Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1984 | Volume 35, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1984 | Volume 35, Issue 2
Where was this battlefield? To say that it was in Indochina or more precisely in the central highlands of South Vietnam doesn’t help much. But visualize for a moment the United States as it existed in the 175Os during the French and Indian Wars. Recall that the American settlers lived mostly on a narrow strip between the Atlantic and the foothills of the Appalachians. To the west were a series of outposts—Fort Pitt, at the confluence of the Monongahela and the Allegheny, for instance—to protect the settlements from attack by the French and their Indian allies, whose forces stretched in a great arc from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes, then south to the Mississippi delta.
Now superimpose South Vietnam on that map: its coastline extends about the distance from Pittsburgh (Fort Pitt) to Savannah. Like our early settlers, most of the Vietnamese also live in a narrow strip along the coast. In place of the Appalachians are the mountains of the Chaîne Annamitique, with peaks reaching over eight thousand feet. Beginning in the early 1960s, the South Vietnamese, with the help of American Special Forces teams, established a series of outposts in these highlands along the hundreds of miles of border they shared with Laos and Cambodia. These were built to protect South Vietnam from the North Vietnamese, who, like the French and Indians, also stretched in a great arc to the north and west, from the Demilitarized Zone south along the socalled Ho Chi Minh Trail in supposedly neutral Laos and Cambodia. One of these outposts was at Plei Me, about two hundred and fifty miles from Saigon and a hundred inland from the coast. This was rugged country, inhabited only by small bands of Montagnards (what we would have called’Indians) of