Fire in the Lake

by Frances FitzGerald

A few American officials — notably the intellectuals, such as Douglas Pike and George Carver — had been sympathetic to the Buddhist struggles in the past, but relations between the embassy and the Buddhist leadership had never been good. Except at the time of the 1963 coup, the Buddhists avoided close contact with the Americans, and the Americans made small effort to accommodate themselves. The result was an impasse — a void filled by fantasy from both sides. To many Americans the bonzes with their bare feet, their shaven skulls, and their curious aged-child bodies appeared to come from some mysterious Asian past where the rules of “civilized” conduct did not hold. Watching Tri Quang speak — the huge eyes of the bonze glittering in the light of the television cameras — one English correspondent said to a colleague, “Yul Brynner playing Dracula.”7 The joke revealed the obscure fear he felt for a man whose ambition it was to imitate Gandhi. Such remarks were fairly common among those journalists who had seen thousands of people following the Buddhist banners, who had seen the panic as the police attacked, and heard the high-pitched screams of the bonzes. If they had not witnessed it, Americans in Vietnam imagined the leap of flame, the smell of burning flesh, and the slow fall and disintegration of Thich Quang Duc. Some perhaps tried to talk to the bonzes, but found them “too moralistic, too devious.” For American journalists and officials alike, the Buddhists, perhaps even more than the NLF, conjured up the old racial clichés of “the yellow masses” and the “inscrutable Orient.” Among the journalists only Takashi Oka, the Japanese-American correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, had over the years continued to visit Thich Tri Quang. As one non-Buddhist Vietnamese explained dryly, “The Americans don’t like the Buddhists for the same reason they did not like Ngo Dinh Diem. The Buddhists are too Vietnamese for them.”

  The remark had more than a superficial truth to it. Under the Diem regime Ngo Dinh Can, the president’s tough, peasant-shrewd brother, who ruled the First Corps, spent long hours with Tri Quang discussing the affairs of Hue and of the nation. Until the last year of the regime, when the president’s brother, Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc, hungry for a cardinal’s hat, legislated against the Buddhist, Can had kept the tensions between the two sects to a minimum. It had perhaps not been that difficult a task, for the two central Vietnamese sects had more in common with each other than with anyone else in Vietnam.

  Living in that impoverished land, the last outpost of the Nguyen empire, the central Vietnamese were traditionalists whatever their adopted faith. Catholics or Buddhists, they believed in the same old customs, the old morality of the patriarchal empire. Halfway between Hanoi and Saigon, they clung to a nationalism that opposed Vietnam to the West and to Western innovation. As Harvard-trained Dr. Phan Quang Dan once exclaimed during the Buddhist crisis, “Tri Quang on the cover of Time! He’s just a witch doctor people go to until modern medicine comes along.”8 His remark was not the disparagement that he meant it to be, for the fact was that Tri Quang’s ideas were much closer to the traditionalist peasantry than Dan’s could ever be, despite the doctor’s good intentions. Neglected by the Americans as well as by the French, Hue was the countryside compared to Saigon.9 As a centrist, Tri Quang, perhaps more than Thien Minh or Tam Chau, saw Buddhism as the spiritual force that united all Vietnamese. “The Communists,” he told Takashi Oka, “are against us because our religion is tied to the Vietnamese nation — because it has always had a nationalist character. The Communists always want to be a mass organization, but Buddhism is the mass — and that makes it more difficult for the Communists as well as for us.” For him Buddhism was the “Middle Way,” that is, both the “Way of the Ancestors” and the Way that united the Yin and the Yang, the two opposing principles of the universe. Certain of the intellectuals that surrounded Tri Quang called themselves socialists, but they believed, as he did, that the real enemy, the real deviation from the Middle Way, was superficial Westernization. Like Ngo Dinh Diem and like so many of the “old-fashioned” people of the country, they saw the difficulty the country people had in coping with Western wealth and Western ideas. To them Saigon was a city of prostitutes, beggars, corrupt generals, and juvenile delinquents — a new Shanghai that had capitulated to the foreigners and isolated itself from the rest of the country. As the American officials pointed out, they expressed their animosity towards the American troops in much the same language that the NLF used. But then so did the Catholics, the Hoa Hao, and the Cao Dai. The NLF had not converted the Buddhists to anti-Americanism, rather the Communists had learned xenophobia from the central Vietnamese mandarins and the people of the countryside. And it was this that the Americans could not acknowledge, if they understood it, for it meant that in opposing the Buddhists they were opposing the voice of Vietnamese traditionalism.

  The Americans erred in their analysis of the Buddhists, but they were perhaps correct in their conclusions: if the Buddhists were forced to choose between the Americans and the NLF, was it not likely that they would choose their own countrymen? In the middle of April 1966, the U.S. Embassy looked from the small safe island of the Ky government down into a vast abyss of people who did not want them in Vietnam.

  Still, in that month of April the Buddhist leaders gave no signs of opposition to the war. Indeed, in their relations with the Americans they behaved in a much more reasonable and conciliatory manner than the generals themselves. Once the promise of elections was made, Tri Quang toured the northern provinces, calling on rebellious soldiers and officials to return to their posts and asking for a restoration of order. Had he been in any way beholden to the Communists, such an appeal would have been difficult for him to make, for it meant effectively restoring the foundation for the entire war effort in central Vietnam. As it was, he had to resist a good deal of pressure from the local GVN officials demanding the immediate resignation of the junta. To overcome their fears of retaliation, he gave them his personal assurance that Ky and Thieu would retire after the election and that their jobs would be secure.10

  Slowly calm returned to the cities and with it a silence indicating that all of the political factions had retired from the public stage to make their arrangements for the forthcoming elections. The Catholics voiced some fear that the Buddhists would dominate the new assembly, but only the American embassy appeared to be positively unhappy with the prospect of elections. In a televised interview Ambassador Lodge spoke darkly about the possibilities for voter intimidation, fraud, and Viet Cong infiltration of the electoral system.11 What undoubtedly disturbed Lodge about the entire situation was the fact that he had no control over it.

  On May 6, after a month of quiet and order, Premier Ky announced quite casually to a group of American newsmen that the junta had agreed to elections for a constituent assembly, not a legislative body, and that he intended to stay in power for at least another year. The next day U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk said on national television that he believed the press must have misquoted Ky: the Vietnamese premier had made it quite clear that he intended to resign his powers to the new assembly. Rusk was wrong. The young general had not been misquoted and he meant exactly what he said.

  On May 14, a thousand Vietnamese Marines, supported by Ky’s wing of fighter-bombers, landed in Da Nang and seized the radio station, the corps headquarters, and other key installations throughout the city. The move came as a total surprise to everyone, including the American advisers to the Marine battalions who, until the moment of landing in Da Nang, believed they were engaged in an operation against the Viet Cong. Caught off guard, Ky’s own corps commander, General Ton That Dinh, fled to Hue in a helicopter lent to him by the local U.S. Marine commander. Once safe in the First Division Headquarters, he refused — or so he later testified — the junta’s offers of cabinet posts and ambassadorships abroad as the price for saying he had “invited” the Saigon troops in. The commander of the ARVN First Division refused to receive Ky’s emissary, and the mayor of Da Nang, Dr. Man, disappeared.12 In Saigon fifty thousand trade union workers struck in protest against the junta’s ac
tion.

  Washington was in an uproar. Without consulting the American ambassador, Ky had provoked a crisis that looked as if it might turn into a civil war within the Vietnamese army. Which portion of the army should the U.S. troops support? Already the First Corps troops had begun to launch shells at the American base, where Ky’s Marines were stationed, and the Buddhists of Da Nang had taken steps to barricade themselves into their pagodas. Appalled by the prospect of so much bloodshed, the new corps commander, sent up to replace General Ton That Dinh, refused to obey an order to clear the dissidents out of the pagodas. On May 16, Tri Quang sent an urgent appeal to President Johnson asking him to intervene on behalf of the Buddhists. The President did not himself reply. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, however, responded that he could not pass judgment on Ky’s use of force and that he hoped that all the Vietnamese would settle their “lesser differences” and concentrate on pursuing the war against the Viet Cong.13

  No doubt emboldened by this American reaction, the Ky junta proceeded to fire the new corps commander and to hand over command of the Da Nang operation to Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the northern-born paratrooper colonel whom two years later an AP photographer was to catch summarily executing a Viet Cong suspect with his revolver. Colonel Loan had few scruples. With reinforcements from the tank corps and the airborne division, he began to move on the pagodas and in a wild series of gun battles, managed to kill approximately a hundred civilians and to wound hundreds of others. On May 22 he forced the last Da Nang pagoda to surrender and completed his preparations for the capture of Hue. The junta initially lacked troops and transport to take Hue as well as Da Nang by surprise, and so it began by laying siege to the city, cutting off all but essential food supplies.

  Within the city of Hue the dissidents began to feel the pressure of want and to hear gruesome reports of the atrocities committed by government troops in Da Nang. Blaming himself for the fate of the Da Nang Buddhists — it was he, after all, who advised them to cease their resistance — Tri Quang (according to one report) shut himself up in his cell for several days, crying out and beating his head with his fists.14 On May 26, a group of students and young workers burned down the USIS library in Hue; the city fire trucks, called in to stop the blaze, made no attempt to put the fire out. In retaliation the U.S. officials withdrew the remaining American personnel from the city. At the same time they attempted to bring the generals to a compromise. Once again their initiative failed completely, for General Thi, their one pawn, now refused to treat with the junta. The Buddhists of Hue were desperate. The same day of the USIS fire one hundred and twenty-five bonzes and nuns began a hunger strike in the U.S. consulate and some six thousand people marched in demonstration; the next day the Buddhist nun Thich Nu Thanh Quang set her gas-soaked robes alight and burned herself to death before one of the central pagodas in Hue. She left a note addressed to President Johnson in which she condemned the irresponsibility of American support for the junta and asked that the United States continue to be the friend and ally of the Vietnamese people. Her death inspired a demonstration of some twenty thousand people in Saigon and a series of eight other self-immolations by Buddhist bonzes and nuns throughout the major cities of Vietnam. Within the week there were more suicides by fire than there had been during the entire Buddhist campaign against Diem. President Johnson called the suicides “tragic and unnecessary” and said that they obstructed progress towards holding the elections for a constituent assembly. On May 31, a group of students and Buddhist youths burned down the U.S. consulate in Hue.15

  Simultaneously with the Da Nang raids Colonel Loan’s police broke into the Buddhist Youth Headquarters in Saigon and arrested twenty students, setting off a new series of demonstrations. This time, however, the police counterattacked with tear gas and bayonets. Thich Thien Minh, a supporter of Tri Quang and the only important Buddhist leader left in Saigon (the wily Tam Chau left the country on an official tour), attempted to negotiate with the junta, but his support was slipping away from him. The southern sects and other political factions that had backed the Buddhists on the issue of elections had come to fear that the Buddhists would dominate the assembly. They turned against them now that it was safe to do so. Despite the daily demonstrations in the city, the junta would give Thien Minh no more than the token concession of enlarging the Armed Forces Council with a few unaffiliated civilians.

  Slowly and steadily the siege began to tell on Hue. Realizing that no help could be expected from the Americans, the commander of the dissident Vietnamese First Division sent a secret message to Saigon through his wife, professing his loyalty to the junta.16 A short time later the mayor of Hue, Lieutenant Colonel Pham Van Khoa, openly declared his change of heart and moved out of the city with the thousand troops at his disposal, leaving Hue defenseless before the government battalions. Most eager to dissociate themselves from the violence against American property, the other city officials and officers of the First Division went along with the decision. When the GVN invasion finally came on June 8, only the unarmed citizenry of Hue offered any resistance; families put their household altars out on the streets and groups of students formed human roadblocks across the avenues leading into the city. Wishing to avoid further bloodshed, Tri Quang ordered the people of Hue to remove their altars from the streets and to allow the GVN troops to enter the city in peace.17 That day he began a hunger strike that was to last for several months and bring him to the point of death.

  Colonel Loan’s clearing operations dragged on. It was a full month after the attack on Da Nang before Hue surrendered completely. With a certain consideration for the feelings of the Americans and the rich Buddhists in Saigon, the junta determined not to imprison the senior bonzes of Hue, but merely to put Tri Quang under house arrest in a Saigon clinic. The Saigon generals were similarly careful with the ranking First Corps officers, many of whom had close relations with their American advisers. Arresting General Thi, General Ton That Dinh, and the commander of the First Division, they took them to Saigon and kept them there under house arrest before exiling them abroad. But they showed no mercy to the student leaders, the trade unionists, and the other lay members of the struggle movement. Imprisoning many of them in their foulest political camps, they left the rest no alternative but to join the NLF. The Buddhist struggle movement was never to recover.

  9

  Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel

  CALIBAN:

  This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother,

  Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first,

  Thou strok’dst me and made much of me, wouldst give me

  Water with berries in’t; and teach me how

  To name the bigger light, and how the less,

  That burn by day and night; and then I loved thee

  And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,

  The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.

  Cursed be I that did so! All the charms

  Of Sycorax — toads, beetles, bats, light on you!

  For I am all the subjects that you have,

  Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me

  In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me

  The rest o’ th’ island.

  William Shakespeare,

  The Tempest, act 1, scene 2

  In the fall of 1966 the Buddhist crisis passed into history. It had disrupted the war effort for some months and disabled the Vietnamese government in the critical area of the First Corps for the rest of the year. Still, the war continued and the Ky junta remained in power. The importance of the crisis lay not so much in what it did as in what it showed about the relationship between the United States and its non-Communist Vietnamese “allies.”

  The Buddhist crisis, first of all, forced U.S. officials to clarify and substantiate their policy towards the Saigon government. During the course of the crisis they made clear that the United States would support the military junta against all opposition, whatever its political weight.
In effect they were giving the Vietnamese the choice between the generals and the NLF. The Buddhists had, of course, suspected that from the time of the Honolulu Conference. They created the struggle movement to show how repulsive that choice was to the urban Vietnamese. And they successfully demonstrated that fact. The curiosity was that they finally went down to defeat. While many Americans simply assumed that they could not prevail against U.S. opposition, the serious American journalists were impressed by the lack of influence the United States appeared to have over its “allies.” Despite its subvention of the regime, despite the two hundred thousand American troops in Vietnam, the embassy failed to control the three generals it supported, much less the Buddhists and other political groups. Granted, it managed to maintain the junta in power and to continue the war on the same terms, but that was all. Except for the resignation of General Thi, all of the American initiatives, diplomatic and otherwise, ended in failure. For the past three months the world had watched the ludicrous spectacle of the largest power on earth occupying one of the smallest and hopelessly trying to unknot a civil war inside a revolution.

  The reason for this failure the journalists found difficult to fathom — and particularly difficult if they talked to the Vietnamese. For the Vietnamese seemed to see the crisis in a completely strange light. According to many of the politicians concerned, the United States had planned and orchestrated the whole sequence of events in order to further its own interests. Sometime in the weeks between the Honolulu Conference and the first Da Nang assault, one student leader (a man in his thirties) wrote a strongly worded manifesto charging that the U.S. embassy had deliberately and selectively cut off the electricity in various portions of Saigon in order to undermine the Vietnamese government, Vietnamese sovereignty, and the aspirations of the Vietnamese people. At the time the American reporters (who suffered from the lack of electricity a good deal more than the Vietnamese) simply laughed, but the student’s complaint began to seem less and less out of the ordinary as the Buddhist crisis progressed. More outspoken and possibly more courageous than their elders, many of whom echoed the same sentiments sotto voce, the student leaders would regularly stand up and accuse the embassy or the CIA of responsibility for every event that displeased them, from the activities of the Ky junta to the corruption of the provincial officials. Some of their complaints were justifiable — the United States was indeed supporting the Ky junta, despite all its claims of neutrality in “internal Vietnamese affairs” — but others were simply inexplicable. Just after the promulgation of the election decree, for example, the militant Catholics (probably inspired by the junta) demonstrated before the American embassy with signs charging that Ambassador Lodge had supported the Buddhists against the junta in their bid for power. When asked why they held such an opinion after all the evidence to the contrary, they merely answered that the Buddhists could not have succeeded in doing what they did without the help of the Americans.