The Australian Captain The CIA Tried To Kill In Vietnam

General
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_qwngG4MRg

Great Story, I have heard that this is where Colonel Kutz was born

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Too much AI slop for me to watch that video.

2 Likes
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In 1965, inside a quiet CIA station in Saigon, American intelligence officers sat down to discuss the death of one of their own allies. The target wasn’t a Viet Cong commander. It was an Australian Army Captain named Barry Petersen. His crime? Refusing to murder Vietnamese civilians for them.

This documentary uncovers the buried story of Captain Barry Petersen and the Tiger Men - twelve hundred Montagnard tribesmen of the Rhade and Jarai peoples who followed one foreign officer into a war that wasn’t theirs. Operating from Ban Me Thuot in the Central Highlands, Petersen built the most feared irregular force in South Vietnam without firepower, without air support, and without permission. He learned the Rhade language. He drank the rice wine. He honoured the buffalo sacrifice. And in doing so, he raised an army that answered to him alone.

Amazon.com: Tiger Men (Asian Portraits): 9789748299136: Petersen, Barry: Books

Twenty five years after he left Vietnam and his Montagnard tribesmen, Australian Barry Petersen wrote this thoughtful story of his life among the Rhade and other ethnic groups of Darlac Province. He went there to train and lead the local tribes to defend their villages and homes against the Viet-Cong; this book is the story of the Truong Son–Tiger Men–who became the most respected and feared self-defence force in South Vietnam. But it is also the sad story of the subsequent defeat and destruction of the Montagnard villages, culture and way of life–as much due to the Vietnamese and American generals and political leaders as to the Viet-Cong.

For his heroic efforts, Petersen himself almost paid the ultimate price–years after his departure from Vietnam, he learned that both the South Vietnamese and some Americans had plotted to have him killed. This is a book which the CIA would rather not see in print.

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Thanks for the heads-up.

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It’s like a scene from a Charles Dickins novel.