand and the spirit world and nature on the other. Though they may have exercised some form of political power on occasion, their primary function was not political in the sense that Westerners would understand it.¹³

A lack of centralized authority was the norm among the Highland ethnic groups in the mid-twentieth century, and in most respects, individual villages had probably always run their own affairs. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, chiefs—in times of stress and for certain purposes—had authority over several villages and considerable geographic areas, raising war bands that were hundreds strong. Certain chiefdoms, though not necessarily passed from father to son, had endured within the same family or clan for several generations. The French tried to gain the cooperation of traditional chiefs and use them as intermediaries in running their administration in the Highlands.¹⁴ The French administration was destroyed completely in 1945, and although it was revived thereafter, in many areas it had collapsed again by 1954. By the mid-1950s most Highlanders acknowledged the authority of a village chief or village council, but they did not recognize any tribal authority outside the village. As an American Special Forces handbook from the 1960s warned its readers:

In Montagnard life, the village rather than the tribe is the important political, social, and economic unit. The villager’s life is conditioned by the immediate environment; he knows that environment well—but little beyond. Thus, a really accurate picture of this complex culture would not deal only with a dozen or so tribal groups but also with the thousands of villages. Such an elaborate study is clearly impossible for reasons of space and insufficient information.¹⁵

As the village was the traditional center of Highland life, it needs attention here. Research suggests that villages of up to 180 houses were not unknown among the Bahnar in the precolonization period. Some traditional longhouses could house hundreds, so there may have been some villages with several thousand inhabitants. But the majority of Highland villages observed by Westerners or testified to by Highlanders in the twentieth century were much smaller. A village of 400 people appears to have been well above the average size.

Observers found it almost impossible to generalize about the way Highland villages were sited and laid out, there being much variation according to tribal custom and local circumstances. Naturally, it was rare for a village to be located far from a reliable source of fresh water. Usually surrounded by the fields tended by their inhabitants, villages were also rarely far from the edge of the forest, which served both as an additional source of food and as a refuge in case of danger. In some Highland cultures, particular areas of forest were regarded as integral to the villages that exploited them.

Traditional Highland longhouses were built of wood found locally, with bamboo usually playing a large part in their construction, and were thatched with dried long grass. The living quarters were well above the ground, supported on pilings, to keep the occupants safe from dangerous animals. A common arrangement was to have a long, central corridor dividing the interior, with compartments on each side, each compartment housing a nuclear family with its own hearth. The family groups sharing the longhouse depended on the kinship system observed in the particular village. Among those peoples observing a system of matrilineal descent (including the Rhade and the Jarai), a young married couple would likely live with the wife’s parents; among those observing patrilineal descent, young couples normally lived with the husband’s family. Most longhouses had a large common room for general gatherings and for the reception of guests. Many Highland groups also had a large “men’s house” in the village that housed adolescent males and bachelors and served other communal functions. A smaller spirit house, where religious rituals were performed, was another feature of the villages of many Highland groups.¹⁶

Agriculture was based largely on the slash-and-burn system (in which trees were felled and burned to fertilize the soil), and rice was the main crop. In most cases this was “dry rice,” which depended on rain for a healthy crop. But some Highland groups with access to sufficient water also practiced “wet rice” agriculture, involving paddies that were deliberately flooded. Manioc, maize, millet, sugarcane, and, by the twentieth century, tobacco were also cultivated. The Vietnamese sometimes labeled the Highlanders nomads. But for most Highland groups that cultivated essentially the same areas for generations, this was very misleading.

Chickens, pigs, goats, and buffalo were kept and eaten, although the last were normally reserved for special occasions. Women collected bamboo shoots, wild fruit, roots, herbs, and saffron from the forest. Men hunted deer, wild pigs, and other game and fished in the rivers. Highlanders used iron and steel to make...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Vietnam and the Central Highlands to 1954
• 2 The Diem Regime and the Central Highlands, 1954–1960
• 3 War in the Central Highlands, 1960–1961
• 4 Buon Enao and the Civilian Irregular Defense Group Program, 1962
• 5 Refugees, Strategic Hamlets, and ARVN Operations, 1962
• 6 Reversal of Fortune, 1963
• 7 The Central Highlands, January–June 1964
• 8 Crisis in the Highlands, July–December 1964
• 9 An Escalating War, January–March 1965
• 10 The Monsoon Offensive, April–August 1965
• 11 Plei Me: Background, Siege, and Relief, August–October 1965
• 12 Retreat, Search, and Pursuit, October–November 1965
• 13 Catecka and X-Ray, November 1965
• 14 Albany and After, November–December 1965
• Summary and Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Gallery
• Back Cover