Chapter 1: A Massacre in Eden CHAPTER 1 A MASSACRE IN EDEN JOHN HELBLE LOVED to drift along the Perfume River at night. For practically nothing he could rent a sampan and a Vietnamese boatman would steer him out into the middle of the wide, slow-moving stream. From there the low outlines of the old imperial capital of Hue were faintly visible along both banks, north and south. Helble floated on the calm, black water in near silence, past places where long-ago emperors marshaled armies, wrote poetry, and frolicked with concubines. Dim lights shone from both shores, but there was little traffic noise, for in 1963 few people in Hue drove after dark. Helble, the twenty-nine-year-old American consul in Hue, had many visitors from Saigon, often fellow State Department officers and their wives. They came north ostensibly on official business, but really to tour the Citadel, the unimaginably luxurious home of the Nguyen emperors, and the overgrown but still magnificent imperial tombs nearby. Helble's entertainment program usually included a nighttime sampan outing on the Perfume. He and his guests glided up and down the river, no particular destination in mind, as smaller, canoe-like vessels, their prows lit by lanterns, pulled alongside, offering Vietnamese delicacies cooked on the spot. There were various stories about how the Perfume got its name, but the best one was that it had been scented by orchids falling into its waters far upstream, in the foothills of the Annamite Mountains. Helble would always remember the languorous beauty of those quiet nights on the Perfume River. But when he arrived on its south bank one hot day in May 1963, he wasn't playing tour guide; he was investigating a massacre. With its French doors and colorful border of tropical flowers, the South Vietnamese government radio station next to the river seemed an unlikely spot for bloodshed. But on the manic night of May 8, 1963, several thousand Hue residents, most of them Buddhists, had surrounded the station, demanding that it devote airtime to a commemoration of Buddha's birthday. The station manager refused, and soldiers and militiamen moved in with rifles, concussion grenades, and armored vehicles. Gunfire erupted, along with violent explosions. The terrified crowd fled in all directions, leaving behind seven lifeless bodies. An eighth person died later. Helble looked around the station the next day for anything that might shed light on what had happened. He found a bullet hole in a drainpipe attached to the building, and other damage probably caused by concussion grenades. But it wasn't clear what triggered the violence or who was responsible. For the past two years, Helble had been trying to understand why things happened the way they did in Hue. Though he spoke fluent Vietnamese and had many acquaintances in the lovely city of 100,000, he had yet to figure out its power structure and how it worked. In some ways, Hue resembled a Sicilian hill town, placid and picturesque on the surface, but rigidly controlled behind the scenes by the Mafia. The insular little city had no newspapers, minimal crime, and--at least until the May 8 slaughter--a docile population. Helble, his wife, and their young son had come to Hue in the spring of 1961, as the South Vietnamese government strained to put down a worsening insurgency by communist guerrillas called Viet Cong. In those days, the conflict seldom intruded into Hue, although Helble occasionally heard firefights between the VC and local police at a guard post on the far side of a large rice paddy behind his house. The war was fought mostly in the countryside, and a big part of Helble's job was to travel around South Vietnam's seven northernmost provinces, picking up information on local military, political, and economic conditions, and reporting it to his superiors at the U.S. embassy in Saigon. He roamed his mostly rural region in a Willys jeep, with a submachine gun known as a Swedish K on the seat beside him. His assistant at the consulate had acquired the weapon by trading a case of rum to an American military adviser, who was part of a growing contingent brought in to help the South Vietnamese army fight the VC. Stationed four hundred miles away from his nearest boss, Helble had a large degree of autonomy, and that suited him just fine. He liked adventure and was unfazed by the dangers of circuit-riding through Viet Cong-haunted countryside. Gregarious, perceptive, and immensely curious, he was an ideal man for the Hue consulate, which functioned as a U.S. observation post for the upper third of South Vietnam, directly below the demilitarized zone that separated it from communist North Vietnam. A native of the mill town of Appleton, Wisconsin, Helble graduated from the University of Wisconsin and soon afterward joined the State Department. He underwent Vietnamese-language training and found himself at the bustling Saigon embassy in the summer of 1960. Within a few months, he learned just how volatile South Vietnam could be. In November 1960, rebel paratroopers stormed into Saigon and tried to overthrow South Vietnam's authoritarian president, Ngo Dinh Diem. The attackers surrounded Diem's residence, Independence Palace, in the heart of Saigon. Helble heard about the incipient coup early in the morning and blithely decided to walk past the besieged palace on his way to work, noting anything that might be useful to the embassy. In front of the palace, he found paratroopers taking cover behind trees. Wrecked jeeps and soldiers' corpses lay in the street. An intense firefight suddenly broke out between the attackers and troops defending the palace. Helble jumped over a low wall around a nearby villa, pressing himself flat on the ground behind it. As it happened, the house was occupied by William Colby, chief of the Central Intelligence Agency station in Saigon, and his wife and their four children. "John, what the hell are you doing down there?" Colby shouted from a balcony. Helble scampered inside the house. The CIA executive was anxious to get to the embassy to carry out his duties and asked his unexpected guest to stay with his family. Helble agreed. For the next thirty-six hours, Helble carefully observed the fighting and telephoned blow-by-blow reports to the embassy. He watched as rebel troops, tanks, and armored personnel carriers exchanged fire with loyal soldiers around the palace, wincing as stray bullets shattered windows in Colby's home. Artillery shells arced overhead and threw up geysers of dirt on the palace's parklike grounds. When a group of mutinous soldiers set up a command post in the front yard, Helble went out and talked to the young lieutenant in charge, asking if Colby's wife and kids could safely leave their house. The lieutenant then marched up to the palace's front gate with a white flag, talked to someone inside, and came back and told Helble: "OK, you can take them out now. We have agreed that there will be no firing." Colby's family slipped away unharmed. Diem ultimately survived the attempted coup, calling in loyal troops from outlying areas to save him. HELBLE FIGURED HIS INTREPID reporting from the villa led to his promotion to Hue over a more experienced foreign service officer who'd been tagged to go there. His consular district was huge, covering thousands of square miles, with varied terrain that included beautiful white sand beaches on the South China Sea, thickly forested highlands populated by primitive tribespeople, and spooky jungles and mountains along the Laotian border that concealed dangerous animals as well as dangerous men. In his early days as consul, he was oblivious to the very real hazards of traveling in his new domain. When Helble first arrived in Hue, the departing consul, a high-spirited man named Tom Barnes, put him in a jeep and took him on a five-day orientation tour. Their destination was Kontum, a market town in the mountainous Central Highlands. They started off by driving south along coastal Highway 1, one of the few paved roads in the region, and then west to Pleiku, a crossroads town and home to a major South Vietnamese army base. Normally, travelers made their way to Pleiku and then took an established road north to Kontum. But Barnes knew a shortcut, and the two Americans swerved off the main road onto a muddy track that led into the forest. They soon reached a village inhabited by mountain tribespeople. There they met a French priest who'd lived with the mountaineers for many years and reported that the Viet Cong were active in the area. The Americans got back in their jeep and continued along the isolated route, winding through mountain forests for hours as daylight faded. They finally arrived in Kontum after dark, parked in the American military compound, and joined some U.S. Army advisers at a bar. One of them asked why the two diplomats were getting in from Pleiku so late. Helble replied that they hadn't come from Pleiku; they'd taken the shortcut through the mountains. Silence descended on the bar. One of the advisers exclaimed, "You did what ? Nobody's been down that track for years. It's totally insecure." On a different trip, Helble had to slam on his brakes to avoid running smack-dab into a Viet Cong ambush in Quang Ngai Province. Just ahead, guerrillas on both sides of the road were shooting at South Vietnamese militiamen who'd been riding in a truck. Helble jumped into a ditch and crawled over to the militiamen, getting off a few shots from his .38-caliber revolver, which wasn't very effective for combat. (After that, he took the Swedish K with him.) The communists broke off the attack and melted into the landscape. One way to foil VC attackers was to drive fast. Helble was doing that on another day in Quang Ngai as he approached a steep ramp that led onto a short, steel-frame bridge. He hit the ramp at about thirty miles per hour, bumped across the bridge, and was racing away when he heard a loud explosion behind him. Checking his rearview mirror, he saw the bridge gone and pieces of it falling from the sky. He figured he'd been moving just quickly enough to thwart the hidden guerrilla who'd detonated the mine. Helble nevertheless enjoyed rambling about his consular district, typically spending one week in Hue and the next on the road. The scenery along the way could be humdrum, such as the scrublands and rice paddies bordering Highway 1, adorned only by an occasional clutch of banana trees. Or it could be breathtaking, like the thrilling vistas along the narrow thirteen-mile road that wound through the Hai Van Pass--Ocean Cloud Pass--in mountains bordering the South China Sea. Helble traversed the pass on his frequent trips to Danang, where he consulted with American and South Vietnamese military authorities. In the coastal lowlands, he often stopped to talk with farmers in their paddies, asking about crop yields and whether Diem's government was doing enough to help them. (It took him a while to adjust to the sight of a barefoot farmer, standing atop an earthen irrigation dike, his pants rolled up to his knees and multiple leeches attached to his blood-streaked legs.) Pulling into a village or town, he'd seek out the headman to discuss the economy or how the war was going in that district. As poor as they were, the rural Vietnamese were gracious hosts, offering their visitor a can of warm beer or soda pop. After a long, dusty day of careening over dirt and gravel roads, Helble gulped the drink gratefully. As his tour wore on, it became more and more dangerous for an American to traipse around the boonies on his own. The VC stepped up their attacks, and the young diplomat occasionally was forced to accept, at the insistence of worried local officials, an escort of armed soldiers. By 1963, he was doing much of his travel aboard small, single-engine airplanes with CIA pilots. Flying was faster, and certainly safer, than driving, and Helble liked getting the pilots to buzz his house in Hue as the plane headed for a short landing strip in the Citadel. Thus alerted, his wife would hurry out to the airfield to collect her husband. HUE HAD LONG BEEN the cultural and intellectual wellspring of Vietnam. With its backdrop of pine-covered hills, it was a somnolent old city of scholars and warriors, exquisite gardens and abandoned palaces, drowsing in memories of its glorious imperial past. In the early 1960s, it was a quiet, conservative place. Sampans brought a daily catch of fresh fish up the Perfume River from a lagoon near the South China Sea. Schoolgirls rode bicycles while wearing white ao dai gowns with split side panels that streamed behind them, making them look like swallows in flight. Young men and women bustled about the Hue University campus, where a team of West German doctors was helping to establish a medical school. There was little nightlife, no dance halls, and only a single bar, the Green Door. Hue's people were the proud puritans of South Vietnam, differing considerably from the less restrained Saigonese in dress, speech, manner, and attitudes. They regarded their countrymen to the south as lazy, undisciplined, and badly corrupted by money and foreign influences, and themselves as the less affluent but high-minded conservators of the nation's heritage and values. "We have," a Hue resident wryly told an American journalist, "one of the most enormous superiority complexes on earth." The most intriguing feature of the landscape was the Citadel, a walled mini-city surrounded by moats that had been the home of the emperors and their enormous courts. At its core was the Forbidden Purple City, a smaller replica of Beijing's Forbidden City, where the thirteen successive emperors of the Nguyen dynasty lived in a dreamworld of extraordinary beauty and luxury, attended by scores of wives and sometimes hundreds of concubines, plus a corps of imperial eunuchs. The Nguyen lords were entertained by paramours and rare animals in their royal palaces and gardens, or dancers and actors in their private theater. Elsewhere in the Citadel were court offices and homes for high-ranking government and military officials and their families. Inside its walls were guardhouses, stables, war elephants, caged tigers, and arms storehouses. The extensive grounds were once adorned with lovely lakes, ornamental bridges, and perfectly landscaped flora. (In the nineteenth century, Emperor Minh Mang put eight thousand soldiers to work on the magnificent Tim Tam gardens and an accompanying lake.) Ponds and canals within the royal fortress were dotted with white lotuses, the Buddhist symbol of spiritual and bodily purity. The emperors' armies were backed on the battlefield by elephants, which could impale enemy soldiers with their tusks and scatter cavalry with their terrifying trumpets. The animals became royal favorites and emblems of imperial power. In a specially built arena, elephants and tigers battled to the death for the amusement of emperors and their guests. (The elephants routinely won, since royal keepers blunted the tigers' teeth and claws.) French travelers wrote of these ferocious clashes with awe and revulsion, comparing them to the feral spectacles in ancient Rome's Colosseum. The emperors were long gone by 1963. But they had a successor of sorts in an enigmatic, potbellied figure named Ngo Dinh Can, a younger brother of President Diem. Although he held no government office, Can ruled Hue and the rest of upper South Vietnam like a viceroy. Rarely seen in public, he lived with his bedridden ninety-one-year-old mother in a house enclosed by high walls topped with triple strands of electrified wire. Can directed his own secret police force, known as the Special Action Group, which had a reputation for crushing the Viet Cong and noncommunist political rivals with equal ruthlessness. Through a network of informants and sycophants, he stayed abreast of all significant political and military developments in his region. "He had his agents everywhere," said one U.S. diplomat. Without Can's blessing, no one got an important government job or won a seat in the National Assembly. Pragmatic and down-to-earth, he liked to be called "Uncle Can" and was said to have a sparkling wit. He kept close tabs on popular aspirations and attitudes toward Diem's regime, and was seen as generally sympathetic to common people. But Can tolerated no dissent. While his brother's political antagonists in Saigon were sometimes allowed to make speeches and be quoted in newspapers, in Can's satrapy no such insubordination was permitted. His political organization had a hand in most major economic development projects in the region, and he was believed to control the lucrative trade in cassia, a cinnamon-like spice. He told one associate that his family had salted away $7 million in foreign banks and that if things went bad, they and their friends could sail away from South Vietnam in five ships they owned. Can disliked foreigners and dodged each of the eager young American consuls who arrived in Hue every few years and sought an audience with him. He pleaded ill health or insisted he was only a private citizen, with no official role in government. He did, however, send the Americans interesting gifts. One of Helble's predecessors received the stuffed head of a gaur, a large horned bovine similar to a bison, as a going-away present. The last U.S. consul who managed to get inside Can's home, in 1959, described it as "bizarre," citing such trappings as two enormous stuffed tigers, a stuffed leopard, and numerous cages filled with raucous birds. A Vietnamese official who'd accompanied the American explained that Can was very fond of animals because he had no wife or children. Helble, too, tried to speak with Can, but was told to submit questions in writing; he did so and got back only pabulum. But everywhere he went, he felt Can's unseen presence. He sensed it every time he tried to talk with a Vietnamese about local politics or the government, only to have that person gingerly steer the conversation to another topic. Hue was filled with police and soldiers, but they kept a low profile, which was all they really needed to do. The people of Hue knew who was in charge and how they were expected to act. LONG BEFORE JOHN HELBLE and other Americans came to Vietnam, it was conquered and colonized by the French. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, France gradually seized control of what became known as French Indochina, composed of the modern-day states of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In 1885, French soldiers sacked Hue, killing as many as 1,500 Vietnamese and forcing the young Nguyen emperor, Ham Nghi, to flee into the countryside with his regents. The French took over the imperial capital and ran the country for their own benefit until Ho Chi Minh's communist guerrilla army forced them out in 1954. Hue still carried a vivid colonial imprint when Helble arrived. The splendid former French governor-general's mansion graced the city's French Quarter, on the south side of the Perfume River, where Hue's most affluent families resided. Also on the south side was the French-built, raspberry-colored railroad station. The glamorous Cercle Sportif de Hue country club, where colons once played tennis on grass courts and sipped cocktails at the poolside bar, was shuttered, but bore ghostly witness to the charms of colonial life. Helble and his wife, Joan, also got a taste of upper-crust living. They moved into a spacious French Quarter villa and hired four servants, including a cook, a gardener, and a nursemaid for their little son, and, in the fall of 1961, a newborn daughter. A bridge enthusiast, Helble hosted weekly games at his house with Jerry Greiner, a CIA agent who was under cover as Helble's "vice-consul." Another regular was Jan Berlin, a U.S. Army doctor who sometimes accompanied Helble on his jeep jaunts in the countryside. The men drank cognac and smoked Philippine cigars as Helble carefully tallied their scores. He also enjoyed taking his family to a gorgeous beach on the South China Sea. Only a handful of other American couples lived in Hue, and Helble and his wife sometimes joined them at a firing range as they honed their shooting skills in case of a Viet Cong attack on their homes or offices. Helble liked Hue and the Vietnamese, and accepted their cultural idiosyncrasies with easygoing Midwestern tolerance. For instance, he dined on a number of occasions with the rotund, jocular rector of Hue University, a Jesuit priest named Cao Van Luan. Father Luan loved playing a puckish practical joke on his foreign guests: he served them cooked dog meat, without telling them in advance. Helble didn't mind eating dog, although it wouldn't be his first choice on a restaurant menu, and was sometimes present at Father Luan's dinners with other Americans. When they finished their meal, the newcomers often remarked, "Father, that was a delicious dish. What was that?" The priest would smile slyly and say, "Dog." The guests sometimes didn't catch what he said at first, or didn't believe their ears. Many of them then beelined for the front yard, making sounds that indicated the meal might not have been so appetizing after all. Helble loved sports, especially games played with a racket: tennis, badminton, racquetball. Soon after moving into his villa, he poured blacktop in his backyard, put up a net and lights, and began organizing badminton games and tournaments. The games had a dual purpose: they were partly for fun and partly a way for Helble to better understand Hue's political and social anatomy. Most of those he invited were government bureaucrats or professors and students from the university. As players batted the shuttlecock back and forth, Helble chatted quietly on the sidelines with those not playing. He asked bureaucrats about their jobs and students about their professors, as obliquely and discreetly as possible. "You always had to be somewhat circumspect in how you approached it," he recalled. Helble held several games a week and several tournaments a year, gleaning valuable information and becoming a first-rate badminton player in the bargain. Helble had other ploys for collecting information as well. For their first Christmas in Hue, he and Joan decided to throw a dinner dance party, even though it was known that Can, the city's unofficial overlord, didn't approve of dancing. Helble had heard that some Hue residents who'd been educated in Europe or the United States chafed at restrictions on dancing and other Western-style entertainments, and he wanted to find out who they were. So he and Joan invited a couple dozen Vietnamese, including members of the local power structure, to their home. The Helbles cranked up their record player with Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass and Les Elgart's dance band. But only a few Vietnamese couples showed up, and they stayed off the dance floor. The party looked like a bust, but the Helbles gamely went ahead with dinner. Afterward, one of the Vietnamese couples excused themselves and left. It was still early, so Helble put on more records and the place suddenly sprang to life. The remaining couples moved onto the dance floor and had a blast. They explained to Helble why they were all so inhibited at first: the gentleman who'd just departed was Can's right-hand man, and "no one was crazy enough to dance in his presence." IN THE TWO YEARS preceding the radio station massacre, Helble had noticed an intensifying competition between Hue's two main religious groups, Buddhists and Catholics. Hue was the de facto capital of South Vietnamese Buddhism. Leading monks lived there and worshiped at Tu Dam Pagoda, with its striking tower resembling a stack of giant mushrooms. About 70 percent of South Vietnam's population identified, at least nominally, as Buddhist, and Buddhist festivals and processions were commonplace in Hue. While Catholics made up only 10 to 12 percent of South Vietnam's people, they had outsize influence in Hue. The city was the family seat of President Diem, an ardent Catholic who, in his youth, had studied to be a priest. In 1961, the Vatican appointed Diem's older brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, as Hue's archbishop. Strong-willed and self-righteous, Thuc moved forcefully to raise Catholicism's profile in the city, constructing a large church and renovating the Hue cathedral. Even Can, the Ngo clan's least devout member, was a weekly churchgoer and lived in Hue's Catholic quarter, Phu Cam. Helble watched as the two faiths tried to outdo one another on holy days, ratcheting up the size and splendor of their celebrations. If the Catholics held a big procession to mark one of their sacred days, the Buddhists staged an even grander one when their turn came. Though heavily outnumbered, Catholics consistently put on good shows of strength. When Archbishop Thuc's new church was dedicated in 1962, for instance, many government officials came up from Saigon for the ceremony. Indeed, Buddhists complained to Helble that Diem's regime had for years consistently favored Catholics. Hue University faculty members bent over backward to please Thuc, believing, as Helble put it in a report to the State Department, that the influential prelate "can break the University if he sees fit." And Helble had seen evidence of direct government assistance to the Catholic community. Shortly after he moved to Hue, construction began on a Catholic seminary near his house. Helble saw five South Vietnamese army trucks bringing fill material to the building site. Two years later, the work was still underway, with the same trucks helping. Local residents told him that army trucks were also used to build the new church. THE MAY 8 MASSACRE stirred deep anger among Buddhists in Hue. Even some Catholics were upset at the tactics government troops had used against people at the radio station. Helble had his diplomatic position to consider, and didn't want to be seen as taking too close an interest in what the Diem government surely regarded as an internal matter. But he did conduct his own circumspect investigation, quietly talking to Buddhist leaders and the few anti-regime dissidents he could find. He gathered official reports on the killings from Vietnamese police and military sources, and spoke with Major Dang Sy, commander of the government troops at Radio Hue. A Catholic, the officer had become the primary villain in what was shaping up as a major scandal. In a lengthy cable to the State Department, Helble said he tried to verify all of the events preceding the massacre, but conceded that his report might not be completely accurate. The incident began, he wrote, on May 7, when Hue police asked local Buddhists to take down flags hoisted in celebration of Wesak, an annual holy day commemorating the birth, enlightenment, and death of Buddha. The cops, however, met with "considerable popular resistance." The next morning, the Buddhists held their traditional Wesak parade and a ceremony at Tu Dam Pagoda. During the ceremony a monk named Tri Quang delivered a fiery speech attacking the Diem government for ordering the removal of Buddhist flags and discriminating against Buddhists. "Now is the time to fight!" he exhorted his listeners. That evening, a large crowd gathered at Tu Dam for a traditional flower dance. But the performance was canceled and the crowd headed for the radio station by the river. By 8 p.m., as many as four thousand people were outside the building. At that point, Helble acknowledged, the details of what happened got fuzzy. Tri Quang went to the radio station and demanded either that a tape of his morning speech be broadcast, or that he be allowed to repeat the speech on the air live. But the station manager refused, whether because the speech hadn't been cleared by government censors or because there was no room in the program lineup, Helble couldn't say. Tri Quang then addressed the crowd over a loudspeaker, urging them to remain calm even though he'd been denied airtime. The province chief circulated among the people, pleading with them to go home. But they didn't and the authorities eventually lost patience. Many police officers appeared, along with two companies of soldiers and militiamen and eight armored scout cars and U.S.-supplied armored personnel carriers. Fire trucks arrived and tried to disperse the crowd by spraying water. The hoses, however, didn't have enough pressure to push people back and many actually enjoyed the cool streams on a hot night. Eyewitnesses said the protesters engaged in no violence, although two youths scrambled onto the radio station's roof and planted a Buddhist flag, shouting, "Victory!" Loudspeaker appeals and tear gas volleys also failed to break up the crowd. At about 10:45 p.m. the security forces all began firing their guns in the air, creating a frightening racket that went on for about one minute. Several earsplitting explosions occurred at about the same time. Armored vehicles rolled forward into the demonstrators, and terrified men, women, and children began running and stumbling. When the bedlam subsided, seven mangled corpses lay outside the radio station. Six of the dead were children or youths. About fifteen other people were taken to local hospitals and dispensaries for treatment. Two eyewitnesses later said they saw a soldier pitch a concussion grenade onto the radio station's concrete porch, where several people died. Though the devices weren't designed to kill, a U.S. Army doctor who viewed the victims told Helble their wounds could have been caused by such grenades going off "in the midst of a closely-packed crowd." The doctor also believed that two children had been crushed to death beneath armored vehicles. The government claimed that Viet Cong agents caused the fatalities by hurling plastic explosives into the crowd. But that story, Helble reported to his superiors, was "greeted with incredulity" by the people of Hue. "They were amazed," he wrote, "that the Government would try to cover up the incident in such a manner when it seemed everyone clearly knew the real truth." STREET PROTESTS SWEPT THE city over the next few days. On the morning after the massacre, about eight hundred people, many of them young and chanting, "Kill us, kill us!," marched to the train station, where the province chief stood on a sound truck with the monk Tri Quang by his side. The province chief told the crowd that the soldiers and militiamen took the actions they did in order to suppress Viet Cong agitators. When an American helicopter appeared overhead, a machine gun protruding from its side door, protesters cried out, "Go ahead, drop the bombs!" But at Tri Quang's behest, they dispersed peacefully. That afternoon, the charismatic monk, with his shaved head and large, intense eyes, addressed several thousand people again gathered at the radio station. He said he'd call a mass meeting soon, but that if they didn't go home immediately, he'd "fast unto death." The crowd broke up without incident. Helble had gone to one of the demonstrations in an effort to gauge the level of popular support for the Buddhists and get more details of their grievances. But he figured he was under surveillance and didn't want Can's men to see him on the streets too much. He found out that several Americans from other U.S. government agencies in Hue were going to protests as well. All of them were tall white men who stood out very visibly among the Vietnamese. For instance, Jerry Greiner, the CIA officer, was a six-foot-three former college football linebacker and heavyweight boxer. Someone showed Helble a laugh-out-loud photo of Greiner trying, with no success, to conceal his bulk behind a streetlight pole. Helble instructed Greiner and the others to stay away from the demonstrations and gave one of the consulate's Vietnamese employees a crash course in how to use a Rolleiflex camera. That way, Helble could keep a low profile and still find out the size of the crowds and what their banners said. The Buddhists called another mass meeting at Tu Dam on May 10. Police and troops lined the roads leading to the pagoda. Thousands of protesters began arriving, many waving Buddhist flags in open defiance of a regime ban on them. Others carried signs and banners that read "Long live the Buddhist religion," "Ready to sacrifice blood," and "The international Buddhist flag will never go down." Tri Quang took the stage and told his listeners they could fly their flags and he'd bear the consequences. He urged them to remain peaceful, carry no weapons, and be vigilant against Viet Cong attempts to infiltrate their ranks. When he asked the people whether they'd follow his leadership, they roared their assent. Tri Quang and other prominent monks then outlined five demands to the Diem government that were soon to become highly contentious. They wanted Diem to lift restrictions on the Buddhist flag and repeal a French-era law they said made it difficult to acquire property for Buddhist schools, temples, and other facilities. They demanded that the government stop "arresting and terrorizing" Buddhists, and that monks be guaranteed the freedom to preach. Lastly, Tri Quang and the other leaders demanded punishment for those responsible for the massacre and compensation for victims' families. Two days later, what Helble described as a "goon squad" of about ten men struck back, beating up several people in various places around the city. The victims seemed to have been picked at random, although most were young. Two of them were assaulted in a coffee shop in Hue's central market as nearby police did nothing. The only plausible explanation Helble heard was that Can was trying to reestablish some semblance of control by intimidating the population. Tensions nonetheless eased in Hue as the days passed. Authorities ended a nighttime curfew and Buddhist leaders toned down their rhetoric. A mass meeting of eight thousand people at Tu Dam on May 21 was completely peaceful, with speakers avoiding attacks on the government and no inflammatory banners or signs appearing in the crowd. But something had changed, and the people sensed it. The cloak of invincibility that had covered Can, and by extension Diem, was badly torn, if not completely shredded. Buddhists had long been submissive to the powers that be, focused as they were on attaining nirvana rather than concessions from the regime. Over the course of a few spring days, however, they'd learned to their surprise that they could parade through the streets, defy government rules, make anti-government speeches, and not face brutal repression. The authorities certainly had lashed out with deadly force at the radio station, but later seemed to back off as more demonstrations unfolded. In contrast to the rigidly hierarchical Catholic Church, Buddhism in South Vietnam was known for its loose organization and the broad autonomy it granted to individual pagodas. But the protests had galvanized Buddhists with a new sense of unity and pride. The scale of the demonstrations, along with participants' willingness to risk being arrested or even shot, showed the urgency and popularity of the Buddhist cause. A profound psychological liberation was taking place in Hue. There were still thugs on the streets ready to attack people if they got out of line, but there were many more Buddhists, and they weren't backing down. The old mindset that the people had to remain meek and voiceless was disintegrating. The May marches and rallies also marked the emergence of a formidable new Buddhist leader: Tri Quang. In the past, monks were visible mostly during their ethereal street processions, in flowing black or gray robes, to and from their pagodas. Tri Quang cut sharply against that passive, disengaged image. A powerful orator and shrewd strategist, he seemed to have a mesmeric grip on the crowds he addressed. When he told people to quiet down, they immediately went silent. When he told them to raise their banners and placards, they instantly did so. When he told them to go home, they obeyed without question. Almost overnight, the little-known monk had become a sort of Buddhist Spartacus. He'd astutely guided the Hue protests since the beginning, using them to publicize his claims that the Diem regime persecuted Buddhists while helping Catholics. Tri Quang threatened that if the government didn't satisfy the five Buddhist demands, he and other monks would launch a hunger strike. Buddhists had reached the point of no return with the regime, and "more martyrs would be created," if necessary, to achieve their goals. Not only were ordinary Buddhists behind him, he declared, but also many military and government officers. Helble sent a long, insightful cable to his superiors summarizing the memorable month of May. He'd never seen such a compelling "rice-roots" movement since arriving in Vietnam, he wrote; the people of Hue seemed stunned by their newfound strength. The Diem regime's insistence that the Viet Cong caused the massacre had cost it all credibility in Hue. No one believed that story, and few now trusted the government to tell the truth about anything. The killings and their aftermath also had implications for the United States, Helble wrote. The Buddhist leaders and other dissidents he'd talked with didn't blame the Americans for what had happened. On the contrary, many in Hue believed that Americans sympathized with their cause. But the United States could lose its good reputation if it didn't modify its blanket support of the regime, Helble predicted. If Diem took more bloody action against the Buddhists, the U.S. government might wind up branded as an accessory, in light of all the advisers, equipment, and other aid it was providing his security forces. Diem, meanwhile, acceded to only one of the Buddhists' demands--he compensated the victims' families ten thousand piastres, or about $142, apiece--while sloughing off the others. Helble's report warned: "Should the Buddhists persist, as it appears they will from this vantage point, and the [government] continues to resist any real compromise, as their past performances would indicate they may, the pressure could mount to serious proportions." His words were as prophetic as they were understated. Excerpted from Kennedy's Coup: A White House Plot, a Saigon Murder, and America's Descent into Vietnam by Jack Cheevers All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
