Trusting Your Enemy: American Encounters with the Kit Carson Scouts During the Vietnam War, 1966–1973

In the fall of 1966, the Kit Carson Scout Program was born. The program authorized the use of South and North Vietnamese defectors from the People’s Army Liberation Force and the People’s Army of Vietnam as auxiliaries employed directly by the United States to work alongside American soldiers in South Vietnam. The Kit Carson Scouts, as these Vietnamese combatants were commonly known, were treated as American soldiers and were provided with American uniforms, weapons, rations, and medical care. In exchange, the scouts served as interpreters, guides, and combatants in order to assist American soldiers to find the enemy and protect them from enemy ambushes and traps. The status of the Kit Carson Scouts as former enemies caused tension between the scouts and their American colleagues who found it difficult to trust soldiers who in some cases had tried to kill them only weeks before. While some Americans never learned to trust the scouts they worked with, others experienced first-hand the life-saving capabilities of the scouts. The close cooperation between the soldiers reshaped American preconceptions of their former enemies and the resulting camaraderie gave American soldiers a window into which they could humanize soldiers they had once fought in battle.