Books about the Dega

A reading list for anyone who wants to understand the Dega properly — our own young people above all. It lists the books and articles we trust, what each is good for, and where it can be read. Many are free online.

Where to start

1. Gerald C. Hickey, Sons of the Mountains and Free in the Forest — the history.
2. Georges Condominas, We Have Eaten the Forest — what village life was.
3. William H. Chickering, A War of Their Own — FULRO.
4. Human Rights Watch, Repression of Montagnards — what happened after.
5. Oscar Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders — how to read all the others.

History and politics

• William H. Chickering, A War of Their Own: FULRO — The Other National Liberation Front, Vietnam 1955–75 (Casemate, Havertown PA, 2025). ISBN 978-1-63624-560-7. — review in SOF News
  The first full history of FULRO in English, by a former Mike Force battalion commander who became a doctor and spent years in Phnom Penh interviewing surviving veterans. Strong on the men, the 1964 revolt and the role of malaria in who settled the highlands; stops in 1975. Reviewed in Asian Affairs (2025) and in the Army War College’s Parameters (2026), which faults its thin use of archives.
• Po Dharma, Du FLM au FULRO: une lutte des minorités du sud indochinois, 1955–1975 (Les Indes Savantes, Paris, 2006). ISBN 2-84654-117-5. — catalog
  An archive-based political and military history of the highland and Cham movements, by a Cham scholar who served in FULRO from 1968 and later worked for the École française d’Extrême-Orient. In French.
• Gerald C. Hickey, Sons of the Mountains: Ethnohistory of the Vietnamese Central Highlands to 1954 (Yale University Press, 1982). — WorldCat
  The standard history of the highland peoples from their origins to the end of French rule, and of how a common highland identity took shape. If you read one book, read this and its companion.
• Gerald C. Hickey, Free in the Forest: Ethnohistory of the Vietnamese Central Highlands, 1954–1976 (Yale University Press, 1982). ISBN 0-300-02437-1.
  The companion volume: Diem, BAJARAKA, FULRO, the American war and the first year after 1975. The source most later writers, including Human Rights Watch, rely on.
• Gerald C. Hickey, Shattered World: Adaptation and Survival among Vietnam’s Highland Peoples during the Vietnam War (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).
  What the war did to highland communities, from Hickey’s field notes and the testimony of highlanders he knew.
• Gerald C. Hickey, Window on a War: An Anthropologist in the Vietnam Conflict (Texas Tech University Press, 2002). ISBN 978-0-89672-490-7. — Internet Archive Borrow free
  Hickey’s memoir of his years in Vietnam, including his advocacy for highlanders with American and South Vietnamese officials and his part in the FULRO negotiations.
• Gerald C. Hickey, Kingdom in the Morning Mist: Mayréna in the Highlands of Vietnam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). — Internet Archive Borrow free
  The “Kingdom of the Sedang” of 1888. See our article.
• Oscar Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders: A Historical Contextualization, 1850–1990 (University of Hawai‘i Press / RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). ISBN 0-8248-2579-9. — publisher
  A critical history of how missionaries, French administrators, the American military and the Vietnamese state each produced “knowledge” about us for their own purposes. Essential for reading every other book on this list with open eyes.
• Andrew Hardy, Red Hills: Migrants and the State in the Highlands of Vietnam (NIAS Press, 2003).
  The history of lowland migration into the uplands — the demographic change behind the land disputes of today.
• Mathieu Guérin, Andrew Hardy, Nguyễn Văn Chính and Stan Tan Boon Hwee, Des montagnards aux minorités ethniques (IRASEC / L’Harmattan, 2003). — OpenEdition Free to read
  Four essays on how the French, the Republic of Vietnam and the socialist state each tried to integrate the highlanders of Vietnam and Cambodia. In French.
• Mathieu Guérin, Paysans de la forêt à l’époque coloniale: la pacification des aborigènes des hautes terres du Cambodge, 1863–1940 (AHSR, 2008).
  The French conquest of the Bunong (Mnong) and their neighbors on the Cambodian side. In French.
• Eric T. Jennings, Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Unmaking of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011).
  How the French built a hill station on the Lang Biang plateau, and what it meant for the Lat and Koho who lived there.
• Stan B-H. Tan, “‘Swiddens, Resettlements, Sedentarizations, and Villages’: State Formation among the Central Highlanders of Vietnam under the First Republic, 1955–1961,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1 (2006).
  Archival study of Diem’s land-development and resettlement policy in the highlands — the background to BAJARAKA.
• William B. Noseworthy, “Lowland Participation in the Irredentist ‘Highlands Liberation Movement’ in Vietnam, 1955–1975,” ASEAS 6:1 (2013). — PDF Free to read
  How FULRO grew out of a Cham, Khmer and highland coalition built around Les Kosem.
• Catherine Scheer, “Subaltern soldiers: Overshadowed Bunong highlanders in the Khmer Republic’s army, 1970–75,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 53 (2022).
  Bunong soldiers, some with FULRO backgrounds, in Les Kosem’s brigade in Cambodia.
• Daniel Ford, Cowboy: The Interpreter Who Became a Soldier, a Warlord, and One More Casualty of Our War in Vietnam (Warbird Books, 2018). — publisher
  Biography of Y Kdruin Mlô, “Philippe Drouin,” the Rhade interpreter who became a FULRO colonel. One of very few books about a single Dega person.
• Nate Thayer, “Forgotten Army,” Far Eastern Economic Review, September 1992, and his reports in the Phnom Penh Post, September–October 1992. — Phnom Penh Post Free to read
  The reporting that told the world FULRO was still in the forest. See Mondulkiri, 1992.

Our peoples: ethnography, law and belief

For the epics, the gongs and the language dictionaries, see also Gongs and epics and Language resources.

• Georges Condominas, We Have Eaten the Forest: The Story of a Montagnard Village in the Central Highlands of Vietnam (Hill and Wang, 1977; French original Nous avons mangé la forêt de la Pierre-Génie Gôo, Mercure de France, 1957). — Internet Archive Borrow free
  A year in the Mnong Gar village of Sar Luk in 1948–49: the swidden, the rites, the debts, the quarrels. Among the most-read ethnographies of any Southeast Asian people.
• Anne de Hauteclocque-Howe, Les Rhadés: une société de droit maternel (Éditions du CNRS, 1987; reprinted 2000). — publisher
  The major study of Rhade matrilineal kinship, household and customary law. In French.
• Jacques Dournes, Pötao: une théorie du pouvoir chez les Indochinois Jörai (Flammarion, 1977). — Gallica
  Jarai ideas of power, and the Masters of Fire and Water. See our article. In French.
• Jacques Dournes, Forêt, femme, folie: une traversée de l’imaginaire Jörai (Aubier Montaigne, 1978).
  The Jarai imagination: the forest, women, madness and the dead. In French.
• Dam Bo [Jacques Dournes], Les populations montagnardes du Sud-Indochinois (Pémsiens), special issue of France-Asie (1950). — catalog
  An early survey of the southern highland peoples by the missionary-ethnologist who later wrote under his own name.
• Jacques Dournes, God Loves the Pagans (Herder and Herder, 1966). — Internet Archive Borrow free
  A missionary’s reflections on the Koho and Jarai, and his critique of missionaries who tried to make highlanders into Europeans.
• Frank M. LeBar, Gerald C. Hickey and John K. Musgrave, Ethnic Groups of Mainland Southeast Asia (HRAF Press, 1964). — Internet Archive Borrow free
  The standard reference handbook, with entries on the Rhade, Jarai, Bahnar, Sedang, Koho, Mnong, Stieng, Hre and others.
• Henri Maître, Les Jungles Moï (Émile Larose, Paris, 1912). — Gallica Free to read
  A colonial explorer’s account of the southern highlands, including Mnong and Stieng country, two years before he was killed there. Read it for what it records and for what it assumes — the title uses the slur moï.
• Albert-Marie Maurice, Croyances et pratiques religieuses des Montagnards du Centre-Vietnam and Les Mnong des hauts-plateaux (both L’Harmattan, 2002).
  Detailed colonial-era fieldwork on Mnong life and belief, published half a century late. In French.
• Jean Boulbet, Pays des Maa’, domaine des génies (École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1967).
  The Maa’ of the upper Dong Nai and their land. In French.
• Pamela D. McElwee, Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2016). — author
  How forest policy has been used to govern upland minorities: resettlement, land allocation and who gets to call a forest theirs.
• Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink (eds), Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology (University of Michigan Press, 1999), including Salemink, “Ethnography as Martial Art: Ethnicizing Vietnam’s Montagnards, 1930–1954.” — Internet Archive Borrow free
  How colonial soldiers and ethnographers invented the categories we are still sorted into.

The war years

• Col. Francis J. Kelly, U.S. Army Special Forces, 1961–1971, Vietnam Studies (Department of the Army, 1973). — Internet Archive Free to read
  The official history of the CIDG and Mike Force programs, which were built on Dega soldiers.
• Thomas L. Ahern Jr., CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam (CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, declassified). — Internet Archive Free to read
  The CIA’s own history, including the Buon Enao experiment that began the CIDG.
• Joann L. Schrock et al., Minority Groups in the Republic of Vietnam, Department of the Army Pamphlet 550-105 (1966). — Internet Archive Free to read
  The US Army’s 1,100-page ethnographic handbook, with a chapter on each highland people. Much used and much criticized; a period document in its own right.
• Robert L. Mole, The Montagnards of South Vietnam: A Study of Nine Tribes (Charles E. Tuttle, 1970). — Internet Archive Borrow free
  A US Navy chaplain’s survey of the religion and customs of nine peoples, written for American personnel.
• John L. Plaster, SOG: The Secret Wars of America’s Commandos in Vietnam (Simon & Schuster, 1997).
  The standard account of MACV-SOG, whose ground teams were largely Montagnard.
• Jim Morris, War Story (Paladin Press, 1979). — Google Books
  A Special Forces officer’s memoir of serving with highland strike forces; Morris remained an advocate for the Montagnards for the rest of his life.
• Robin Moore, The Green Berets (Crown, 1965).
  The bestseller, thinly fictionalized, that shaped how Americans imagined the Montagnard alliance.
• Paul Seitz, Men of Dignity: The Montagnards of South Vietnam (1975), from Des hommes debout.
  By the Catholic bishop of Kon Tum, a portrait of highlanders caught in the war.
• Homer E. Dowdy, The Bamboo Cross: Christian Witness in the Jungles of Viet Nam (Harper & Row, 1964).
  The Protestant mission among the Koho: background to highland Protestantism.
• James and Marti Hefley, No Time for Tombstones (1974).
  The missionaries killed and captured at Ban Me Thuot in 1968. See The missions and the doctors.
• Faris R. Kirkland, “Cultural Dynamics of Civic Action in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, 1967–1968,” Armed Forces & Society 26:4 (2000).
  A scholarly assessment of American civic action among highlanders.
• Gerald C. Hickey, RAND research memoranda: The Major Ethnic Groups of the South Vietnamese Highlands (RM-4041, 1964) and The Highland People of South Vietnam: Social and Economic Development (RM-5281/1, 1967). — RAND Free to read
  Hickey’s reports for the US government, setting out highland grievances in the 1960s.

After 1975, exile and North Carolina

• Thomas Pearson, Missions and Conversions: Creating the Montagnard-Dega Refugee Community (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). ISBN 978-0-230-61536-6. — publisher
  The main scholarly book on the Dega community in North Carolina: religion, the forest years, resettlement and identity.
• Raleigh Bailey, Montagnards: Their History and Culture, Culture Profile (Center for Applied Linguistics, 2002). — Internet Archive Free to read
  A short guide written for resettlement agencies; the basis of most official North Carolina histories.
• Lauren E. Raper, “Blest be the Ties that Bind”: The 1986 Montagnard Resettlement to Greensboro, NC (MA thesis, North Carolina State University, 2009). — PDF Free to read
  The 1986 arrivals, in detail.
• Joe P. Dunn, “Kok Ksor and the Struggle for Cultural Survival,” Athens Journal of History 10:1 (2024). — PDF Free to read
  A life of Kok Ksor and the Montagnard Foundation.
• Jacques Dournes, Minorities of Central Vietnam: Autochthonous Indochinese Peoples (Minority Rights Group, 1980). — Internet Archive Borrow free
  A short human-rights overview written five years after the war.
• Human Rights Watch, Repression of Montagnards: Conflicts over Land and Religion in Vietnam’s Central Highlands (2002). — HRW Free to read
  Book-length, and still the best single account of the 2001 protests and their background. The other reports are listed in Reports and documents.

See also: Theses and academic studies.

Compiled September 2026. Books by Dega authors are the thinnest part of this list, which says something about who has had the chance to publish. If you or someone in your family has written about our history — a memoir, a thesis, a dictionary, a collection of songs — please tell us, and we will add it.