During the Vietnam War, U.S. Army Special Forces teams worked with the Montagnards – tribal people who lived in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. These warriors served alongside Green Berets in combat against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) for several years. They received American arms, ammunition, and combat training from their SF advisors.
However, some of these Montagnard tribesmen were also members of a secret Montagnard revolutionary movement that existed from the 1950s to the 1970s. The United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races or FULRO (French acronym) was an organization whose objective was autonomy for indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in South Vietnam. It was initially a movement opposed to Vietnamese rule but evolved into a guerrilla group that conducted insurgent activity against the governments of North Vietnam as well as South Vietnam.
Some members of the US-trained Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) were also members of FULRO. Several unsuccessful uprisings by FULRO (1964, 1965) were defeated by the South Vietnamese Army. The movement continued to exist after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975; however, it slowly died away in time.
William H. Chickering, the author of A War of Their Own, commanded a Mike Force battalion of Montagnards during the Vietnam War. Chickering dropped out of Yale University in 1963 to enlist in the Army. He became an officer and then joined U.S. Army Special Forces. After Vietnam, he left the Army, went back to college, and graduated from medical school. He has worked as a doctor in the United States, Korea, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Cameroon, and China. In 2012, he moved to Phnom Penh with his French wife and two children. While in Cambodia he established contact with former members and leaders of FULRO to cointinue his decades-long research into the FULRO movement.
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A War of Their Own – FULRO: The Other National Liberation Front, Vietnam 1955-1975, is published by Casemate, May 2025, 256 pages. The book is available on Amazon.com.
An exerpt of the book, pages 152-163, has been published in the Sentinel, a monthly bulletin posted by Chapter 78 of the Special Forces Association.
