New Friends

Deep in South Viet Nam's highland forests live more than 500,000 primitive natives whom the French called montagnards-people of the mountains. The aboriginal montagnards hunt with crossbows and poisoned arrows, practice animal sacrifice to the spirits of the sky and water; montagnard women go barebreasted, and men wear only loincloths. Though they inhabit more than half the land of South Viet Nam, the montagnards consider the Vietnamese to be carpetbaggers who came into the hills only to exploit them and steal their land. Taking advantage of this loathing, Communist Viet Cong guerrilla cadres from the north moved into the mountains, adopted tribal customs, even took montagnard wives in an effort to persuade the mountain people to join their ranks.

Training Program. But the Viet Cong overplayed their hand. They took rice and livestock from the montagnards in order to feed their guerrillas, used terror tactics against the more recalcitrant mountain villages. Tens of thousands of montagnards fled to government-held territory. Prodded by the U.S., President Ngo Dinh Diem's government has begun an attempt to win the montagnards over with a resettlement program. Even more important, U.S. military advisers have started a program to arm and train montagnards, who then are sent back into the hills to defend their villages and to keep the surrounding territory out of Communist hands.

Most of the recruits have come from the Rhade (pronounced Rah-day) tribe, drawn by the near-legendary tales about a young U.S. civilian named David Nuttle, 26. an expert hunter and a crack shot with the crossbow, whom tribesmen have dubbed Y-Dio--King of the Rhade. Nuttie first arrived in Viet Nam in 1959 with the International Voluntary Services, a U.S. welfare organization, picked up the Rhade tongue on his extensive motorcycle travels through montagnard territory. An agriculture graduate of Kansas State University, he helped the Rhade develop better methods of cultivation, learned their customs, wrote two studies on Rhade culture. This year he became a U.S. Army civilian employee, was given the formidable task of wooing the Rhade away from the Viet Cong.

Attack Repulsed. At Nuttle's suggestion, U.S. military advisers work and live intimately with the Rhade volunteers--even to the extent of joining in the bruising drinking bouts with kpie wine that are a standard form of Rhade entertainment. After two weeks of military instruction, the volunteers head back for the hills to defend their villages. To date, not one of the 5,000 tribesmen trained has defected to the Viet Cong. Many montagnard hamlets have become almost fortresses, surrounded by bamboo fences, spikes and poisonous bushes called kpung, whose tiny thorns enter the skin and cause temporary paralysis.

So successful has the rearming program been that two more training centers soon will open, and five more are in the planning stage. Three weeks ago, calling on the lessons learned from their military advisers, the Rhade evacuated a village under attack by a superior force of Viet Cong guerrillas, hid their weapons in pigsties, ditches, and under bushes in the jungle. The Communists soon abandoned the deserted village and the Rhade tribesmen, resupplied by air, filtered back, dusted off their hidden weapons, and waited for the next strike. When it came last week, the reinforced tribesmen sent the Viet Cong running.

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