Incident at the Pagoda

It was early evening in Danang, a city blasted and weary of civil war. For eight days the six battalions of loyal Vietnamese troops dispatched from Saigon by Premier Nguyen Cao Ky had been closing the vise, block by block, street by street, on 800 rebellious soldiers in the military capital. Shattered trees, some completely sawed off by gunfire, lined Danang's bullet-spattered boulevards. Pocked walls, splintered doors and decapitated houses testified to the city's agony, in which over 80 had died and more than 400 were wounded.

But now the government cordon was nearly closed. Ky's marines, backed by tanks and a squadron of armored personnel carriers, each armed with a .50-cal. and two .30-cal. machine guns, ringed the rebel command post, the faded yellow-stucco Tinh Hoi Buddhist pagoda. Six blocks away, the foreign press, mostly American, was taking a breather on the cement terrace of the Press Center overlooking the Danang River.

Suddenly a Jeep with a Red Cross blazon roared up. Driven by a young Vietnamese with his head swathed in bandages, it carried a Buddhist monk and a young girl with a bandaged arm. They had a message: the press was invited to Tinh Hoi at once for an announcement. Grabbing cameras and note pads, some 35 newsmen set out for the pagoda, passing first through government lines, then the firing pits of the Tinh Hoi compound filled with rebel soldiers. Among them were TIME Correspondents Karsten Prager and William McWhirter.

Grisly Tableaux. The compound was a cacophony of wailing wounded and milling troops, Boy Scouts, monks and nuns, ordinary women and children. As the correspondents entered, they saw a grisly series of tableaux. There lay a wounded woman with a tiny baby, just old enough to sit, screaming beside her. On another stretcher lay a young woman with two bullet holes in her back, freshly wounded and brought into Tinh Hoi for medical treatment. Torches illuminated a chamber where 26 corpses lay under Buddhist flags and swarms of flies. But there was no sign of a rebel spokesman or of the promised announcement. As the minutes passed and night fell outside, the newsmen's suspicions mounted. As Correspondents Prager and McWhirter told it:

"Several times we asked when the announcement would come. A Buddhist Boy Scout told us in broken English to wait another five minutes. A man in a green uniform blandly assured us that it would deal with the reasons for the rebel fight against the Ky government. That hardly seemed worth summoning us to the pagoda, and it suddenly occurred to us that it might very well be a trap. If the rebels feared a government attack on Tinh Hoi, what better way to forestall it than by arranging the presence of three dozen foreign reporters inside the pagoda?

"True or not, the possibility of being used as pawns was enough to set ten of us moving. We left the compound, hands in the air, moving slowly toward where we expected the government lines to be in the darkness. We chanted 'Bao chi, bao chi [press, press], no shoot!' The reply was nervous giggles. Two sniper bullets whined by. We took cover on the edge of the road, then moved out again. Then all hell broke loose, triggered by which side it was impossible to tell.

"Up and down the dark street, from both sides, intense automatic fire raged. Five of us dived for cover into one courtyard, the others into an adjoining one. Outside in the street, a tremendous explosion resounded--either an M-79 grenade or a 60-mm. mortar shell. Three of the other newsmen, peering out a door, were wounded by blast fragments. UPI photographer Steve Van Meter asked an old man in a nearby building for some mosquito netting to bandage our wounded. The man shook his head. We offered him 500 piastres. Still no. With that Van Meter brushed the man aside, took the netting. The firefight was over with the big blast. Twenty minutes later, the Tinh Hoi loudspeaker announced that the rest of the newsmen were coming out of the pagoda and that this time there would be no shooting. We joined them and walked the last four blocks home."

Hastening the End? The government forces did not attack the pagoda that night. There was no need to. Hopelessly surrounded and outgunned, its besieged defenders surrendered the next day, led by a paratroop captain who laid his carbine down at the foot of a tough young government colonel and saluted. That ceremonial gesture signaled an end to the city's nightmare of hysteria.

Danang's peace was probably hastened by the newsmen's harrowing experience the night before. If the Buddhist-inspired rebels had been planning a last-ditch stand in the pagoda, they would have done so only if they could have been certain that the press --and world opinion--would blame the Ky forces, and not themselves. When the reporters departed, so did the Buddhists' will to fight on.

In two decades of war, the Vietnamese have learned resilience. No sooner had the guns fallen silent in Danang than the rubble in the streets was removed. Shutters and boards that had been hastily nailed to windows were removed. Shops that had been closed for eight days opened up; police replaced soldiers at busy intersections. Miraculously, people reappeared: riding bicycles and peddling cycles, passing the time of day at sidewalk kiosks, shopping, visiting--a city alive again and glad of it.

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