For my friends (mentors) who are veterans of operations in Laos.  We should recall the lesson on abandonment when considering future operations with indigenous forces.

The UConn Daily Campus

Presentation recalls ‘secret’ CIA war in Laos

By Zach Lederman

Staff Writer

http://www.dailycampus.com/presentation-recalls-secret-cia-war-in-laos-1.3150989#.UyM_f2RDupc

Published: Friday, March 14, 2014

Updated: Friday, March 14, 2014 02:03

SANTIAGO PELAEZ/The Daily Campus

Major Sar Phouthasack of the Royal Lao Army and Special Guerilla Unit attached to the U.S. Special Forces was the keynote speaker at a ceremony in Konover on Thursday evening.

The atmosphere of Konover Hall in the Dodd Centre on Thursday night was a solemn one during the Vietnamese Student Association’s presentation, “The Vietnam War and the Secret War in Laos.”

The evening began with an introduction by Kimberly Thai, the VSA’s President, and Garret Grothe, who honored U.S. troops with a moment of silence, as well as a playing of the national anthem.

Once the anthem concluded, the opening ceremony began with two cultural acts: one Vietnamese, and the other Laotian. The first act featured five female members of the Vietnamese Student Association who performed a traditional Vietnamese dance representing the cultural view of the Vietnamese people as having descended from dragons. The second performance was also a dance, featuring Mina Phomphakdy, who performed a traditional Laotian dance used to grant good luck to the audience. Following the ceremonies, the keynote speaker was introduced: Major Sar Phouthasack of the Royal Lao Army and Special Guerilla Unit attached to the U.S. Special Forces.

He began his talk with a request for everyone in the audience: “Defend your nation. Support your troops and protect your fellow citizens. I have seen no greater country in my life than the United States.”

Phouthasack is a veteran of the Vietnam War but he identifies as a veteran of what many refer to as the “Secret War” in Laos. This war, which is not typically taught in school, refers to the CIA’s recruitment operation in the Hmong villages of Laos. The CIA recruited Hmong soldiers from these villages, and it was said that over the course of the war, many Hmong lost their lives in order to save even greater amounts of American troops.

Phouthasack was described as one of the greatest assets that the American army had. During the presentation, it was estimated that he had saved potentially upwards of thousands of American lives during his time on the front. He was trained by various groups, including the Green Berets and the CIA, and performed various covert intelligence operations.

Unfortunately, when the Americans left Vietnam, Phouthasack and his fellow troops were abandoned, leaving them to face the wrath of the Communist survivors who enacted ethnic cleanses all across Laos, raping and killing entire Hmong villages suspected of having supported the Americans. Though many were not so lucky, Phouthasack used his skills to successfully find refuge in Thailand before finally making his way to the United States.

At times, the stories were difficult to listen to. Phouthasack spoke of the friends he lost and the atrocities he witnessed, and as Grothe stated towards the beginning of the night, “This is part of all our history. Tonight isn’t about whether you identify as Laotian or American. Tonight is about remembering what happened to our fellow human beings, and doing what we can to see that it does not happen again.”

Following the speech, Phouthasack hosted a brief question and answer session before moving to the Asian American Cultural Center for a reception. The show was coordinated by the Vietnamese Students Association, hosted by the Asian American Cultural Center, and co-sponsored by the Cambodian Student Association, the Laotian and Thai Student Association and the CT Asian Pacific American Affairs Commission.

An important and often overlooked aspect of the Vietnam War.  We should keep this example in mind in all our work with indigenous forces.

V/R
Dave

The Snake-Eaters and the Yards

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/american_military_history/2013/11/the_green_berets_and_the_montagnards_how_an_indigenous_tribe_won_the_admiration.single.html

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The Vietnamese tribesmen who fought alongside American Special Forces won the Green Berets’ admiration—and lost everything else.

By Rebecca Onion

Wounded Green Berets are evacuated by helicopter from a camp in Plei Me, South Vietnam, in November 1965.

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

In 1965, syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak used a frontier metaphor to describe the American Special Forces’ advisory role with Vietnamese tribesmen. “Assume that during our own Civil War the north had asked a friendly foreign power to mobilize, train, and arm hostile American Indian tribes and lead them into battle against the South,” they wrote.   

REBECCA ONION

Rebecca Onion, who runsSlate’s history blog The Vault, is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. Send her an email or follow her on Twitter. 

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If that historical hypothetical suggested wild possibilities, Evans and Novak used it advisedly. For four years, Special Forces had been training an oppressed minority group in guerrilla tactics, providing them with weapons and acting as de facto aid workers in their communities. When Americans remember Vietnam, we often think of the war as having three major actors: the North Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese, and the American military. But there was another player: the Montagnards.

The indigenous Montagnards, recruited into service by the American Special Forces in Vietnam’s mountain highlands, defended villages against the Viet Cong and served as rapid response forces. The Special Forces and the Montagnards—each tough, versatile, and accustomed to living in wild conditions—formed an affinity for each other. In the testimony of many veterans, their working relationship with the Montagnards, nicknamed Yards, was a bright spot in a confusing and frustrating war. The bondbetween America’s elite fighters and their indigenous partners has persisted into the present, but despite the best efforts of vets, the Montagnards have suffered greatly in the postwar years, at least in part because they cast their lot with the U.S. Army. In a war with more than its share of tragedies, this one is less often told but is crucial to understanding the conflict and its toll.

The Montagnards, whose name is derived from the French word for mountaineers, are ethnically distinct from lowland, urban Vietnamese. In the early ’60s, writes military historian John Prados, almost a million Montagnards lived in Vietnam, and the group was made up of about 30 different tribes. The Montagnards spoke languages of Malayo-Polynesian and Mon Khmer derivations, practiced an animistic religion (except for some who had converted to Christianity), and survived through subsistence agriculture.

In the early ’60s, the Green Berets were supermen of the Cold War: tough, smart, and canny.

When the United States Special Forces first arrived in Vietnam in the early 1960s, the Montagnards were already decades into an uneasy relationship with Vietnam’s various central governments. Before their withdrawal, the French had promised to give the Montagnards protected land—a promise that vanished with them. The Communist government of North Vietnam had included the right for highlander autonomy in its founding platform in 1960, but many Montagnards were uneasy about Communist intentions. Meanwhile, South Vietnam’s President Ngô Đình Diễm had begun to settle refugees from North Vietnam in the highlands. His government neglected education and health care in the Montagnard areas, assigning inexperienced and ineffective bureaucrats to handle their needs.

Tensions between the Vietnamese and the Montagnards were ratcheted up by racism. Vietnamese called the tribal people mọi, or savage. Prados recounts a story of a “young Vietnamese woman who told an American, in all seriousness, that Montagnards had tails.” Stereotypes about the “primitive” nature of the tribesmen—unfounded beliefs that they were all nomadic and lived by slash-and-burn farming—made it easier for the government to advocate the expropriation of their lands.

* * *

Meanwhile, in the United States, American Special Forces were taking on an increasingly large role in American military planning and strategy. The Cold War seemed to demand a decentralized, versatile style of fighting. In 1961, John F. Kennedy, a proponent of such irregular warfare, authorized the use of the iconic green beret, a symbol that would capture a nation’s imagination. In the early ’60s, the “Berets” were seen as the supermen of the Cold War: tough, smart, and canny. 

Starting in 1961, in an initiative at first run by the CIA, the Special Forces moved into the Vietnamese mountains and set up the new Village Defense Program (a forerunnerof the better-known Strategic Hamlet Program). The Montagnards’ forested mountain homelands, which ran along the Cambodian and Laotian borders in the western portion of Vietnam, were prime highways for North Vietnamese forces to move men and materiel. The Viet Cong, understanding the way the Southern government discriminated against the tribes, promised much if the tribesmen would defect—and some did. But the VC also preyed on isolated villages, taking food and pressing Montagnards into labor and military service.

When Kennedy visited Fort Bragg in 1961, the Green Berets demonstrated their skills by catching, preparing, and eating a snake.

The working relationship between Green Berets and Montagnards began in the Village Defense Program. Detachments of 12 Green Berets trained Montagnards, drawn from the tribe dominant in the surrounding area, into “civilian irregular defense groups,” or CIDGs. The idea was that a security zone would radiate outward from each camp, with CIDG serving as defense forces, advised by small groups of American Special Forces and South Vietnam’s own special forces, the LLDB. With help from the Navy’s Seabees, Special Forces built dams, roads, bridges, schools, wells, and roads for Montagnard groups, and Special Forces medics provided rudimentary health care. By December 1963, 43,000 Montagnard defenders guarded the area around the first camp, Buon Enao, from the Viet Cong, while 18,000 Montagnards were enlisted in mobile strike forces, which were deployed by air to spots where conflict broke out.

In interviews, Special Forces often described the people they were training as loyal, honest, and friendly and compared them favorably to Vietnamese allies. In 1970, Gloria Emerson of the New York Times visited a CIDG camp at Dakseang. The Green Berets there were uninterested in being interviewed, but she managed to ask them some questions about the Yards:

When they talk of the Montagnards—uncorrupted by the cities, physically superior to most South Vietnamese, less sophisticated in their outlook—the Americans are fiercely possessive ... Because the Green Berets enjoy their own toughness, they appreciate some of the more primitive aspects of the Montagnards’ habits.

The tribal customs were strange; but then, the regular Army found Special Forces’ ways odd. Edward E. Bridges, a Green Beret who was at Fort Bragg when Kennedy came to visit in 1961, remembers that as part of their demonstration for the visiting president, the men caught, prepared, and ate a snake. The nickname “snake eater” stuck to the Special Forces. The Berets, who often made jokes about the Yards eating dogs and seemingly unpalatable vegetation, saw something of their own values in these ways.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/american_military_history/2013/11/the_green_berets_and_the_montagnards_how_an_indigenous_tribe_won_the_admiration.single.html

Robert B. Rheault, Green Berets commander who faced scandal in Vietnam, dies at 87

Some Vietnam and Special Forces history for Sunday morning.

Robert B. Rheault, Green Berets commander who faced scandal in Vietnam, dies at 87

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By Matt Schudel, Published: October 26 E-mail the writer

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/robert-b-rheault-green-beret-commander-in-vietnam-scandal-dies-at-87/2013/10/26/f2b47cb6-3dad-11e3-b7ba-503fb5822c3e_story.html

Robert B. Rheault, a charismatic Army colonel who could scale mountains, dive to the ocean floor and speak flawless French, arrived for his second tour of duty in Vietnam in May 1969, when the war was at its raging peak. He had the job that had been his destiny, commander of the Green Berets, the elite Special Forces unit that often operated outside the standard Army chain of command.

Within a month, Col. Rheault (pronounced Roe) was embroiled in a case that spread to the highest levels of the Pentagon, White House, CIA and Congress and brought a premature end to his promising military career. The Green Beret murder case, which was splashed across magazine covers and in headlines for weeks, became one of the most puzzling, disturbing and tragic episodes of the war, but it has largely been forgotten in the decades since.

(AP) - Col. Robert B. Rheault, a former commander of the Army’s Green Berets in Vietnam in 1969.

In the words of Time magazine, it was “a Vietnam War scandal second only to the My Lai killings” — in which U.S. troops killed hundreds of innocent civilians — “and one of infinitely more complex moral overtones.”

Col. Rheault died Oct. 16 at his home in Owls Head, Maine. He was 87.

His wife, Susan St. John, confirmed his death. She did not disclose a cause.

Col. Rheault, a 1946 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., joined the Army’s Special Forces in 1960. He traveled all over the world, engaging in actions along the East German border and peering into China from high in the Himalayas. He trained military units in Jordan, Pakistan, Tunisia and Iran.

In one training exercise, according to Jeff Stein’s 1992 book “A Murder in Wartime,” Col. Rheault’s commandos sneaked into the headquarters of a sleeping U.S. general, drew a red line across his throat and left a note on his pajamas that said, “You are dead.”

During Col. Rheault’s first tour in Vietnam in 1964, he was an intelligence and operations officer with the Green Berets. Few people knew what he did on his long solo forays into the jungle, but he always came back alive.

In the mid-1960s, when he received a master’s degree in international relations from George Washington University, Col. Rheault also worked as a counterinsurgency specialist for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had close contact with top officials at the White House, State Department, Pentagon and CIA. He was among the few people who knew about clandestine U.S. operations in Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia and Laos.

As the war in Vietnam began to be questioned on the home front, the Green Berets remained one of the few popular parts of the military during an unpopular war.

In 1966, “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” a song co-written and sung by Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler, was a ­No. 1 hit on the pop charts. In a flattering 1968 film portrayal of Special Forces units in Vietnam, John Wayne played a colonel in “The Green Berets.”

‘A scintillating leader’

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/robert-b-rheault-green-beret-commander-in-vietnam-scandal-dies-at-87/2013/10/26/f2b47cb6-3dad-11e3-b7ba-503fb5822c3e_story.html

Viewpoint: Could one man have shortened the Vietnam War?

A figure from Vietnam War history that was unfamiliar to me.  But doesn't this have a ring of familiarity?  

The morale project grew out of the Pentagon's great problem in the early part of the Vietnam War. The US Air Force was bombing North Vietnam because they wanted to stop the North Vietnamese communists from supporting the insurgency in South Vietnam led by the Viet Cong. 

The idea was to break the will of the North Vietnamese. But the Pentagon didn't know anything about the North Vietnamese. They knew nothing about Vietnamese culture, Vietnamese history, Vietnamese language. It was just this little speck in the world, in their view.

But this is a useful anecdote for any analyst and something we have had drilled into us – insurgents do not have to win, just not lose.

Everyone believed what Goure said, with one exception - Konrad Kellen. He read the same interviews and reached the exact opposite conclusion. 

Years later, he would say that his rethinking began with one memorable interview with a senior Vietcong captain. He was asked very early in the interview if he thought the Vietcong could win the war, and he said no. 

But pages later, he was asked if he thought that the US could win the war, and he said no.
The second answer profoundly changes the meaning of the first. He didn't think in terms of winning or losing at all, which is a very different proposition. An enemy who is indifferent to the outcome of a battle is the most dangerous enemy of all. 

Now why did Kellen see this and Goure did not? Because Goure didn't have the gift.

But I think this is an important lesson about listening.  It should not need to be a "gift."

Listening is hard because the more you listen, the more unsettling the world becomes. It's a lot easier just to place your hands over your ears and not listen at all.

V/R

Dave

8 July 2013 Last updated at 19:58 ET

Viewpoint: Could one man have shortened the Vietnam War?http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23037957

Konrad Kellen was an unknown defence analyst who might have changed the course of the Vietnam War if only people had listened to him, argues Malcolm Gladwell.

Listening well is a gift. The ability to hear what someone says and not filter it through your own biases is an instinctive ability similar to having a photographic memory.

And I think we have a great deal of trouble with people who have this gift. There is something about all of us that likes the fact that what we hear is filtered through someone's biases.

There are many examples of this phenomenon, but I want to focus on the story of Konrad Kellen, a truly great listener.

During the Vietnam War, he heard something that should have changed the course of history. Only it didn't. And today no-one really knows who Kellen was - which is a shame because his statue should be in the middle of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC.

Continue reading the main story

About the author

• Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist and author
• Hear more on this story in Radio 4's Pop-Up Ideas, broadcast on Tuesday 9 July at 09:30 BST and repeated on 10 July at 20:45 BST

• Or catch up with iPlayer

Kellen was born in 1913. His full name was Katzenellenbogen - one of the great Jewish families of Europe. They lived in splendour near Berlin's Tiergarten. His father was a prominent industrialist and his stepmother was painted by Renoir, a family friend.

Kellen was tall, handsome and charismatic. He loved Ferraris. He could quote long sections of Thucydides from memory. One of his cousins was the great economist Albert O Hirshman. Another was Albert Einstein.

He lived one of those extraordinary 20th Century lives. When he was quite young, he left Berlin and moved to Paris where he became friends with Jean Cocteau. On a ship, the America, he was offered a job by the gangster Dutch Schultz. And when he got to the US, he met the author Thomas Mann and became his private secretary. Then he joined the US Army during World War II.

After the war was over, a young woman came up to him in a Paris cafe and asked if he'd do her a favour: "My father is an artist and I need someone to take his work back to America." He agreed. The woman was Marc Chagall's daughter.

Kellen was the kind of person that people went up to unannounced in cafes and asked great favours of. He had that gift.

Continue reading the main story

Konrad Kellen

• Born 1913 in Germany
• Fled Nazi Germany for New York aged 20
• Worked for US Army intelligence unit in WWII and awarded the Legion of Merit
• Policy analyst at Rand Corporation in California
• In 1969, he and Rand colleagues wrote an open letter to the US government recommending US troops be withdrawn from Vietnam within a year
• Died aged 93 in 2007

After the war, the army sent him back to Berlin where his job was to interview German soldiers to find out why they kept fighting for Hitler long after it was clear that the war was lost. Then he went to work for Radio Free Europe. Again he had the job of a listener, asked to interview defectors from behind the Iron Curtain to get a flavour of what life was like under the Soviet regime.

And finally, in the early 1960s, he joined the Rand Corporation, a prestigious think tank in California started by the Pentagon after the war to do top-level defence analysis. And there he faced the greatest challenge of his career - the Vietnam Motivation and Morale Project.

The morale project was started by Leon Goure, who was also an immigrant. His parents were Mensheviks. They escaped from the Soviet Union during one of Stalin's purges. Goure was brilliant, charismatic, incredibly charming and absolutely ruthless, and he was Kellen's great nemesis.

The morale project grew out of the Pentagon's great problem in the early part of the Vietnam War. The US Air Force was bombing North Vietnam because they wanted to stop the North Vietnamese communists from supporting the insurgency in South Vietnam led by the Viet Cong.

The idea was to break the will of the North Vietnamese. But the Pentagon didn't know anything about the North Vietnamese. They knew nothing about Vietnamese culture, Vietnamese history, Vietnamese language. It was just this little speck in the world, in their view.

How do you know that you're breaking the will of a country if you know nothing about the country? So Goure's job was to figure out what the North Vietnamese were thinking.

He came into Saigon and took over an old French villa on Rue Pasteur in the old part of the city. He hired Vietnamese interviewers and sent them out into the countryside.

The job was to find captured Viet Cong guerrillas and to interview them. Over the next few years, they came up with 61,000 pages of transcripts. Those transcripts were translated into English and summarised and analysed.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23037957