The failure of a second rebellion deepened the division between moderates who preferred to negotiate with Saigon and die-hards who still hoped to win autonomy through fighting. Seeing that their leader, Y-Bham Enuol, was leaning toward negotiation, young militants engineered a coup in 1968, sending the older leader onward to house arrest in Phnom Penh and disarming his followers. Thousands of moderates trekked to Vietnam and integrated into society, leaving only the militants — about 200 Montagnards and young intellectual Chams — at Fulro’s forest base in eastern Cambodia.

In March 1970, Sihanouk was deposed, replaced by a pro-American general. In May, the remaining Fulro militants, including some wives, found themselves on a hill under attack by North Vietnamese soldiers.

For two nights they fought off ferocious assaults but, recognizing that a third would be their last, slipped away in small groups before daybreak. Making their way by night across 100 miles of forest, they evaded the North Vietnamese for two weeks with little food or water. By homing on the sounds of battle, they finally linked up with invading Americans. The Chams, town-dwellers and new to war, had lost almost half their number, the Montagnards none. For 800 years, Montagnard and Cham had been allied against the slow, inexorable march of the Vietnamese. This was their last stand.

The surviving militants were absorbed into the Cambodian Army. The Montagnards were put across a river in defense of Phnom Penh, also under siege. With time, the North Vietnamese withdrew, pushed back by American airpower (the Cambodian Communists, the Khmer Rouge, were still organizing in the provinces). Thus for the next three to four years, life was relatively normal in Phnom Penh itself. The Montagnard leaders moved into the city, sharing two villas and sending their children to school, some for the first time in their lives. The elder leader asked passing reporters to help him get to America.

In 1973, I was one of those reporters. I had left the Army to finish college, and then pursued pre-med studies, but Fulro’s mystery called, and I wangled a press card as a stringer for Harpers. Fulro’s spokesmen, three young militants, were candid about their revolution being stalled. Cambodia, now allied with South Vietnam, could no longer be used as an anti-Vietnamese platform.

Two years later, Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge. Once again the Montagnard soldiers encamped across the river from Phnom Penh had to escape at night, this time neck-deep through swamps, back to the city. Eligible for diplomatic asylum, they gathered their wives and children and took refuge in the French Embassy. But, as those who saw “The Killing Fields” will remember, the victorious Khmer Rouge scoffed at the concept of asylum and demanded the expulsion of everyone without a foreign passport.