Book Review

A War of Their Own
FULRO: The Other National Liberation Front, Vietnam 1955–75
by William H. Chickering
Casemate (April 1, 2025)
264 pages
Available to pre-order in hardcover

By Jim Morris

In one sense I’m the perfect person to write this review. In another I’m the wrong guy, because I’m so intimately connected to the subject that I cannot be objective, and I can’t read the book as a general reader would.

In the summer of ’73 I was in the lounge of the Saigon municipal airport. I saw a guy at the bar dressed pretty much like me, jeans, harness boots, but with an old SF rucksack at his feet. I shouldered my own rucksack, approached him and introduced myself. He said, “I’ve heard about you. You’re the SF guy who came back to do an article about the Montagnards for Rolling Stone. I’m Will Chickering, the SF guy who came back to do an article about the Montagnards for Harper’s.” We’ve been friends ever since, though widely separated by geography. A few years back he told me he was writing a book about FULRO. I’ve been waiting for it ever since.

It’s here and it’s excellent. It is, of course, of special interest to former SF who worked with Montagnards because it will fill in gaps in their knowledge of their own tours that they have carried for fifty years. If you’re former SF and didn’t work with Montagnards or fight in Vietnam it will illuminate a chapter in the SF epic that you will want to know.

FULRO was the Montagnard separatist organization. Will says it’s an acronym for Fronte Uni pour la Liberation de Races Opprimees, Unified Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races. But in 1964 I was told it was an acronym for Fronte Unife de Lutte des Races Opprimees, Unified Fighting front for Oppressed Races, and so I had believed from then until now. Will is probably right because he has the documents.

If you served in II Corps then your Strike Force belonged to it. We ran something like a 10,000-man army and it was wall-to-wall FULRO. In 1964 I was XO of a team (A-424) just outside of Cheo Reo. My CO, Captain Crews McCulloch came back from a patrol with the news that our Montagnards were going to revolt against the Vietnamese, and we better be ready for it. He had it all, their founding documents, their plan, who was in charge, a flag, everything. He told our “B” team commander, Major Rick Buck, and then took it to Saigon. They didn’t believe him. The Agency guy who came to investigate actually asked why we would make up this fantastic story. That was just before Crews threw him out of the camp.

We were back on Okinawa when the revolt happened in September, so we missed it. All we heard were rumors. The first thing Will’s book did for me was clear up one of those rumors. I had been told that when the Yards revolted at Chuck Darnell’s camp, Buon Sar Pa, they shoved the Vietnamese SF troops down the holes in the outhouse and machine-gunned them down there. Turned out they had been executed and buried in a hole that had been dug for a latrine, but not yet used. Not great, but not as bad as the rumor.

A significant point that Chickering raises that as far as I know has not been raised elsewhere is the importance of malaria. Until quinine was developed in the 19th Century nobody lived on the Highlands but the Montagnards, and they paid a high price for the privilege, a 40 percent infant mortality rate. When quinine was developed the Highlands were flooded with immigrants and they took land the Montagnards considered their own. The racial animosity that exists between the Montagnards and the Vietnamese exceeds any I had been exposed to before. I could write a book about just that, and it wouldn’t make anybody look good.

There are 31 tribes of Montagnards in Vietnam. They existed by dry rice farming and hunted with crossbows. The men wore loincloths, and the women wore sarongs and usually went topless.

But it would be a mistake to think that because they were primitive they were stupid. When the French were there, they provided educational opportunities for bright Montagnard kids, and they did just fine. Of the group that came here after the war I know a Montagnard millionaire, and another with a master’s in social work. There is also a Montagnard published author. Not having educational credentials most made their living with manual labor, but they excelled at it, and I know of none on welfare. The organizers of FULRO were the products of a French education.

In 1968, as a young captain, Will Chickering ran the B-50 (Project Omega) Mike Force. That’s when he first met the FULRO folks.

This book is actually two books. One is an objective account of how FULRO was formed, and how its internal politics interacted with its mission and with the war that raged around it. The other is a subjective account of Will Chickering’s passionate involvement with a people he came to love. In the same vein this review is also an article about how Will’s experiences interact with and illuminate mine.

Here are some of the major players. Y-Bhan Kpor, Y-Dhon Adrong, Y Bun Sur Paul, and Kpa Doh.

Will’s friend Bhan had become a Cambodian army colonel by 1975. The tragedy of his life was that he was in the Infantry Officer’s Advanced Course at Ft. Benning when his family in Phnom Penh was killed by the Khmer Rouge. Eventually he found his way back to SE Asia, formed a new family, and died there recently.

Dhon was the vice president of FULRO. The short version of what happened to him is that his ego ran away with him and opposed the president, Y-Bham Enoul, directly, which offended enough rivals that he was arrested and executed.

Y Bun Sur Paul was perhaps the best educated of the FULRO leadership. After the revolt he left Vietnam, leaving his family behind. He took command of the former Buon Sar Pa strike force, then a Cambodian army Battalion. They were all executed when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh

My three main Montagnard friends were Phillippe Drouin, aka Y Kdrowin Mlo aka The Cowboy (The subject of Dan Ford’s book, the Cowboy). Nay Luette, and the very same Kpa Doh.

Kpa Doh gave me my first Montagnard bracelet when A-424 arrived at Camp Buon Beng. Will says his wife was rumored to be very beautiful, but he never met her. I can confirm her beauty, but I don’t think she liked me very much. She gave birth to her first son during my first combat patrol and Kpa Doh was the interpreter. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t immediately abort the patrol and bring him home to her. She was always scrupulously polite, but never warm.

I looked Kpa Doh up when I got back in ’67. By then he had been fired as chief interpreter and de facto commander of the II Corps Mike Force. When I found him in Ban Me Thuot he had filed out, acquired an air of casual authority, and a Kawasaki 650. He had also acquired a bad rasp in his speaking voice. As a young man he’d had a brief stint singing propaganda songs for the Diem regime. That’s where he met his wife. They sang duets. So, I was pleased to read Will’s account of the battle where he acquired that wound. Kpa Doh was up and moving to direct his troops. He packed the wound to stop the bleeding and kept directing his troops until the battle was over.

My other friends did not have better luck. By 1967 Philippe was a FULRO Colonel, commanding a “division” in Darlac province. He got in a fight with a VNSF sergeant over a bar girl in BMT. He and the sergeant stepped outside to settle it. But he had a couple of ex-Mike Force troops guarding his jeep and when they saw their colonel squaring off with the sergeant, they wasted the sergeant. At that time the Viet authorities in BMT tolerated FULRO as a temporary ally, but they couldn’t tolerate that. Philippe had enemies in FULRO, and they iced him for the Viets. For a time, I believed a rumor that he had got away, but in 1973 in Phnom Penh Kpa Doh, then a major in the Cambodian army, confirmed his death. “Man who kill him live two block away. I introduce you.” I declined.

In 1964 Nay Luette was a driver and interpreter for USOM in Cheo Reo. He also did brilliant intelligence work for me. By 1973 he had become the second and last Minister of Ethnic Minorities for the Republic of Vietnam. He died in a re-education camp. Will thinks that was the result of a spontaneous brain bleed. Montagnards say the camp commander said, “This moi is supposed to have a big brain. Let’s have a look at it.” They believe he was still alive when the Viets took off the top of his head, but that’s what they would believe. In any case it was missing when his family got the body back.

That’s not in the main narrative of the book, but in the very useful end notes.

There are two other major characters who must be mentioned. The first is Y Bham Enoul, the president and commanding general of FULRO. No one has ever stood higher in the esteem of his people. He was rumored to have supernatural powers. But by the end he had retired to what amounted to house arrest in Phnom Penh. He was executed by the Khmer Rouge.

The last is Les Kosem. He is described as a colonel in the Cambodian army in this book. But in 1973 Kpa Doh introduced him to me as a Cambodian brigadier general. I have no explanation for this discrepancy.

Les Kosem was a Cham whose people had come from Vietnam, and his main goal was autonomy for the Cham people. One could make a case that all of FULRO was his idea, a three-part revolutionary organization. There were wings for the Montagnards, the Cham, and the KKK (Khmer Kampuchea Krom). The six southern provinces of Vietnam had originally been Cambodian, and Cambodia wanted them back.

I spent a great day at Les Kosem’s compound in Phnom Penh, plotting revolution with a bunch of Cham intellectuals. Les Kosem was about six feet tall, slim, and engaging. I gave him my SOG knife, and he gave me a camo jacket he had worn as a lieutenant in the French colonial paratroops. When Phnom Penh fell he got out, to Malaysia, though he later died there of cancer. His widow is a leader in the Cham community there.

Will was able to do this book because he had become a medical doctor, worked in an ER in Beijing, and could visit Cambodia, Malaysia, and Paris, to interview the surviving players.

But he was unable to answer my big question. Kpa Doh and his family were among the Cambodians who had taken refuge in the French embassy. The KR threatened to storm the place unless the French turned them out, and they did. Those people were executed.

But later I was told that Kpa Doh had made a deal to fight the Vietnamese for them and was killed in battle a couple of years later. Some of the KR were Jarai, as was Kpa Doh, so the story might be true. If it’s true then his widow, or one or more of his boys might have survived.

Nobody knows for sure.

I think about that often.

Click here to read an excerpt from the book.