The Story of Anak Cu Chiang: Caught in the Crossfire of the Vietnam War

As US Army Special Forces (the ‘Green Berets’) pushed north in their fight against North Vietnamamese forces in the early 1960s, they came face-to-face with the natives of the Central Highlands — the Anak Cu Chiang, or ‘Children of the Mountains’.¹

The Anak Cu Chiang are an ethnically distinct subgroup, labelled moi (‘savage people’) by the Vietnamese Kinh majority, not allied to either side of the conflict.

They were recruited by the Green Berets on the side of South Vietnam, and over 70,000 fought throughout the Vietnam War in their familiar mountainous domain.² Their bravery was consistent, and exemplified in July 1964 when 60 Anak Cu Chiang, together with 300 American troops, held off North Vietnamese forces three times their size at Nam Dong.³

There was, however, underlying discontent. Just a few months after Nam Dong, 3,000 Anak Cu Chiang fighters across five camps took 20 American troops hostage and killed 80 South Vietnamese soldiers.⁴ The rebellion surfaced the almighty paradox in which the Anak Cu Chiang found themselves: battling on the side of their oppressors, the South Vietnamese government, by whom they had faced discrimination for decades.⁵

The Anak Cu Chiang did, however, continue to serve alongside the Green Berets until the fall of Saigon to the communist North in April 1975 — by which time 220,000 of their number had perished and 85% of their villages destroyed.⁶

Post-war, they were left marginalised as enemies of the new regime — moi to the old and moi to the new — and were abandoned by empty promises of relocation to the US, with a resettled population of only 3,000 by the year 2000.⁷