The Storm Breaks

For a nation fighting for its very life, the rioting that pockmarked South Viet Nam last week seemed a senseless and dangerous self-indulgence. Night after night, motley mobs--students and street urchins, town toughs and saffron-robed Buddhist monks, Boy Scouts and Communist agitators--surged through the streets of Saigon. In battles with police and Vietnamese troopers, they answered tear gas with stones, staves and homemade spears, occasionally even a hand grenade. In South Viet Nam's capital of discontent, Hue, and in Danang, Dalat, Pleiku, Nha Trang and Ban Me Thuot, the rioters roamed virtually at will, their ranks often swelled by uniformed Vietnamese servicemen. A month in the gathering, South Viet Nam's storm of political unrest had erupted in a hail of intermittent violence and near civil war.

Everywhere the rioters shouted "Da Dao! Da Dao!"--Down With! Down With! Down with what did not really seem to matter. In the streets with the mobs marched the frustrations of a nation that has been too long at war, too often faced with problems that seemed insoluble. This crisis was made in Viet Nam by the Vietnamese, and Americans could only watch despairingly as the tragedy progressed. Through it all ran the baleful influence of Viet Nam's powerful Buddhists, who have helped to topple four previous governments. This time, however, they were up against not only Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, but a whole Directory of tough and determined generals who did not mean to bend easily before the demands of Buddhist monks, particularly when many of the monks openly egged on the rioting mobs.

Seized Spark. It was, in fact, the dismissal of a member of this ten-man Directory that precipitated the crisis. In a bold bid to strengthen the national government and with the near-unanimous support of the Directory, Premier Ky on March 10 sacked Lieut. General Nguyen Chanh Thi, the canny and insubordinate warlord of the five northernmost provinces that comprise the I Corps. Though Thi had carefully cultivated the Buddhists in his domain, notably ambitious, extremist Thich Tri Quang of Hue, Ky reportedly had Tri Quang's approval for Thi's removal. When some of the I Corps officers and men in Danang began agitating for Thi's return to command, Ky was confident that Tri Quang would lie low and let Saigon settle the matter among soldiers. Instead, Tri Quang seized on the spark of unrest over Thi's ousting to fan the flames of a Buddhist call for a return to civilian rule.

Initially, the Buddhist-inspired demonstrations in the I Corps area and Saigon were mild and orderly. But the unrest spread steadily, drawing up the civil servants, the military, laborers--all disaffected by South Viet Nam's galloping inflation and wartime insecurity, by wild rumors and even by the growing American presence in Viet Nam. At first Ky kept hands off so as "not to provide any martyrs" among the demonstrators, but the unrest gauge rose from troublesome to serious to grave. Two weeks ago, feeling its credibility as a government at stake, Saigon broke up a demonstration with tear gas and clubs, made its first arrests. The stage was set for last week's violence.

Shoot the Mayor. After the first clash between the government's tough airborne troopers and the demonstrators, Ky summoned an extraordinary session of the nation's generals and officials, who flew in from all over the country. They agreed to call a Congress in one or two weeks to work out the composition of a constitution-making assembly. In a press conference afterward, the mercurial Premier, puffing on Salems and nibbling from a plate of candy, made the angry charge that the city of Danang, where demonstrations were spreading, "is already held by the Communists, and the government will undertake operations to clear them out. We will liberate Danang." Snapped Ky in English: "The mayor of Danang is using public funds to organize anti-government demonstrations. Either this government will have to fall--or the mayor be shot." It was a foolish and precipitate statement, and it stunned Ky's listeners.

Danang, headquarters for 20,000 U.S. Marines and a major airbase, was hardly in Communist hands, although demonstrators had taken over the radio station and some government buildings, on occasion assisted by Thi's Vietnamese troops. The U.S., which had tried to stay out of the swelling crisis, even to the point of ordering U.S. troops to stay off the streets of Danang and Saigon, suddenly found itself forced to take sides. To "liberate" Danang, Ky needed U.S. planes to move his troops. Next day he got them: six U.S. C-130s, provided on the direct order of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, lifted 1,300 Vietnamese marines to Danang.

Fasten Seat Belts. Ky flew in his own plane to Danang, where he was met at the airport by Thi's successor, appointed by the junta, Major General Chuan. While Ky's marines set up tents near the airport, and demonstrators, aided by some 300 I Corps soldiers, haphazardly set up barricades and roadblocks on the airport road, Ky and Chuan had a tough private talk. The result was a compromise: Ky apologized for saying that Danang was ruled by Communists, but insisted--with good reason--that the Viet Cong had infiltrated the demonstrators. Chuan ordered posters put up proclaiming the demonstrators' cause just but not worth pressing to the detriment of the nation. With that, Ky flew back to Danang, leaving Danang's Mayor Nguyen Van Man still in charge. But Ky's marines stayed.

In Hue, the U.S. intervened so adroitly that even the wily Thich Tri Quang would have been impressed, had he not been grounded in Saigon by Ky's cancellation of all Air Viet Nam domestic flights. What the U.S. did was order the evacuation of all American civilians and military advisers in Hue. Night before they were due to leave, a province chief tried to call the Vietnamese division headquarters in Hue in order to get an artillery strike against the Viet Cong. Without the U.S. advisers around, not a Vietnamese soldier was on duty to answer the call. Next morning, half an hour before the U.S. personnel, their seat belts fastened, were due to fly out, General Chuan called and asked them to stay, personally guaranteeing the safety of every American citizen in Hue. The military advisers went back to their units, the civilians were evacuated--and Hue became noticeably calmer.

Exotic Bags. The same could not be said for Saigon, where each night, defying the government's curfew, the mobs roared through alleys and streets, leaving a wake of sticks, stones, broken bottles, empty cartridges, spent grenades and smoke flares. Often led by gazelle-like children or astonishingly pretty girls and, as the week progressed, directed by whistle-blowing Buddhist monks, the rioters baited the airborne troops trying to keep order. Despite wicker shields and flak jackets, the soldiers sometimes found the hail of stones so intense that they, rather than the rioters, broke for cover. When they hurled tear gas, the rioters picked up the smoking cans and hurled them back, used plastic bags over their heads for improvised masks. Newsmen as often as soldiers were targets for stoning and, when the mayor of Saigon went out into the teeming streets to try to reason with the rioters, he was stoned too. Wherever the mob clashed with the soldiers, the air soon became unbreathable. Tears flooded the eyes, juices poured from irritated mouths and noses. Everyone gasped, ran, fled the maddening tear gas.

But Ky's real struggle lay with the Buddhist leaders, who discovered their power three years ago in ousting Premier Diem, and have been thirsting for more ever since. Back in Saigon, Ky met with Buddhist leaders and tried to arrange a compromise. The Buddhists wanted an amnesty for rioters and the soldiers who aided them, withdrawal of the South Vietnamese marines from Danang, and the establishment of an assembly to draw up a constitution within four to six months. If Ky and his fellow generals would agree to that, said the bonzes, they would "temporarily suspend all forms of struggle to prove our good will."

The generals were agreeable to the constitutional assembly, as they have been all along, but not to the first two conditions. When I Corps Commander General Chuan in Danang argued that the marines had to be withdrawn from his city, the rest of his colleagues in the Directory unanimously removed him--with his concurrence--from the command he had held for less than a month. He was replaced by Lieut. General Ton That Dinh, who helped to lead the coup against Diem.

"Many, Many Men." With that, the Buddhists abandoned all pretense that the street mobs were not of their making. Closing ranks, they issued a proclamation from the Vien Hoa Dao, their chief headquarters, assuming responsibility for all future demonstrations. They declared that "a state of emergency" existed, and that "we want an elected national Congress now." Whether the Buddhists were declaring war only on Premier Ky or on the whole military government was not immediately clear. But in publicly blessing the civil disorder, and promising that from now on the street mobs must not be made up of "hoodlums" but "many, many men," the political bonzes had moved the crisis up still another notch.

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