Fire in the Lake (23 page)

According to Mus, the early brotherhoods that carried Buddhism from India to China and Vietnam had of necessity made a very particular accommodation with Confucian society. Accepting the “universal empire” as a political system and a social structure, they maintained their claims to a greater universality: Confucianism was a social order defined by culture and history; Buddhism was a faith relevant to all times and to all men, no matter what their circumstances. Buddhism lived within the system and beyond it. Not just a civilization, not just a means of living in the world, it was a Way for all men to transcend the limitations of society and the self to reach a higher truth. As Buddhists, all men were brothers in a realm above race and culture. They were not fathers and sons, kings and subjects, but equals in moral responsibility, equals in their capacity for achieving salvation. As incorporated into the Vietnamese folk religion, Buddhism showed a Way out beyond the binding “net ropes” of the Confucian world. In peacetime it offered the Vietnamese an internal life — a soul, a personal identity — outside the conventions of society. In times of tyranny and “splitting apart,” it indicated a morality that lay beyond loyalty to existing authorities. The Buddhist “brotherhood” was an alternate form of community that provided a basis for opposition to an oppressive regime. It did not itself incorporate an alternate design for a state or a society-in-the-world, but it provided a means of reconciliation and showed the Way back into Confucian society.

In 1963 the bonzes of the cities gave no such explicit analysis of their goals. But they took on this same moral and political task of their predecessors. Their leaders had certainly pondered the whole course of the regime before that year. They had heard of the secret police, the corruption, the arbitrary arrests, and the terror. They no doubt knew that the Ngo family had managed to alienate even its top officers. The Hue incident only proved to them and to their following that there were no longer any limits to the tyranny of the regime. Though only a small sect, they acted and took on the burden of leading the opposition. In the summer and autumn of 1963 they transcended their sectarian limits to become the conscience of those who continued to support or acquiesce to the regime — the urban Vietnamese and the Americans.

The self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc in June was, of course, the central event of the entire Buddhist protest movement. It shocked the Americans as much as the Vietnamese; it had an important effect on American policy. And yet it remained mysterious. It seemed a barbarous, primitive act, an expression of some atavistic memory, yet it had, so far as anyone knew, no precedent in Vietnamese history. Then too, the publicity the Buddhists gave to it was most incongruously modern. During those endless minutes while the flames leaped up the robes of Quang Duc, obscuring his face, and during the slow fall of the charred body from its upright position, a young bonze with a microphone called out over and over again in Vietnamese and English, “A Buddhist priest burns himself to death. A Buddhist priest becomes a martyr.”
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The bonzes had called the American reporters to witness the scene. Later they would display the heart of Quang Duc in a glass case and insure television coverage of some of the six other self-immolations. Even those reporters who favored the Buddhist cause could not help feeling that the performance was somehow crass and sacrilegious. But the mystery remained.

To those who knew Vietnamese history, Quang Duc’s death recalled the suicide of the great mandarins who could not reconcile their loyalty to the emperor with their obedience to the will of Heaven. But those deaths had been quiet, gentlemanly suicides that indicated resignation and inability to resolve a fundamental conflict. Quang Duc’s death by fire and loudspeaker had not at all the same tone. As Mus explained, it was not a gesture of resignation, but rather one of protest — an advertisement of the intolerable gap between morality and the reality of the Diem regime. The self-immolation had no precedent in Vietnamese history — but then never before had a Vietnamese regime depended upon the electronic reactions of world opinion. By taking the pose of the Buddha, Quang Duc was indicating to both Vietnamese and Americans a morality and a responsibility for others that lay beyond the divisions of political systems and culture. To the Vietnamese his self-immolation was a call first to reconciliation and then to rebellion. The students of Saigon and Hue responded. Breaking a long tradition of what the Americans called “political noninvolvement,” but what was actually political nonresistance to the government, they went en masse to pray in the pagodas and then to join in the demonstrations behind the bonzes. The students, including many of the Catholics, responded by
becoming
Buddhists. They burst through the “net ropes” of Confucian authoritarianism that had paralyzed them with fear and suspicion of one another, and they became for the moment equals. When Douglas Pike wrote that he could see “the whole fabric of Vietnamese society coming apart,” what he had in fact observed was the society breaking out from its untenable pyramid of superiors and inferiors to become a brotherhood of trust.

five

On July 11, 1963, Ngo Dinh Nhu called a meeting of all his generals to present them with the veiled threat that they might expect a coup whose participants would be his own dupes.
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A maneuver worthy of Nhu at his most Machiavellian, the threat proved a brilliant tactical success. The generals, who were on the point of bringing their own plans for a coup to fruition, walked out of the meeting divided and confused.

Nhu was not afraid of his generals, nor was he afraid of the Americans who, he judged correctly, would not withdraw their support until they found a “viable alternative.” But the Buddhists, “those miserable unarmed bonzes,” as Madame Nhu called them, they were the threat. Day after day they would hold meetings and lead processions through the streets, calling for attention and more attention. Their disingenuousness shocked the Americans, but it was their effrontery that worried the Ngos. The bonzes had dared to step out of place, had dared to stand up in open protest as unfilial sons. Before the autumn passed, six more bonzes followed Quang Duc in self-immolation. “Barbecues,” Madame Nhu called them, drawing a psychological curtain before her. Only Ngo Dinh Can urged conciliation.
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The Nhus wanted military action against the Buddhists. To some of their officials they expressed their intention of raiding the pagodas on the anniversary of the St. Bartholomew’s Eve Massacre,
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and it did not seem to matter to them that it would turn world, and more particularly American, opinion against them. President Kennedy’s replacement of the sympathetic Ambassador Nolting with Henry Cabot Lodge only made them speed up their plans.

On the morning of August 21, Nhu’s own troops surrounded the Xa Loi pagoda, only a few hundred feet from the presidential palace, and shot over thirty bonzes and imprisoned the rest of them. In Hue and other central Vietnamese cities other units perpetrated a similar outrage. The next day Nhu had the telephone lines of the American embassy cut in order to keep the Americans uninformed. He claimed that the army had executed the raids and implied that the troops belonged to one of the last of the officers faithful to him, General Ton That Dinh, the governor general of Saigon. It was a suicidal move, and the Nhus must have known as much, for too many people had heard of their plans. From that time on Nhu went to work with a strange determination. Charging that Diem had been weak in his dealings with the Buddhists, he arrested some four thousand university students and hundreds of high-school students who demonstrated against the raid. His move appeared calculated to alienate those last Saigonese families who might have supported him, as well as the Catholic clergy. But Nhu went further. Assuming that the American press reflected the views of the officials as closely as did his own, he attacked the U.S. government in public and charged the CIA chief, John Richardson, with having formed a plot against his life. He spoke of a vast international conspiracy against the regime and hinted broadly that he had opened negotiations with Hanoi. His rages terrified all those who came close to him. As the Ngos’ secretary of state later told Robert Shaplen, “We knew that Nhu was smoking opium in the last year and maybe taking heroin, too, and that this helped create his moods of extremism.… You could begin to see madness in his face, a sort of somnambulistic stare, always with that cold smile.… It was as if a devil had taken possession of him.”
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In his failure Nhu had withdrawn so far into himself that in the end his face was a mask that no longer opened onto the real world.

Finally the Americans reacted. In August, just after the pagoda raids, the new ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, instructed a CIA agent in contact with the generals to tell them that Washington would approve a coup. The generals were suspicious of both Harkins and Richardson, and demanded further assurances. They allowed the moment to pass. Then in October, after a great deal of internal debate, the Kennedy administration decided to suspend the Commercial Import Program — the source of most of the government funds — and publicly to dissociate itself from the Ngos. Further demonstrations, further assurances, and the plotting of other officers finally impelled the generals to act. When on November 1 the tanks came rolling up to the Norodam Palace, not a single ranking officer remained with his masters inside the iron circle.

But the drama was not quite over. The coup took a whole day to unfold. At 1:30
P.M.
army troops took over the central government installations and surrounded the palace with tanks and machine guns. Still the generals did not make a move towards the Ngo family. For hours and hours they waited outside the palace while Diem and Nhu, defended by a few bodyguards, called over the military telephone to the corps and divisional commanders, to the province chiefs, to the heads of the Republican Youth Movement and the Women’s Solidarity League. But there was no answer from anyone, not even from the best-rewarded of their favorites. At 4:30
P.M.
Diem telephoned Ambassador Lodge to ask what the attitude of the United States was to the rebellion. Lodge replied that he was not well enough informed to say, but reported that he had heard that “those in charge of the current activity” planned to give Diem and Nhu safe conduct out of the country if they would resign. Diem asked Lodge if he had his telephone number, then concluded the conversation, saying that he was trying to re-establish order.
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A little while later, Diem and Nhu left the palace by an underground escape route, maintaining radio contact with the generals but refusing to disclose their whereabouts. The next morning as they were seeking sanctuary in a Catholic church, the Ngos were discovered, thrown in a van, and killed like commoners by a junior officer.

After the crisis had passed, the people of Saigon rarely spoke of the Diem regime again. There was nothing more to be said. For the city people the fall of the regime was a catharsis played out with full theatrical extravagance. When the news of the two brothers’ death went out over the radio, the whole city exploded into rejoicing. On that day there were no more “Diemists” in the city, for the Buddhist demonstrations had already signaled that the regime had fallen in all but title, that the will of Heaven had already changed. In nine years the Diem regime went through the entire life cycle of a dynasty, following the ancient Vietnamese rhythms not of rise, decline, and fall, but of rise, holding, and abrupt descent. There was a finality about it. As the Ngos perhaps recognized, the Vietnamese would commit their regime to that absolute death that comes to a family when it has no heirs, and that comes to a dynasty when the will of Heaven turns against it.

The Diem regime had no issue. Assassinated in secret, the Ngos were buried in unmarked graves. The officers who wrote the original death certificates described Diem not as “Chief of State” but as “Chief of Province” and Nhu as “Chief of the Library Services.”
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By demoting the brothers to the last ranks they had held under the French regime, the officers demonstrated their own similar concern for ritual prestige, rank, and hierarchy. By indirection they reasserted the whole Confucian system that proved the downfall of the Ngos. To change the government required only a rebellion; to change the country, a revolution.
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4

The National Liberation Front

    As the past history of this country shows, there seems to be a national attribute which makes for factionalism and limits the development of a truly national spirit. Whether this tendency is innate or a development growing out of the conditions of political suppression under which successive generations have lived is hard to determine. But it is an inescapable fact that there is no national tendency toward team play or mutual loyalty to be found among many of the leaders and political groups within South Vietnam. Given time, many of these [words illegible] undoubtedly change for the better, but we are unfortunately pressed for time and unhappily perceive no short-term solution for the establishment of a stable and sound government.

    The ability of the Viet Cong continuously to rebuild their units and to make good their losses is one of the mysteries of this guerrilla war.… Not only do the Viet Cong units have the recuperative powers of the phoenix, but they have an amazing ability to maintain morale. Only in rare cases have we found evidences of bad morale among Viet Cong prisoners or recorded in captured Viet Cong documents.

— General Maxwell Taylor (From a briefing to principal Washington officials concerned with Vietnam. November 1964)

Introduction

The Americans began by underestimating the Vietnamese guerrillas, but in the end they made them larger than life. During the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, American officials spoke of plans to capture the enemy’s command headquarters for the south as if there existed a reverse Pentagon in the jungle complete with Marine guards, generals, and green baize tables. In fact the American generals knew there was no such thing, but in the press and the mind of the public the image kept returning. After all those years of fighting, the NLF and the North Vietnamese had taken on a superhuman dimension. Paradoxically, the exaggeration diminished them, for in the dimension of mythology all things are fabulous and unaccountable. By turning their enemy into a mirror image of themselves, the Americans obscured the nature of the Vietnamese accomplishment.