ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the American counterinsurgency strategy rather than the Communist and South Vietnamese policies, and the ethnographic discourses that attended the American intervention. With the growing strength of the Communist guerrilla movement in Vietnam in the early 1960s and with the American military presence there, Vietnam was to be the test case for the use of Special Forces counterinsurgency tactics. The chapter discusses the rising insurgency in Vietnam triggered a ‘Counterinsurgency Controversy’ within the American civilian and military bureaucracy, which would bring in the Special Forces and – again – a relativist ethnographic discourse. Before turning to the Special Forces narratives and its relation to Montagnards, the chapter examines earlier American plans and discourses on the Highlands and its population. The model for the American experience with the Montagnards had been set in World War II by the well-known ethno-psychiatrist Georges Devereux.
