Little is known about Cambodia's highland minorities during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese communists were infiltrating their homelands on the ground and American bombers attacking them from the sky. When inhabitants of the northeastern regions are mentioned in histories about the Khmer Rouge's coming to power, it is mainly as bodyguards of Pol Pot, who represented them as remnants of an uncorrupted ‘primitive democracy’. However, stories heard in the highlands raise different narratives, notably those of Bunong men and their families who left Mondulkiri province for Phnom Penh, where they enlisted in the weak pro-American Khmer Republic's army. These stories, told by the few who survived the mission and by the many who lost relatives to it, complicate the history of this convoluted period by bringing to light the Bunongs’ previously unmentioned involvement within the Forces Armées Nationales Khmères. Neither visceral rebels, nor unconditional allies, these Cambodian highlanders were and still are complex actors, whose engagements constitute a much-needed disturbance of dominant (historical) records.