South Viet Nam: The Crackdown

Over and over, the desperate voice shouted into the telephone: "They are breaking into Xa Loi Pagoda. They are breaking into Xa Loi Pagoda." In the background, gunfire mingled with the confused screams of Buddhist monks and nuns and the clanging alarm of the huge brass gong that hangs in the bell tower of Saigon's largest pagoda. Suddenly the phone connection from the temple went dead.

It was 12:20 a.m. Using their rifle butts as clubs, squads of tough, riot-trained "special forces" smashed into the pagoda, battering a path through a small guard of young Buddhist monks. The troopers had a list, and each monk on the list was considered to be a "Communist in disguise." On the temple's second floor, one monk tried to resist and was thrown bodily from a balcony to the courtyard 20 ft. below. Other monks and nuns were routed from behind a flimsy barricade of wooden benches and forced outside by tear gas and gunshots.

Sacking the pagoda's main altar, the raiders carted away the charred heart of Buddhist Martyr Thich Quang Due, who last June was the first of five Buddhists to burn himself to death in pro test against the Diem government's anti-Buddhist drive. But the Buddhists managed to spirit out of the building the receptacle holding Quang Due's ashes. "The ashes are holy," said one monk. "We would give 15 lives to defend them." Two other monks escaped over the back wall of Xa Loi (pronounced sah loy) into the grounds of the adjoining U.S. Aid Mission, where they were given temporary sanctuary.

To the Diem government, the crackdown obviously seemed necessary to protect the regime—and enforce the law of the land—against Buddhist defiance. But it was brutal, nonetheless, and it aroused a strong new wave of sympathy for the Buddhists. It also put U.S. policy in South Viet Nam, which involves the lives and safety of 14,000 U.S. troops, into an agonizing dilemma. While often unhappy with Diem, the U.S. has proceeded on the assumption that it was safer to stick with him than risk the chaos that might surround a switch to a new, unknown and unpredictable regime. But by his move against the Buddhist monks, who have the growing support of the country's vast Buddhist majority, Roman Catholic Diem may finally have shattered his own political usefulness. He also opened up the possibilities of coups, countercoups, and even civil war—from all of which only the Communist Viet Cong could benefit.