U.S. Army Special Forces Major Jim Morris: Proud of His Service in Vietnam

 | Vietnam  | 2 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Morris’s area of operations for most of the time he was in Vietnam was in the Central Highlands approximately 115 kilometers southwest of Pleiku. The base camp was about four kilometers outside the village of Buon Beng, alongside the Song Ba River near Cheo Reo, ‘a town of one Esso station, two photo shops, two bars, three whorehouses, six hardware stores, an ARVN officers club and a MACV compound,’ he recalled.

Most Special Forces jungle encampments were constantly under Viet Cong (VC) observation, but Morris still remembers the ease with which he and his Montagnard detachments could maneuver on patrol: ‘Our camp was in a pacified zone. What that meant was we had three quick roads into areas that weren’t pacified. So Charlie [i.e., the VC] could sit there watching our camp, but all he knew was that we had left. We could dismount anywhere along the highway and zip into the underbrush. We had very rapid unobserved entrance into any operational area. Most teams left at 0600 hours and were tracked the whole bleeding way, whereas we couldn’t be, so we kicked some serious ass.’

Morris’ wartime camaraderie with the hill tribes led him, along with other former Special Forces veterans and his friend Don Scott, to work for the few thousand Montagnard refugees now in the United States and to publicly express concern for those left behind in Vietnam. Scott, now a Greensboro, N.C., entrepreneur, aided them in Kontum during the war as a civilian hospital administrator for the San Diego­based Project Concern. He and Morris pleaded the case of the Montagnards in a 1986 airing of the CBS-TV news magazine West 57th.

Interviewed by journalist Meredith Vieira, both emphasized the fact that the Montagnards had all been left behind and virtually forgotten after the fall of South Vietnam by an American government that, as thanks for their service, had promised their leaders safe passage out in the event of what had become by then the inevitable South Vietnamese defeat.

That promise was made to Montagnard leaders by the CIA at the American Embassy in Saigon in the waning days of the war in April 1975. One in attendance was Edmund Sprague, a former intelligence officer. ‘It was politick-speak,’ Sprague said, indicating that the promise to the hill tribes may have been slightly double-talk. ‘But it was my understanding that the Montagnards would be taken care of.’

While Morris finds it painful to ponder the fate of those Montagnards, he does have fond memories of the beautiful countryside in Vietnam: ‘That first day I thought, ‘Lord help me. I’m just a cornfed boy from Oklahoma. I’ve never seen any place like this. Mother, I’ve come home to die.’ I loved it.’

But for Morris the repeated tours could not hold a candle to the first one. The fact that Vietnam had escalated to a full-fledged war by the mid-1960s did not help. ‘It just became crap,’ Morris said. ‘Some things are perfect and some are magic, and you cannot re-create them by trying for the same physical environment.’

With pride, though, he produces a letter written to him by the legendary Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, one of the first U.S. Army advisers to South Vietnam in 1962. Vann, who left the Army the next year in a dispute with the Pentagon over how the war was being waged, went to work as a provincial pacification representative for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). He was killed in a helicopter crash in the Central Highlands in 1972, 10 years after he had arrived in Vietnam (see ‘Troubled Apostle of Victory’ in the Spring 1989 issue). Eerily, his letter to Morris arrived three days after Vann’s death.

Vann was clearly a role model for the retired major, who speaks glowingly of his own training. He and fellow Green Berets were schooled in the ways of their opponents in Indochina. They were trained to beat the Viet Cong at their own game. ‘We read Mao [Mao Tse-tung] until we could quote him word for word,’ Morris remembered. ‘You can lay what he wrote over any revolution throughout history and it’s all right there.’

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, People, Vietnam War

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.