 A man driving a truck down a mountain road. Nothing unusual about this. Except that the last two trucks which tried to make this trip never reached their destination. Behind the wheel of the truck is an American soldier assigned to United States Army's special forces operating in one of the most dangerous regions of Southeast Asia. The guerrilla infested central highlands of Vietnam. He is here to assist, to advise, and to help a remarkable people who have been called upon to progress in a single decade from a peaceful, primitive life into the violent 20th century. As commander-in-chief, the late President Kennedy left to us this directive. We need a greater ability to deal with guerrilla forces, insurrections, and subversion. We must be ready to deal with any size of force, including small, externally supported bands of men. And we must help train local forces to be equally effective. This is the story of what one group of Americans are doing today to carry forward that far-sighted policy. Eraging today in South Vietnam is not being fought in the streets of cities. Since the guerrilla onslaught began in the late 1950s, the Republic of Vietnam has had little trouble in retaining control of the great urban centers. The place names on the map. But the central highlands, the Hoang Son Cordillera, are a mountainous, largely jungle-covered region remarkably like those mountainous regions of Spain where the term guerrilla was born. Here, everything favors the lightly armed, fast-moving irregular. And it is here that the struggle for Vietnam may ultimately be decided. For the Hoang Son dominates both the rich rice bowl of the Mekong Delta to the south and the narrow, densely populated coastal plain bordering the South China Sea. Into this remote, almost impenetrable region, the communists of North Vietnam have infiltrated a steady stream of agitators, terrorists, and professional guerrillas. Their target is not only the highlands, but the whole of Vietnam. Military strategists on both sides of this struggle are agreed that he who gains the highlands will have won the fight for Vietnam. And political history of few nations have been so greatly influenced by geography. For more than 900 years, the emperors of China dominated all Vietnam, except the highlands. Here, in the 13th century, the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan suffered one of his few defeats. And here, in our own century, were mustered the revolutionary forces which overwhelmed 180,000 highly trained French troops in the campaign's climax by Dien Ben Phu. Colleges of the highlands are inhabited by many races, each with a tradition and a way of life distinctly its own. Known to the outside world by the French term, Montenards, or mountain people, they are known to themselves by such tribal names as Rade and Mong. Are vastly different from the light-skinned lowlanders whom the world knows as Vietnamese. Believed to be the original inhabitants of the region, before the arrival of the Vietnamese more than 2,000 years ago, most of the Montenards continue to live a stone age existence in the midst of the 20th century. Confined for centuries to the isolated areas of the plateaus, the Montenards have little contact with the city dwellers of the lowlands. Take little interest in the complexities of modern life. For most of them, Vietnamese is a foreign language. For such people, words like communism and democracy have little meaning. Cannot without great difficulty even be translated into their own dialects. Here in the mountains, both Saigon and the communist capital of Hanoi seem equally remote and unimportant. Through these mountain villages for more than a decade have passed increasing numbers of communist guerrillas. Befriending the villagers, rewarding those who cooperate, terrorizing those who resist, the guerrillas have converted much of the highlands into a secure staging area for their assaults on the roads and population centers of the lowlands below. Americans encountering these people and this situation often feel transported 200 years back into time to our own French and Indian wars when British and French vied for support of Indian tribes on the frontier. And like the primitive tribesmen of those earlier wars, the Montenard on his own ground is a formidable ally. Tough, muscular, a skilled hunter and woodsman, a man of great personal courage, the Montenard holds the key to a strategically vital area of Southeast Asia. If he can be one to the government's cause and given the training and equipment to resist communist terrorism, the guerrillas' jungle sanctuary and the Vietnamese highlands will disappear. With this in mind, United States military advisors and the government of Vietnam early in the 1960s began a program to win the active allegiance of the Montenards. Their primary objective was to seal off the hidden supply routes through the mountains from the communist north. Chosen to execute the plan were the anti-guerrilla experts of the US Army Special Forces, accompanied by Vietnamese Special Forces, whom they themselves have trained and through whom the bulk of their work in the village will be performed. Equipped with all the skills of the highly trained airborne infantrymen, the Special Forces soldier brings with him a number of unique abilities designed to meet just such situations. Selected for linguistic aptitude and a talent for tact and diplomacy, Special Forces personnel are adept at winning friends, from the village chief down to the lowliest peasant. Going into a Montenard village for the first time is an experience you don't soon forget. In the first place, the only people you're likely to find are the ones who were too old or too young or too sick to run away when they saw you coming. You give candy to the kids, talk politely to their elders, and try to convince everybody that you're not here to hurt anyone. There's no way of knowing whether the men have run away because they're guerrillas themselves or because they believe guerrilla propaganda about the government troops and the terrible Yankees. All you can do is keep your guard up and try to show by actions that you're here on a friendly mission. Our biggest asset in this kind of thing is the team medic. His main job, of course, is taking care of us. But there are no field hospitals in guerrilla fighting, so one of our medics has to know a lot about his business. With the modern medicines available, he can do a lot for people in places like this. One thing is, when you first ask whether anybody's sick in the village, the first answer is usually no, so then you offer to examine anyone who thinks he might be sick. And in no time at all, you've got a waiting line. What gets you most are the kids. They say people don't miss what they've never had, but you bring medicine into one of these villages where they've probably never seen a doctor and the people turn out to be just as worried about their kids as you are about yours. Pull an aching tooth or save a man's eyesight and you've made a friend for life. You do this kind of work because you've got the medicine and because you're here, and God knows it needs to be done. In some of these villages, half the people have TB, most of the kids have Empatigo, and everybody has vitamin deficiencies. Any decent human being coming into a setup like this would do what he could without asking for a reason. But the fact remains that from a military point of view, this is a good tactic. Squads and platoons of Vietcong gorillas have been coming through here with promises. Now, thanks to our medic, we've come along with something a lot better, something we can give them now. The village chief is impressed, but he is also a man on a tightrope. Unless his new friends can provide adequate protection, cooperation will lead to Vietcong attacks, a devastated village, or his own assassination. The chief makes his decision. The young men are summoned back from the bush. They will train with the American and Vietnamese special forces. They will make a stand. And so, motinards of fighting age assemble. The first step is taken toward recovery of a communist-dominated area within the borders of South Vietnam. All this is taking place in what is, to all intents and purposes, enemy territory. Much will have to be accomplished before anyone here sleeps without a gun close to his pillow. Is it possible to make soldiers out of men almost untouched by the 20th century? What kind of supplies do you issue to men who have never worn pants or shoes? Mountain men are fighters everywhere. The Ozarks, the Scottish Highlands, or the Highlands of Vietcong. Get yourself a mountaineer and you've got potential fighting material. These people may be primitive, but they know what a weapon is and what it's for, even when they still haven't learned how to use it. These people are hunters. They're a peaceful people, basically friendly. Without this guerrilla business that's been going on here for the last 10 or 20 years, you'd be as safe walking through the Highlands as down a street back home. But being hunters, these men grow up fitting arrows into a crossbow. And from a crossbow to an M1 carbine is not as big a jump as you might think. One thing mountain people aren't always so big on, though, is discipline and organization. We had to teach our mountain yards to coordinate with such modern inventions as an aerial resupply drop, and that took a certain amount of doing. Great assets as a fighting man is the energy, the mileage he can get out of a single bowl of rice. Incidentally, this training program was by no means a one-way street. Our own food supplies were supposed to be obtained, as it said in the orders, through normal civilian channels. In practice, this meant a special forces sergeant, our weapons specialist, to be exact, learning how to bargain with Vietnamese shopkeepers in the nearest town. A part of the ritual involved sharing tea with the proprietor and his family while everyone argues politely about prices. Our weapons specialist became an overnight authority on chickens, cabbages, and bacon on the hoof. Not to mention the purchase of 2,800 pounds of rice and miscellaneous other commodities. Classes for the mountain yards were conducted whenever possible by U.S. and Vietnamese special forces working together. It was a complicated operation. The Vietnamese weren't much better off than we were. Most of the lecturers required two interpreters. There were Vietnamese who spoke English and a few mountainards who spoke Vietnamese. One of us would give the lesson to an English-speaking Vietnamese. The Vietnamese would then have to pass it on to a villager who understood Vietnamese. The native interpreter would then pass it along to the trainees. So much can get lost in translation that you have to say everything at least twice. That kind of thing takes time, but it's the only kind of training that pays off under these conditions. Students themselves were amazing. They took to modern firearms faster than most of us thought possible. These men came to us with almost none of the background you'd expect a trainee to have. Most of them couldn't read or write. Most of them couldn't even pass a draft board physical back in the States. Anxious to learn. Most important, what they're learning, how to defend, is their own home, their own families. With that kind of motivation, you can overcome a lot of handicaps. We had to hit the high points of six months worth of training in only a few weeks. But the lessons seemed to take. Our mountainards were shaping up into some of the best anti-guerrilla fighters in Southeast Asia. Very few weeks they progressed from simple hand weapons to the tricky business of demolition. Even radio communications were taken in stride. This was even more surprising and maybe more important. It meant that before we left, radios could be issued tying our friendly villages together in a sort of mutual protection association. Guerrilla bands moving in on an isolated village would touch off an automatic alarm throughout the network. Togetherness is a big thing with these people. When father goes off to training camp, the family goes along. But they still take to soldiering as fast as any group you're ever likely to see. Within a few weeks after seeing their first rifle, these characters were going through an infiltration course as rugged as anything they've got at Fort Bragg. They also had no trouble learning the tactics of resisting a night assault. This burning arrow technique is designed to point out guerrilla positions to aircraft answering a radio call for help. This is what the army calls a confidence course. Here it seemed a little like teaching birds to fly or monkeys how to climb trees. Convincing them of the importance of night patrols in the jungle was a little more difficult. Their inclination was to stay home and man the barricades. We had to persuade them that unless you attack and ambush their guerrilla on his own ground, he'll turn your village into a shooting gallery. Once convinced, as usual, they learned fast. The Viet Cong who gets within a mile of a village where these men are patrolling, is going to be as scared of them as they used to be of him. The guerrilla is a fish, said Maitre Tung, and the sea in which he swims are the people. If the people be unfriendly, he cannot survive. Operation Montanard is an exercise to teach the mountain people of Vietnam the art of anti-guerrilla warfare. It also involves giving them a better understanding of the issues of what the war of subversion raging in their country is really all about. Through no fault of their own, the future of these mountain people is inextricably bound up with the outcome of the struggle against communist expansion in Southeast Asia. Operation Montanard has given them the weapons and organization to resist guerrilla terrorism. Acts with U.S. and Vietnamese anti-guerrilla experts during the many weeks of training have also made fast friends where there was before only fear or indifference. The army's special forces leave behind a well-trained group of friends who may in time have a profound effect on the future of Vietnam.