"Malaysia And The Vietnam War" Topic

Something a little bit different for everyone here.
I have stumbled across odd bits and pieces in all my reading that maybe should be put all in one place for others to hear and think about. This covers a little bit about the Malaysian participation and support that they gave to RVN.

First of all the simple support given. They made their jungle warfare school at Johore Buhru, outside of Singapore, available for training. A complete wing was dedicated to support training of the Vietnamese and Thai military under the STAP. (Services Training Assistance Program)

While the UK's official policy was non-intervention, the training support was an open secret and official visits and such were actually kept apart from 'discovering' it.
It seems that the Malaysian policy was pretty in line with the UK's policy of official non-intervention.

The school opened to the RVN in approximately 1967-68 until the early seventies.

This is all confirmed in the autobiography of JP Cross in "Face Like a Chicken's Backside". He also refers to a number of inspection visits of RVN and other places like Thailand.

More posts to follow.

The next topic to talk about is the Senoi PRaaq.
This was the UK and Malaysian development from the Malayan Emergency from the 1950s.

Peninsular Malaya has a distinct population of ethnicities. There are South Asian populations, "Indain'most would say, that are predominant in towns and cities. There are the much larger Chinese populations that are both urban as well as rural. Then there are the Malay populations. As well, there was the Orang Asli who are Indiginous groups who are Malay-Poynesian and speak dialects of Malay.

The Malay peninsula itself is for the most part split into the three major groups of Malay, Orang Asli and Chinese. The South Asian and European populations being pretty small in percentages compared to the major three.

So, in the traditional way the military tried to overcome the insurgency by getting the locals to partake on the government side and take it on in their own manner. The Senoi Praaq were a co-creation with the Malay Scouts or 22 SAS as they are otherwise known.

The Senoi Praaq wee composed of members of the Orang Asli tribes and organized alongside the Malay Scouts. The roles and responsibilities were slightly varied. They were to perform intelligence tasks, small unit reconnaissance, lead conventional units as guides and assist them, small scale police duties and assistance of police and also to assist in organizing tribes and villages for the government and government forces.

They were concentrated in the Malay peninsula itself.
Originally they were under the auspices of the army. Years later they would be turned over to the police.

More posts to come.

By 1960 the Emergency in Malaya was pretty well all but wrapped up except for border smuggling and some insurgents still holdind out on the Thai side of the border with Malaysia. Additionally, it seemed the Senoi Praaq were an armed organization in a newly independant state, that was looking for a purpose.

(After all an armed ethnically based organization tends to make new and not quite stable states rather nervous of them and their intents,,,.)

A British military mission visited South Vietnam in 1961 and laid the groundwork for Malaysian assistance.

The Orang Asli are distantly related and shared the material environment and cultures of the Montagnards.

In 1961 the UK sent an advisory mission and quietly sent Senoi Praaq troops to Montagnard areas of RVN. Official request went from President Diem to Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman in 1960.

Indeed, visits by RD Noone, one of the big names in the Senoi Praaq and also a big anthropoligist in Malaya went throughout the area. The strangest confirmation that these occurred are in US State department reports of visiting Montagnard leaders and finding quantities of "Tiger" beer.
A beer brewed in Singapore.

The UK established a British Advisory Mission (BRIAM) in Saigon and the Senoi Praaq iperated under the auspices of SEATO, even though Malaysia was technically a member of SEATO they were in support of it.

Additionally members sent were officially removed or resigned from service to dis-associate them from either the UK or Malasian military connections. Needless to say their deployments were treated with incredible delicacy against being made known.

This was also the same time that the CIA were creating their mountain scouts program, border surveillance tams and combat inteligenceteams as well as their nascient village defense programs that became the Civilian Irregeular defense Groups.

The Senoi Praaq set up operations mainly to start in Ankhe and Kan Nak. They then moved to Plateau GI 60 miles north ast of Kontum. Expanding from 35 Jarai to approximately 180.

They found that surprisingly, both the Senoi Praaq and the Jarai could actually speak directly to each other with little problem. After all they are both Malayo-Polynesian cultures and languages. (as well as the Rhade and the Cham at least linguistly too.)

The South Vietnamese LLDB did participate, but on finding themselves left out when they Senoi Praaq and the Jarai could speak to each other without resorting to their help. It kind of infuriated them as well as cutting into their expected kickbacks and bribes. In addition in 1961, the official government view of Montagnards was rather disparaging to say the least with downright oppression as a norm and a policy.

Having a training and advisory team that had no cultural or linguistic barriers rather startled the Vietnamese, now feeling left out as a third wheel.

As far as operation go, they used the same principles that they used in Malaya. intelligence gathering, small unit reconnaissance, advising larger units and police on operations, organizing local tribes for the government.

Quite a lot of the intelligence gathering consisted of identifying the viet cong cadres and either capturing, turning or eliminating them. Later, this entire concept became the Pheonix Program under CIA auspices. It was most likely a bit more successful under the locally run village, tribal and clan level. Under hte CIA control it was run under the control of Province Chiefs so that the GVN could maintain control to an extant. quite often being misused for criminal and opposition purposes.

Mistakes were made. The Malay experience did not suffer from thousands of miles of porous border infiltration. This they would later suffer from in Borneo shortly after. Additionally the level of communist infiltration and propaganda over the years was quite a shock to them.

They did however have a pretty good grasp and potential for growth.

One thing they did do was to avoid if at all possible the concept of defending territory. They truly did everything they could to avoid defending fortified villages and camps. Their efforts were among the tribes with whom they operated.

Another avoidance was the traditional British concept of doing the job with the limited resources that you had. There was no answer in the concept of throwing more men and material at it. In retrospect, this was the early days before the North started infiltrating whole sale complete units at a time from 1964-5 onwards.

Eventually the civilian support concept gave way to more and more covert activities and the overly hasty government relocation into protected villages destroyed quite a lot of any trust and support that was created.

The incredibly fast build up and infiltraion from 1963 forward led to the increased militarization and attempt to mobilize the montagnards en masse.

I suspect that the multiracial realtiy and experience in Malaya was not necessarily understood immediately by the US military as a whole, who concentrated on the ethnic Vietnamese. This was exasperated by the turn over of control of the CIA programs from their control to the military control in 1963, highlighting the war going from a politicl to a flat out militarization as well.

The low technology of low level counter-insurgency was downplayed by big army, probably rightly given the ramping up by the north.

The final straw was the political machinations in Saigon and Washington wiht the assasinations off Diem and then Kennedy. The senoi Praaq and the BRIAM were withdrawn shortly after and gone by 1964.

Some pretty strange aspects of teh war from Malaysian and even the British perspective.

Other Notes are from, "Death In The Dark, The Senoi Praaq, Malasia's Killer Elite", by Roy Davis Linville Jumper.

In addition, all this is confirmed in the book, "Tiger Men" by Barry Petersen. He was an Australian officer who created a force of Montagnards from 1961-1964 and then had to get hustled out of Vietnam because of political macchinations by the CIA officers who felt threatened and jealous by his success.

First I quote his meeting with one ex-pat Brit RD 'Dick" Noone.
"Dick Noone and I hit it off from the moment we met and this was unusual. Most people found him bloody hard to get on with. He would rather sit down and chin wag with some member of a south east asian tribe than a fellow westerner. He had a marked personality barrier in dealing with his own kind. A man of secrets who had been involved in clandestine operations for close to thirty years. He didn't waste his breath on those he wasn't interested with and spoke only when he wanted to."

Then Later the confirmatory quotes. Berry explains his dealings with the Montagnards to Noone and then Noone replies.
"Yes I found them like that. But I wasn't allowed to deal with them directly, I was saddled with a Vietnamese special Forces team."

"Yes. I was in Vietnam about the same time you were."

"As a British MI6 officer Dick had taken some Malays and tribesmen to the central highlands of Vietnam. He said he worked among the montagnards in the province north of Darlac. The Vietnamese government had allocated a Vietnamese Special Force A Team to match his own team much like they do with the American Special Forces Teams."

"Because Dick's team was ethnically Malayo-Polynesian like the Montagnard tribes in the area, there was virtually no ethnic or language or cultural barrier.This not only surprised the Vietnamese but made them very suspicious of the origins of Dick's team members. Animosity between Dick's men and the Vietnamese rapidly developed. Dick told me that the situation became unbearable and he had to request the teams withdrawal from south Vietnam."

"This was the first and only indication I had up until then of British and Malaysian involvement in Vietnam. During my later attachment to the Malaysian Army in the 1970s, I met a few Malaysian Army officers who had claimed that they had served in South Vietnam. With Dick's background and the claims of those few officers perhaps after all, there was some involvement albeit minor."

A bit of a lot of reading but hopefully it opens up some aspects you may never have known about. Also some very good reads to dig all this out from.

Read Triumph Forsaken, he goes through other se Asian countries, the Communists were also gunning for Malaysia, Sakaro (not sure spelled rigjt) flirted with the Communists.