Cowboy: The Interpreter Who Became a Soldier, a Warlord, and One More Casualty of Our War in Vietnam - Paperback

by Daniel Ford (Author)

Cowboy was handsome, flamboyant, courageous, clever, and cruel. He got his nickname from the Green Berets who worked with him in the Highlands of South Vietnam in the 1960s. "You've got to take the bad with the good," one Special Forces captain explained. "And Cowboy is a good interpreter." But he soon fired the interpreter because prisoners did not fare well when Cowboy was around.And in the end, Cowboy was murdered by his own side, the Montagnard rebels who hated the generals in Saigon as much as the Communists in Hanoi.The compelling story of a country and a people caught up in a Cold War they couldn't understand, and which in the end would destroy them.

Author Biography

In 1964, Daniel Ford took the publisher's advance for the sale of his first novel, and with it bought a ticket to Saigon. For several months, he hitchhiked around the country with American helicopter crews and joined the government forces -- both Vietnamese and ethnic minorities -- in their quest to find and destroy Communist guerrillas. The most memorable of these warriors was a young man whom the Americans knew as Cowboy, who liked to introduce himself as Philippe Drouin, and who had been born Y Kdruin Mlo in the forbidding Highlands where the lowland Vietnamese were hated and feared. Here Dan returns to that long-ago war and to the story of one of its most fascinating fighters, who in the end became one of its victims.