The Real Paco
Working with the Montagnards in Cambodia
I met the real Paco in Cambodia in
2005, a Vietnam Marine Corps veteran, who has gone back to work
with Montagnard hill tribes in southeast Asia.
Unlike the fictional Paco in Larry Heinemann's Paco's
Story, Gary Paco Gregg does not fit the carefully
crafted image of the crazed dysfunctional Vietnam veteran that
found its way into the dominant media culture of America after
the Vietnam War. Heinemann's fictional Paco satisfied
the popular culture's deranged view of the Vietnam Veteran
returning from the unpopular war, and he won the National Book
Award for it in 1987.
In a recent C-Span appearance, Larry Heinemann
expressed his views on the Vietnam War, and he still continues to
replay a carefully crafted late-1960s anti-war message, borrowed
from the Jane Fonda version of the war. His latest book about his
return to Vietnam as a Vietnam veteran has all the depth of a
tourist who never ventures far from the air-conditioned tour bus.
Gary Paco Gregg returned to Vietnam several years ago to
make peace with his fallen Marine comrades and the people of
southeast Asia. He volunteers now for a little known NGO, Cambodia Corps Inc, that runs a
boarding school for one-hundred and fifty Montagnard (Phnong)
children in Mondulkiri province, Cambodia, just across the border
from Vietnam.
Says the real Paco, "I came back to
Vietnam in 2002 to honor my dead Marine comrades on the spot
where they died. I landed in Da Nang and found my way out to the
ambush site near Cam Lo. I sang the Marine Corps hymn, I saluted
my dead friends where they died, and then I sobbed and cried. It
seemed fitting to say goodbye to them where they left
this earth."
"I lost many friends in I Corps in 1967 in a place called
Ambush Valley[†]. I was a machine-gunner/driver with H & S Company, 3rd Battalion,
26th Marines," says Paco. Cam Lo is between
Khe Sanh and Dong Ha on Route 9 in Quang Tri province."
Struggling with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, like many Vietnam
combat veterans, Paco has found a new life in Cambodia,
and an antidote to PTSD. He now helps the Phnong people, close
relatives of the Mnong across the border in Vietnam. The
Montagnards are the indigenous peoples of Vietnam and Cambodia, a
collection of fifty-four hill tribes who aligned themselves with
the United States, and fought side-by-side with the Americans in
the war.
"The Marines have a saying," says Paco. "We leave no
Marine behind. But isn't that what America did to the Montagnards
in the Vietnam War? We went off and abandoned them, leaving them
with the false promise that we would come back and take care of
them."
Cambodia Corps (CCI) runs a
boarding school for Phnong children who have no school to attend
in their home villages, and also sponsors fourteen (as of May
2007) of them now with scholarships to attend college in Phnom
Penh. The plan is to provide them with an education, so they can
return and help their people in the changing world that the
future will bring.
I traveled there from Phnom Penh in October of 2005 with
Paco, who is the operations coordinator for CCI. It's an
eight hour trip and there is no public transportation. For US$20,
we purchased a seat in the back of a pick-up truck that was
delivering goods and supplies to the remote province capitol of
Sen Monorum where the boarding school is located. The last part
of the journey was over unpaved and washed out roads, which makes
it treacherous during the rainy season.
We arrived in time for the evening meal at the boarding school.
Paco greets the students exuberantly; he calls some of
them by name and gives big hugs to others. One-hundred and fifty
kids were eating at the outdoors communal dining room. The Phnong
students were squatting Asian-style on benches constructed for
sitting down Caucasian-style. Chickens and dogs roamed under the
tables to scarf up dropped rice and bones thrown there after the
meal. This practice is the same followed in their villages, where
clean up in their stilt-houses is simplified by a woven mesh
flooring, that's also cooler and more comfortable than solid
floors.
"You can see why I come back here for several months every year
to help out," says Paco. "These kids have so little and
are so appreciative of our help. I love it here. If CCI weren't
here, these students wouldn't have the opportunity to go to
school at all."
CCI was founded by another Vietnam veteran, Tommy Daniels, a
former Green Beret who served with the Mike Force, and
it operates on a tiny budget of only US$80,000 a year. They hire
a Khmer school administrator and Khmer language instructor.
Unlike many of the large NGOs in Cambodia, CCI rubs elbows with
the Montagnards at the rice roots level, and a high
percentage of their yearly budget goes directly to the Phnong.
No one knows how many hundreds of thousands of Montagnards fled
to the wilds of Cambodia to avoid persecution in Vietnam. Many
crossed the border after South Vietnam fell in 1975, as their
ancestral homeland in the Central Highlands was invaded and
colonized by the Vietnamese from North Vietnam.
Even today, when life becomes unbearable for the Montagnards in
the Central Highlands of Vietnam, their only escape is to cross
the border into Cambodia. And now, they are no longer safe there,
because they are hunted down by the Cambodian police/army and
sold back to Vietnam for the bounty placed on their heads. The
UNHCR in Phnom Penh has pulled their refugee camp from Sen
Monorum so that it is no longer accessible for them.
A number of Vietnam veterans are still concerned about the
ongoing repression of our Montagnard comrades in Vietnam and
Cambodia, but only one Vietnam veteran has put his money where
his mouth is, and that's Tommy Daniels. He ventured out to the
eastern frontier of Cambodia, which borders Vietnam, several
years ago and started CCI, which provides direct service to the
Montagnards.
To help the Montagnards in southeast Asia today, one must go to
Cambodia, because the Central Highlands are off limits in
Vietnam. There is very limited access to what used to be
Montagnard land. The American ambassador can only travel there on
carefully guided tours accompanied by communist party minders.
And our own State Department has abandoned them, giving sway to
the communist double speak that things are okay for the
Montagnards in Vietnam.
The traditional Montagnard way of life is quickly disappearing in
Cambodia, as it has already done in Vietnam. Logging operations
in Ratankiri province, just north of Mondulkiri, have devastated
the forests. In Mondulkiri, the site of CCI's boarding school, a
Chinese company has just purchased a long-term lease of 200,000
hectares of land to plant pine trees. Some of that land used to
belong to the Phnong, and was used for subsistence, not for
cash crops.
Even though the Phnong comprise seventy-five percent of the
population of 40,000 in Mondulkiri province, the Cambodians
control the local government offices. To cope with economic
growth and land speculation that threaten the farms and forests
on which they depend for their livelihood, the Phnong will have
to learn new farming techniques and land law at the same time.
Paco recently helped a Montagnard family that had their
land confiscated by a wealthy Khmer from Phnom Penh. The Phnong
family went to the provincial authorities in Sen Monorum and
protested their land being taken away from them. For this act of
defiance they were thrown in jail. Paco hooked them up
with the only Phnong lawyer in Cambodia, and after a long process
of arbitration in Phnom Penh, they finally got their land back.
CCI believes that education and training are the only hope for
the future of the Phnong in Mondulkiri, and for all Montagnards
in the other provinces of Cambodia. Here's the reason that a
boarding school is so necessary. The Montagnard children can only
attend school out in the province up to the sixth grade, but only
if there is one within walking distance. As a result, forty
percent don't attend school. The only middle school and high
school is in the capital of Sen Monorum and there is no
transportation to get there on a daily basis.
Students must live in the province capital to attend school. At
present, one-hundred and fifty students live at the boarding
school and attend classes at the province school.
CCI also provides housing and tuition for fourteen Phnong
students to attend college in Phnom Penh. They recently moved
into a large house which serves as CCI's dormitory/headquarters
in Phnom Penh. The students are training in the following
disciplines: medicine, veterinary medicine, engineering, law, and
education. They are the first Montagnard students among several
hundred thousand to attend college in Cambodia.
I've been there to visit with them and they are the most self-effacing young college men and women that I have ever met. They
study every night because they realize the fate of the Montagnard
ethnic group in Cambodia may rest on their future leadership.
"One of the college students came to me recently," says
Paco, "And told me that his little brother was dying
back home in one of the villages. He had been sick for two months
and was burning up with fever. We took him by taxi from Sen
Monorum, an eight hour ride, to a hospital in Phnom Penh." What
Paco is reluctant to say is that he personally paid
US$600 out of his pocket to pay for his hospital care, which
saved the young man's life.
What are the future needs of CCI? Says president Tommy Daniels,
"The Cambodian government wants CCI to come up with funding to
support three more boarding schools of one-hundred Montagnard
kids in each school. We need to dig a well, procure a generator,
and purchase a water tank. Expenses will be US$1000 a month for
each school. So for US$12,000 a year, another one-hundred
Montagnard kids could go to school and further their education.
And for US$36,000 a year, three-hundred students can continue
their education."
What brings Vietnam combat veterans like Paco back to
southeast Asia? Psychologists might say it's survivor
guilt, or an attempt to make sense out of the incredible
sacrifice the Vietnam veteran made in that long ago war. For
Paco, it satisfies a need to give something back to the
Montagnard people that those heartless politicians in Washington
abandoned in their hour of need.
Most Asians have forgotten (or have never learned) about the war,
since half of all the people living today in southeast Asia were
born after the war ended; but it still lies festering under the
surface of the American veneer. Just recall the last presidential
election where most Vietnam veterans, including the POWs,
renounced John Kerry's version of the war.
"It's like a breath of life for me," says Paco. "It's
like being reborn again, trying to help these forgotten people
that the world has abandoned."
The world hasn't discovered Mondulkiri Province yet, not even the
backpackers who traverse southeast Asia, but they will be coming
soon. Speculators are buying up land now. The traditional
Montagnard way of life is falling by the wayside.
Will the Phnong be ready for modern civilization when it finds
its way to Mondulkiri province? CCI is making every effort,
despite their small budget, to improve the plight of the
Montagnards. You can go to their website at http://www.cambodiacorps.org/ to
see the great work that they have done. Any person or group that
is interested in sponsoring a Montagnard student for college will
find that the cost is from US$1800 to US$2000 a year for room,
board, and tuition in Phnom Penh.
"Now you can see why I come back to Cambodia each year and try to
give something back by helping out here. I also sponsor one of
the college students in Phnom Penh," says Paco. "Our
efforts here will prepare the students to stand up for themselves
and fight for their rights."
I prefer the version of the Vietnam Veteran portrayed by Gary
Paco Gregg, rather than the fictional Paco
crafted by Heinemann that helped stain the individual soldier who
honorably fought the Vietnam War.
The real Paco is my hero. "I have to go
back to these people in the mountains every year," he says. "It's
become my mission. My life."
If the Vietnam veteran will not help the forgotten Montagnard
allies, who will?
[†] : see Eric
Hammel's book Ambush Valley: I Corps, Vietnam, 1967, The Story
of a Marine Infantry Battalion's Battle for Survival
[return to text]
by Richard W. Webster
... who is a retired U.S. Army officer, a retired special
education teacher, and now writes freelance. He has written about
Montagnards in his capacity of public affairs officer for Counterparts (C/THDNA), a veterans'
association of former advisors from the Second Indochina War. He
served in Vietnam with both the 1st Infantry Division
and with Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS
MAT III-87), about which experiences he is writing a book.
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