A war of their own: FULRO — The other national liberation front, Vietnam 1955–75

Link to the program recording here.

In the first of three programs to mark the 50th anniversary of the fall of Indochina to communist forces in 1975, the FCCT welcomes author William H. Chickering to discuss his exhaustive work on one of the great secret armies of the Vietnam War era.

“This is a lost and extraordinary story. William Chickering has excavated it with heroic persistence, and now tells it with authority, empathy and grace,” wrote David Quammen, the author of the bestselling book Spillover, and three-time National Magazine award winner. “Damn, what a fine and valuable book.”

In 1967, Chickering commanded a Mike Force battalion in Vietnam of montagnards -- highland tribesmen who were also members of a secret army, the United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races, or FULRO. Its purpose was to rid the highlands of all Vietnamese, both communist and non-communist. Fighting for land and dignity, they saw the Vietnamese as colonialists and themselves as revolutionaries. For a while, FULRO appeared capable of changing the course of the war. Then, inexplicably, it faded away.

Chickering’s quest to understand FULRO took him to Phnom Penh in 1973, where he found five of its six leaders -- the sixth having been mysteriously murdered. He was unable to discern the truth behind their political smoke.

Two years later, 150 of them -- men, women and children — sought refuge in the French Embassy as the city fell but were expelled into the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Among them was the family of Bhan, one of the leaders. In the United States at the time of the fall, Bhan tried to learn their fate with Chickering's help, but Cambodia had become a tomb.

In 1986, Bhan headed out into the world to learn for himself. He resurfaced in Cambodia 22 years later, after an extraordinary odyssey, never having found them. Had they and the rest of the FULRO montagnards been executed, or could they still be alive somewhere in the hinterlands?

Determined to learn the truth, Chickering moved to Phnom Penh. His research led him to the widow of a Cambodian Cham widely assumed to have been FULRO’s puppeteer and eventually to FULRO’s secret papers. From these, he was able to piece together why FULRO faded away and how that was connected to its one last heroic shot in 1965 to win a country of the montagnards’ own.

This extraordinary account corrects history’s assumption that Vietnam’s montagnards were only pawns, revealing how an ideology of their own -- ethnonationalism -- gave them the agency to create an army and clandestine movement that kept Hanoi, Saigon and Washington guessing.

The discussant for the evening will be Mark Dodd, a distinguished Australian foreign correspondent who arrived in Phnom Penh in 1991 to reopen the Reuters news agency bureau that had been closed in 1975. He covered the United Nations Transition Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) interregnum from 1992 to 1993, and reported the discovery of FULRO remnants in Cambodia’s remote eastern borderlands in 1992. He left Cambodia in 1995.

Moderator: Dominic Faulder, FCCT board member.