By Kevin Seabrooke
Details the efforts of the resistance movement of the United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races (FULRO), whose objective was autonomy for various indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in South Vietnam, including the Montagnards in the Central Highlands, the Chams in Central Vietnam, and the Khmer Krom in Southern Vietnam. With some support from Cambodia and the People’s Republic of China FULRO often conducted guerrilla warfare against both South and North Vietnam.
Author William Chickering commanded a Mobile Strike Force Command (MIKE)—a key Army Special Forces component in the Vietnam War—battalion of Montagnards in Vietnam in 1967. The Montagnards were highland tribesmen who were part of the secret army of FULRO, whose goal was to drive all Vietnamese, whether communist or not, who they saw as colonialists, from what they considered their land.
Chickering has spent decades investigating the history and fate of FULRO and its leaders, even moving to Vietnam in the 1980s in his search for the truth.
A War of Their Own: FULRO: The Other National Liberation Front, Vietnam 1955–75 (William H. Chickering, Casemate Books, Havertown, PA, 2025, 256 pp., 26 photos & 3 maps, $34.95 HC)
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