From their mountain redoubt, the guerrillas staged ambushes and engaged in sabotage against the Hanoi government as recently as two years ago, the refugees said. Missionaries who helped settle another group of FULRO (a French acronym for the guerrillas) refugees in 1986 were already lining up job interviews. “It’s mind-blowing to think they hung in there, as Rip van Winkles of the Vietnam War,” says Bob Myers, an American diplomat who worked with the “hill tribes” in the 1960s. “The real question is, when you’ve been out of the mainstream … for so long, how do you fit into North Carolina?”
