iii. the scandal of general williams
The first time I heard rumors about General Samuel L. The first time I heard rumors about General Samuel Williams was in April 1957, when I was already working part-time as a military adviser to the Gia Dinh Security Corps, which was under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Viet Nam.
One evening, Lt. Col. Cornayne returned to Saigon from the central city of Hoi An and went to a cold-drink store on the city’s Pavilion Road for a drink with Major Quynh of the Saigon Military Delegation and Major Khe Minh of the Saigon Police Department, with me as his chaperone.
It was raining heavily at dusk that day, and it was after nine o’clock when we arrived at the cold drink store in the jeep driven by Major Kemin. The waitress at the store, a plump girl, saw us enter and hastily rose from behind the counter. We each ordered a martini on the rocks and sat down at a table by the window.
I had met Major Quinn a couple of times before that, but never spoke to him. I heard that he frequented the “human market” and that one day he got drunk and asked for three Vietnamese girls at once.
I am very familiar with Major Minh. He was fluent in English and French, yet always thought that Vietnamese women were more beautiful than women from any other country. He said that the Americans, being so rich, still had their eye on the narrow strip of land that is Vietnam, and it certainly showed.
In the midst of the small talk, Lt. Col. Cornayne began by telling us what he had come across on his trip to Hoi An and the tenses there.
Since May of the previous year, Le Bamboo, a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), had been working in the provinces of Quang Tri, Thanh Tinh, and Quang Nam, mobilizing the masses in marches for , and employing cadres left behind in the south to carry out a “political struggle” in preparation for the upcoming national “universal suffrage”. The “universal suffrage” was about to take place. This time, Lt. Col. Kornaien brought several former members of the “Binh” group to Hoi An in order to meet with a VC cadre who had been captured and surrendered.
Lt. Col. Cornayne said, “The Communists in the north believe that they now have no need for armed struggle, and that the national unity elections to be held this year will make it easy for them to take back the south.”
“Those guys are just crazy!” Major Minh said scornfully. “Recently we’ve arrested some people who were left behind when the Vietcong came to the north to ‘rally’. They’ve been spreading rumors everywhere that the government is about to issue a decree banning people from practicing Buddhism, etc.”
Major Cornayne smiled and did not speak.
“Major Minh,” Major Quinn suddenly remembered something. “The editor-in-chief of the Journal of Current Affairs, Mr. Yim Ik-Sun, has asked me to help him find out what happened to the people who were arrested during the march on March 2; would you be able to tell me anything about that?”
Major Minh was evidently offended to hear Major Quinn speak of the Times-Tribune.
“Major Quinn, I’d advise Yen Tuoi Sin not to have too much contact, that guy used to be the secretary of the Vietnamese Nationalist Party before Tran Tien and was always going against the government. The government is negotiating with the Military Assistance Advisory Group to build the Saigon to Bien Hoa highway, and his newspaper actually ran an article saying that General Williams was a sexual deviant who bought two young Vietnamese girls for fun.”
“Yes?” Lt. Commander Cornayne put down his glass with interest.
This incident came as a great surprise to all of us, as the head of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group, General Samuel Williams, was a highly respected figure both among the Americans and the Vietnamese government officials. General Samuel Williams, as head of the U.S. Military Assistance and Advisory Group, was a very powerful man among both Americans and Vietnamese government officials. The Americans in Saigon often make peachy news, and we’re all too used to it to be a surprise. Once upon a time, the French did the same thing, they have been here for nearly a hundred years, the first thing they do in Vietnam is to find women to have fun; they built a “human market”, opened dozens of strip joints and brothels. In the eyes of the Vietnamese, white people are always the same. However, this kind of thing happened to a senior officer of the U.S. Army, it is hard not to be shocked, and Samuel Williams is already half a century old. General Samuel Williams was already over 100 years old.
Major Minh felt very pleased to see that we were interested, and proceeded to relate to us, in an informed tone, the circumstances of the affair.
When it comes to child prostitutes, it’s not news that brothels in every country are trying to recruit customers with child prostitutes, while half-aged women make little money at all, except for the cheapest payment for a woman’s flesh. As child prostitutes, their childish faces and looks, and their bud-like bodies, halfway between those of an adult and a child, have an irresistible power to make men throw away large sums of money.
In Vietnam, a tropical country, the physical development of girls usually begins before the age of 12, and by the age of 15 or 6, they have already assumed the appearance of adults. The poverty and backwardness of the society have led tens of thousands of girls to work in the flesh market, especially after the return of the French to the colony in 1947, and even the daughters of the middle class families have been put on the “flesh market”.
Major Minh said that the underage girls were the most attractive to the French. Former French commander in North Vietnam, General Raoul Salang, was in his 50s at the time, but he always had a 12 or 3-year-old girl with him. Although he was already in his 50s at the time, Admiral Salang was very fond of child prostitutes and always had a 12- or 3-year-old Vietnamese girl with him. It was not until after the Dien Bien Phu defeat in 1954 that the French were forced to sign the Geneva Accords. When the French army withdrew from Hanoi, Admiral Salang did not forget to bring the little girl back to save his country.
After the Americans arrived, prostitution became more common. American soldiers and Vietnamese girls could be seen hugging each other on the streets of Saigon. In the Vietnamese mind, having sex with an American was a matter of honor, and if a Vietnamese girl married an American, everyone around her would look at her with admiration and jealousy.
However, this rarely happens and most Americans are just looking for a good time. Besides, the girls here were cheap, and a few dollars would make them happy, while these few dollars were difficult for the average Vietnamese man to pay. So all the Vietnamese girls had their eyes fixed on the Americans, who had come from the land of plenty and would bring them plenty too; and what plenty really looked like they had neither seen nor imagined.
There is nothing unfair or dishonorable about them giving their flesh to Americans and Americans giving them some money in return.
Even their countrymen did not despise them for it. On the contrary, it was through their bodies that many created bonds with Americans.
A man of General Williams’ stature would not have the decency to spend a night in a “human market” or some other place. Even a good disguise could be life-threatening for a man who spoke neither Vietnamese nor French. Not long ago, an American was killed by a Vietnamese girl who led him to the outskirts of Saigon. This incident caused the Americans alert, go out to buy women always in groups of three or five, and no longer go around.
Perhaps out of a sense of empathy, bachelor Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Nhan (who would become President a few months later) noticed that General Williams was living as a widower and instructed Foreign Minister Vu Van Mô to make arrangements. However, Vu Van Muy, who was always a scholar of the Nguyen dynasty, followed the rules and did not care about the matter at all. Later, through the responsibility of Ngo Thuong Hieu, Major Minh was introduced to General Williams. Major Minh, who was familiar with this kind of hook, was born into an aristocratic Vietnamese family, and his grandfather had been the Minister of the Interior to Emperor Bao Dai. When he was ten years old, he was sent by his father to France to study, and thus spoke fluent French and English.
The Americans in Saigon loved him and he was very eager to find them agreeable Vietnamese girls. At my CIA station in Saigon alone, you could see his jeep parked out front almost every day. His colleagues called him “Minh” and even Colonel Lansdale, who was known for his strictness, was very close to him.
General Williams originally lived at the Hotel Carriène, but later moved to a heavily guarded building next to the Bridgebank Drain, where the Military Assistance Advisory Corps was located, because the holdovers from the headquarters of the International Committee were also living there.
One day in August 1956, Major Minh brought a Vietnamese girl to General Williams’ residence.
Meeting General Williams for the first time, Major Minh was more than a little restrained. He conveyed Prime Minister Wu Tingyan’s greetings and then introduced the girl he had brought to General Williams.
The girl’s name was Ah Chuan, twenty-two years old, a dancer at a strip joint in the red-light district, she was very good-looking, with a plump figure, and specialized in lewd belly dancing there.
General Williams surveyed the slender girl with interest and asked if she would have a little coffee.
“She doesn’t speak English.” Major Minh said, then translated General Williams’ words in Vietnamese to Ah Cham, who nodded curtly.
Major Minh politely told General Williams that Arc had been sent to look after his life. If the General was satisfied with her, she could remain at the General’s side from the instant.
“Ming,” said the General, “the girl can stay, and please convey my thanks to Premier Wu Tingyan.”
In this way, Ah Thanh stayed with General Williams, and formal negotiations began on the construction of schools, hospitals, and the Saigon-Bien Hoa highway. For this purpose, Ngo Chong Hao brought Major Minh to the “Palace of Independence” to meet Ngo Dinh Yen and his brother Ngo Dinh Ru. The brothers praised Major Minh’s work and kept him for dinner.
However things went wrong. After more than half a month of living as a mistress and lady-in-waiting to General Williams, Count was thrown out for reasons unknown.
Ah Chik found Major Ming and sobbed and told him what had happened.
“The general is too rough.” Akane said as soon as she opened her mouth. “He simply treats me like a wild animal. From the first night, he’s beaten me in every way possible, he doesn’t even treat me like a human being.” With that, she carefully lifted up her skirt.
Major Ming saw that her leg was bruised and purple, with a bandage around her left ankle.
“Are you not very cooperative?” Major Ming asked.
“I’ve been treating him real good, just like you told me to. The other night after he’d done that, for some reason, he suddenly swung me under the bed and made me dance for him for two hours. I was sleepy and tired and told him that I would dance for him tomorrow, but he stormed over to me, pinned me to the ground, and then rode over me and beat me. For the next ten days or so I was afraid when I saw him.”
“Have you been hit again since?”
“Hit harder later.” She huffed accusingly. “Before every time he did that, he had to tie me up and whip me with a belt like an animal, and I wasn’t allowed to scream. And that’s not all, he wouldn’t let me sleep all night, and he would do it six or seven times a night. At night, when he was drunk, he pressed me into the bathtub once. Then on a whim, he took me out to dinner. I was so hungry that he tied me up and put me in the bathtub before noon and didn’t give me anything to eat. He saw me gobbling it up and as if he was a little concerned he pointed out the meal for me to eat. Who knew that as soon as we got back to the room he would change, and this time he didn’t use a belt. He tied me to the table and stuck a pistol in my bottom to scare me. At the time, I thought he was really going to kill me… Later, when he got tired of beating me, he went back to drinking, and after drinking he beat me again. Around midnight, he suddenly strangled me with a belt around my neck, causing me to urinate and defecate all over the place. At that point he untied me from the table and forced me at gunpoint to eat my own incontinence, then tied me up again and threw me in the bathtub. When he woke up yesterday morning, he got sober, dragged me out of the bathtub and threw me on the floor, pointed to the filth in the room and cursed, beat me again severely, and then threw me out.”
Major Ming was taken aback. He had always thought that a man like General Horn Williams had a gentlemanly demeanor in everything he did. Now he was no different from a landowner in the Vietnamese countryside.
Regardless, it was still important to preserve General Williams’ image, and Major Ming gave Count some money and told her not to go around talking about it, or else he warned her in an aggravated tone that she would be arrested.
Akane looked at the bills in her hand, her nose turned sour, and she cried again.
Major Ming told Wu Chongxiao about this incident, and Wu Chongxiao not only did not express his surprise, but told Major Ming in the tone of an elder that there were many people like General Williams in the West, and that it was nothing to be alarmed about. He also asked Major Ming to continue to find some “spicier” girls for General Williams.
Major Minh understood that the government was about to rely on U.S. aid to build something in the South as a way of winning the hearts and minds of the people. Since the crisis of the sects was quelled in the spring, the Government had made no effort at all to fulfill the promise of reconstruction which it had made. This will undoubtedly have a most unfavorable effect on the general election next year (56). A captured South Vietnamese cadre who had “rallied” to the North before 1954 said: “President Hu is in the hearts of the people and the Communists will surely win next year’s elections and thus recover the South.”
The Ngo Dinh Yen government also realized this and therefore paid extra attention to the members of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group. Although the Americans had some hope and were prepared to provide some assistance, the gun battle in Saigon between armed Binh Chuan sectarian bandits and the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao sects, and the factional strife among government departments made the Americans doubt the solidity of the regime, thus slowing down the original aid program as well.
Nothing surprised Wu Tingyan more than the promotion of U.S. support. To this end, he paid a special visit to a close friend of the Wu family, U.S. Ambassador Elbridge B. DeBrowne. He hoped that with the help of his personal connections, he would be able to obtain more U.S. aid.
However, the Americans were not like the Vietnamese, who could rely on personal connections to facilitate the success or failure of something. Ambassador de Broglie politely told him that the ability to get more American aid would be determined by the ability to gain the confidence of more American military advisers to the regime, and that he himself could not and would not be able to exert some influence on the citation.
So, Wu Tingyan turned his attention to the head of the advisory group, General Samuel Williams. General Samuel Williams.
Through the efforts of Wu Tingyan’s brother, Wu Tingru, and his wife, General Williams began positive consultations with them regarding the provision of funds for labor, rural development, social welfare, health and education.
It was at this time that General Williams exposed his weakness, much to the delight of Wu Tingyan. He had always believed that personal relationships determined the course of history, so he placed all the Wu brothers in important government departments and netted a large number of crony government officials.
Major Minh’s relationship with the Ngo family began with his association with the “communist expert” Ngo Thuong Hieu. Once the Saigon police broke up a secret communist organization and arrested four former members of the Vietcong Union, including a senior cadre, Prof. Le Vinh Chi. From then on, Ngo Thuong Hieu attached great importance to Major Minh, and gradually became more and more frequent, revealing to Major Minh from time to time some important government news and conflicts between factions.
Since accepting to “arrange life” for General Williams, Major Minh has sent four more girls, but their fate was not much better than that of Ah Ch’ien, and one of them had her finger twisted off by General Williams.
Nevertheless, General Williams’ attitude above the negotiating table improved, while the personal relationship between Major Ming and General Williams became close below the table. In time, they developed to the point where they had nothing to say to each other.
In the course of the relationship, Major Ming realized that General Williams’ mind was full of strange and bizarre ideas, and could even be said to be a bit mentally deranged. He told Major Ming about the first person he had sex with when he was young, a fat black girl. He laughed out loud and said that he could still remember the sound of that girl grunting. After the end of World War II, he went to Japan, Korea and the Philippines, yet this old soldier who had drifted for half his life never married, but kept running from one battlefield to another with the debauchery of a professional soldier. This itinerant career made him develop an eccentric temperament, and every time he arrived at a new station, he would find a local girl to enjoy himself, and of course, the other officers had to do the same.
During the occupation of Japan, General Williams selected two able-bodied Japanese women from among the widows whose husbands had been killed in action, put them up at a U.S. Army post, and had a child with them until his departure in 1950.
When it came to the Korean Theater, Major General Lee Jong-su, Commander of the Army’s Second Army Corps, sent a young and beautiful female secretary especially for General Williams to actually serve as General Williams’ mistress. During an internal mutiny in the Korean army, General Williams was hit in the head by shrapnel, and from the day he recovered, General Williams was so hysterical that he suspected that the North Korean female secretary was spying on the United Nations troop movements for Major General Lee Jong-su, and went so far as to strangle the girl to death on the bed, and then slept soundly. The same thing happened to the second Korean secretary sent by Major General Lee Jong-su, so that General Hauser had to transfer General Williams away from the Korean battlefield to recuperate for a long time.
In early 1953, General Williams returned to the Korean Prisoner of War Administration (POWA), where he had soldiers bring Chinese and North Korean POWs (especially female POWs) into the camp’s office to be tortured whenever he had a headache. On one occasion, when he directed POWs to gang-rape a young North Korean female medic corporal, it caused resentment among the North Korean POWs, who clashed with U.S. administrators and staged a five-day hunger strike in protest. The fallout from that incident was so great that General Williams soon received a second transfer order and departed for a U.S. base in the Philippines.
One day, Major Minh drove General Williams back from the Saigon pier, on the way to talk about the French commander in Vietnam, Admiral Salang and the scandal of the 12-year-old girl, General Williams in the interest of listening to Major Minh’s account, clapped his hand on the shoulder of Major Minh, said: if the experiment of a small Vietnamese girl like that can be delivered in fact a very interesting fact, please Major Minh to give him to think of ways to arrange for a Vietnamese girl between 10 and 13 years old. The Vietnamese girl between the ages of 10 and 13 years old.
Major Minh searched unsuccessfully in the “human market”, where the girls were older than General Williams wanted them to be. In the end, he decided to choose from among the northern refugees who had fled to Saigon.
To General Williams’ surprise, a week later, Major Minh did deliver the young Vietnamese daughter General Williams had hoped for to the U.S. advisor’s compound at Qiao Ku Quat, and a twin sister at that.
Major Ming found the twin girls, named Shui and Ri, along the Chinese canal near the “human market”.
One afternoon, Major Ming and another policeman, Li, went to the embankment, and it was still very hot in mid-autumn, so both Major Ming and Li took off their uniforms, but they were still sweating profusely, and they cursed the abominable weather, feeling that the several kilometers of road had become much longer.
While passing through the Chinese canal, Rik suddenly pointed to the side of the road and said, “What do you see there?”
Major Ming looked in the direction of Rik’s finger, but there was nothing moving except a large field of rice paddies and tall coconut and palm trees hanging lazily in the hot sun.
“What did you say?” Major Ming asked.
“Look in that river, there’s someone.”
Major Ming’s heart sank downward when he heard someone in the river, and he immediately increased the speed of the car and looked out of the window from time to time.
This area was infested with Cao Dai Cult bandits, and people were often cold-cocked here. The police went to the neighborhood several times to clear the area, but nothing came of it; as soon as they left the bandits burrowed out again. Despite the tacit agreement between General Zheng Shiming and the government, things were far from settled.
“Not bandits!” Force shouted, sticking his head out of the car window on one side.
The jeep lurched violently and crunched to a stop. Major Ming put on his uniform, drew his pistol, jumped out of the jeep with Rik, and the river, which he finally saw, loosened his taut heart.
In a river not far away, two American soldiers were swimming, their clothes and guns conspicuously placed on the bank. They said they were swimming, but they weren’t in the same position; each of them was holding something that made a squeaky, screeching sound in his arms, and they were lolling together in the river.
Major Ming looked for a while, did not understand what was going on there, or Li poked him and said, “Those two American soldiers are taking it!”
Oh, he finally figured out that the two American soldiers had women in their arms and were doing that sort of thing in the river.
“How fucking refreshing!” Major Ming cursed inwardly as he headed that way.
Seeing the two policemen calling them from the bank, two American soldiers came up out of the river dripping with women in their arms, muttering and getting dressed. It was then that Major Minh saw clearly that what they were holding could not be described as any woman at all, but two small Vietnamese girls who had not yet reached adulthood. They were so small that their breasts had not even developed yet, just a conical bump around their nipples. Once on shore, they shyly covered their bare bottoms with their hands, then turned their backs and hurriedly dressed.
From the moment they met, Major Ming recognized that they were twins, both very decent-looking, with short shoulder-length hair, the same round face, the same dark eyes, and the same slightly upturned nose. These were not the same “chicks” for whom General Williams had offered his head in exchange!
The two American soldiers knew Major Ming. After exchanging greetings, Major Ming told them that the area was very dangerous, with frequent snipers, and advised them to go downtown to have fun to avoid accidents.
They were a little unconvinced by Major Minh’s words, and laughed and said: “It’s safe here, it’s as comfortable as home, and the Vietnamese chicks are a lot of fun.
Hearing this, Riku got a little angry and he asked, “Are you American chicks fun too?”
Rik didn’t speak English, and Major Minh didn’t translate his words. The two American soldiers thought Rik was talking about Vietnamese girls, smiled and patted him on the shoulder, saying, “That’s great.”
Major Minh told them that he was going to take the girls back to Saigon. They laughed out loud, thinking that Major Minh also wanted to experience the light fun they had just had, and said, “No matter, no matter.”
However, just as the two American soldiers picked up their rifles and were about to leave, one of the little girls suddenly ran up to them, stretched out a hand and said to them in hard English, “Mani!” (Money) One of the American soldiers laughed, fished a greenback out of his coat pocket, shoved it into her hand, and picked her up and kissed her.
When the American soldiers left, the two little girls asked, “Uncle, where are you taking us?”
Without waiting for Major Ming to reply, Rik roared angrily, “Bastard!” He swung his arm up and knocked the two upper girls to the ground, then kicked them frantically with his feet again.
It took a great deal of effort for Major Ming to pull the force away.
“Don’t get so mad.” Major Ming advised.
“Those two sons of bitches!” Force cursed hatefully, his face reddening, “They treat Vietnamese women like monkeys and go around having fun for two dollars!”
Major Ming knew that Force hated the foreigners very much; both his parents had been burned alive by the French army. Force hated all foreigners, in his head the French and Americans were all the same, there was no difference; he also hated his own countrymen who showed affection to foreigners, and he especially hated the prostitutes who hung out with the American soldiers. He believed that Vietnamese women were the lowest of the low and that these people had insulted the country, so they should be treated harshly. Later, I ran into Rik at the police station, and he made a perfunctory effort to talk to me, but his indifference was obvious. I heard that there were many other people like him in the police station. It seems that it is not easy to eliminate racial hatred among people.
Looking at the little girls curled up on the ground covering their stomachs and moaning, Major Ming said to Rik, “If you don’t prostitute them, what are they going to eat? Is there anyone who can reduce so many women?”
“So you mean the Americans feed us?”
Major Minh didn’t know that, in fact, he didn’t even think about those things. Like the Vietnamese aristocrats I counted, he was not at all interested in politics and society in general, and spent more time on pleasure.
He smiled at Force and without further argument, took the two little girls into the jeep.
It was late in the day on the return to Saigon, and Force drove the jeep over bumpy roads and bumps.
Major Minh learned from his inquiries that the two girls, whose names were “Shui” and “Ly”, had just turned 12 years old and lived near the Saigon harbor. Their father had gone to the north and their mother had died in hospital a year earlier, so they had to stay with their uncle. However, their uncle, who worked on the docks, was also very poor and could not make ends meet as he had to support his own wife and three small children, as well as the nieces.
Often they didn’t have enough to eat either, and every day they went to the pier to pick up some fish to bring back, or picked up fruits to sell.
One day, the neighbor’s daughter told them that there was a refreshment station by the canal, where they could earn a lot of money by sleeping with Americans. So, these two do not know how to sleep with a man is a small girl behind the back of her uncle came to the “human market”, from then on they began their prostitution career. They can eat a full stomach, the face also has a color, and often bring back some money to the uncle. Later, my uncle also knew what they were doing, but poverty and fatigue made him not care.
The jeep drove past the “human flesh market” and drove northward. At this point, the two young girls became uneasy and pleaded with Major Ming to let them go back.
Major Minh stopped the girls. In fact, he was very hesitant to send them to General Williams. In any case, it would always be bad for him if word got out about giving underage girls to a perverted sexual sadist as a means of venting his frustrations, even though the twins had already engaged in a career of prostitution before that.
At this point, the jeep pulled into downtown Saigon and slowed down at the corner of a street. Suddenly, Major Minh was struck hard in the back of the head by something, and with that the door behind him opened, and the two little girls jumped out and began to run away.
Force slammed on the brakes and jumped after them.
A little girl jumped out of the car without standing still and fell to the ground on the side of the road. Force grabbed her by the head and dragged the sprained ankle back to the car, however by that time the other little girl had already run a few hundred yards away as she darted through the pedestrian-free streets.
However, she was obviously unfamiliar with the streets of Saigon and kept running along the main road, which caused the jeep to quickly catch up with her.
“The next morning when I went to pick up General Williams for a meeting at the Presidential Palace, I found that those two little girls could no longer walk.” Major Ming smiled and said, “You can imagine what General Williams did that night.”
It was then, not long after the incident of Captain Bain’s photo album, that such a thing happened to General Williams again, causing Lieutenant-Colonel Cornayne to smile hopelessly and bitterly. “Where are the twins now?” He asked, “Are they still at General Williams’ quarters?”
“That’s the problem.” Major Ming said, his eyes fixed on the twisting waists of the waitresses walking past. “At first, they stayed in the garrison as hired laundresses, but after that story was published in the Times, people started to take notice of it, so General Williams asked me to think of something.” At that, he leaned over and whispered, “For those of you who don’t know, those two little girls are four months pregnant.”
“No way!” Lt. Col. Cornayne said, “It wouldn’t be pregnant at the same time.”
” Indeed.” Major Ming affirmed. “Their bellies have been very obvious. All the people in the military aid corps know about this. Currently admitting two little girls with bellies back will inevitably cause trouble, so I’ll bring them to my home for now, and then arrange for them to go to a farther place after some time.”
“Does Mr. Wu Chongxiao know about this?” Lt. Col. Cornayne asked.
“I informed him of this, but he was to be the representative in Phnom Penh, and therefore had no time to attend to it, and only instructed me to try to make proper arrangements by all means, and not to let the press find trouble.”
Since Ngo Dinh Nhan’s election to the presidency, the Saigon press had become increasingly critical of U.S. military personnel, especially the radical newspapers Democrat, Tiempo, and Action, which labeled U.S. military personnel as “new masters who are more brutal than the French colonizers. “After 1957, the accusations became even more intense, and even the People’s Daily, sponsored by Information Minister Chen Zhengcheng, also began to criticize some of the government’s measures.
“So how are you going to resolve this?” Lt. Col. Cornayne asked. He obviously didn’t intend to cause any more unpleasant trouble over this type of incident soon after the incident with Captain Bain’s photo book.
Major Minh told us that he was prepared to send the two little girls to other cities for a few months, until they had given birth safely, and then bring them back to Saigon; or, he added in conclusion, to let them settle there, so that the adverse effects could be permanently removed.
Lt. Col. Cornayne was very pleased with his idea. Many such incidents had been gathered by the intelligence services in recent months and had already had a very bad effect. Had such incidents occurred in the high-profile Military Assistance Advisory Group itself, they would have inevitably been misrepresented and utilized by the Viet Cong propaganda apparatus.
In order to bring the matter to a successful conclusion, Lt. Col. Cornayne decided to meet the pregnant twins in person to make sure they didn’t suddenly run away before being transferred to another city.
In addition, Lt. Col. Cornayne told Maj. Minh that in moving them to other cities, they could be transported by U.S. military aircraft so that the matter would not create undue rumors among the Vietnamese.
It was late at night when we left that cold drink store, the streets were empty of pedestrians and the air was much cooler. As we walked out of the store, however, a dark figure flashed out from behind the jeep we were riding in.
Lt. Col. Cornayne and Major Ming simultaneously drew their pistols and took cover behind the door of the cold drink store as Major Quinn and I hurried back into the cold drink store.
During that period, armed bandits of some sects were again engaged in sporadic gun battles in Saigon. The Viet Cong who had remained in the South had resumed their terrorist activities after the Constituent Assembly elections, and nine Vietnamese officials and American soldiers had already been shot. Our belief that we had encountered bandits, especially in the secluded streets at midnight, made us extremely nervous.
A few minutes later, Lt. Col. Cornayne and Major Minh pulled out of the back of the jeep a pudgy, ragged Vietnamese boy, skinny and bony, looking at us warily. Major Minh reprimanded him in Vietnamese and then kicked him to the ground. The little boy got up and ran, soon disappearing into the darkness at the corner of the street.
However, we made a mistake. The little boy had been sent by someone else who had already slashed both the inner and outer tires of the jeep with a sharp knife.
Since there was no telephone in the cold drink store, we were unable to find a taxi on such a late night and had to prepare to walk back to the compound. By a stroke of luck, a police patrol car came from the opposite direction as we walked out, and we were able to avoid that long and scary walk.
One evening two days later, I accompanied Lt. Col. Cornayne to Major Kemin’s home on the west side of the Saltbridge Kouya acetylene gas station.
Major Ming’s family lived in an outdated two-story brick and wood structure greenish-gray building, fronted by his wife’s grocery store, while the family lived on the second floor. When we arrived, Major Ming’s wife hurriedly led their two noisy children downstairs.
The furnishings of Major Minh’s house looked very basic and the air in the house was stifling. He told us that in early 1954, his father and his family were endangered by the Viet Minh in their home town of Nam Dinh, and that he was the only one who escaped to Saigon with his pregnant wife on a French plane transporting refugees to his uncle, who worked for a Saigon government agency.
“Where are those two little girls?” Lt. Commander Cornayne asked, stepping under Major Ming’s buzzing ceiling fan and blowing on his sweat-soaked hair.
“They were always looking for a chance to escape, so I locked them in the attic.” Major Ming replied, pointing to the ceiling. He took out his key and climbed the stairs, looking for the wooden door that led to the attic.
It was a long time before the two little girls slowly climbed down the ladder to the house below.
The twins looked very much alike, with short shoulder-length hair, pale faces, and wearing wide, black, three-woman clothes that made them look much younger than they really were. Nevertheless, their bellies were already bulging underneath the wide clothes, giving the impression that they looked more like children with dolls hidden underneath their clothes than like pregnant women.
“Good evening, little girl.” Lt. Colonel Cornayne greeted them as kindly as he could, patting their cheeks gently with his hand, yet they cowered back, gazing at Lt. Colonel Cornayne in horror. Perhaps they thought that Lt. Col. Cornayne was going to replace General Williams from now on.
I translated Lt. Col. Konain’s words to “Water” and “Ree”, telling them not to be afraid, that we would not harm them. They didn’t believe me and neither answered, nor did they soften their vigilant gaze. So we had to spend more time trying to allay their suspicions and give them the canned food we had brought with us. The two little girls, obviously hungry, ate one or two cans each and were not at all interested in the pineapples and bananas we had brought.
Soon they eased up and started talking to us.
One little girl (I can’t tell them apart by name) complained that they were often hungry and that the mosquitoes and cockroach bites in the attic prevented them from sleeping. “And rats!” Another little girl added.
“Anh xem min iep cua co fa gom chun!” (Look how tricky they are!) Major Minh’s wife came upstairs shouting. She angrily told us that she was very unhappy about adopting two prostitutes and prostitutes in her home that even Americans were disgusted with, and made sure that Major Minh translated her words into English and forwarded them to us, managing that she knew I knew Vietnamese.
We were able to calm her down by telling her that we had arranged a place for the two little girls to stay and that we would pick them up in a few days, and by promising to compensate the family for the expenses they had incurred.
Major Minh sent us downstairs, apologizing to us that his wife did not care for him to work in the police department, as it was a rather dangerous occupation, and many policemen on night patrol had been shot cold.
We can understand his wife’s concern. At that time almost everyone, journalists, businessmen, hawkers, students, armed sects, Viet Cong infiltrators and even civilians, hated the police. And this hatred had led to considerable incidents, the most sensational of which occurred on April 28, 1955, when Ngo Dinh Yen attacked the Binh Trang sect.
We expressed our gratitude and left Major Ming’s house.
The twins had to be sent far away from Saigon before word got out to the community. This was because more and more journalists, under the influence of Indian Ambassador Desa, Vice Chairman of the International Monitoring and Supervisory Commission, were going around gathering information on U.S. personnel in Vietnam. The previous month, Polish and Indian representatives had questioned President Ngo Dinh Nhan severely about the behavior of U.S. personnel in Vietnam in various locations after August 1954, and Saigon journalists reported a great deal of information in that regard, which had a very negative effect on us.
Indeed, the Viet Cong and its supporters who opposed President Ngo Dinh Yen watched with horror as the Republic of Viet Nam became increasingly consolidated and the prosperity, at least economic, that had developed in the South over the years. Ho Chi Minh, having been briefed by Le Dang, a Vietcong cadre who had returned to the North earlier in the year (1957), believed that at this rate his illusion of “reunification” would be shattered forever. However, until the end of 1958, he continued to instruct the latent cadres in the South to intensify the “political struggle” rather than the “armed struggle”. They used the private affairs of United States personnel in Vietnam to distort and propagandize in order to disturb the situation in the South, which was becoming more balanced.
In order to escape from those possible disturbances, we were mostly engaged in such matters or in dealing with the sectarians in the years following the Geneva Accords. As a result, until the North Vietnamese resolved to use violence to destabilize the Republic of the South, all U.S. personnel in Vietnam did not have a basic understanding of the long and brutal war that lay ahead, and devoted all their energies to confronting the Vietcong in their “political struggle.”
As head of the Military Assistance Advisory Group, General Williams was a notable figure. He appreciated President Ngo Dinh Yen’s efforts to pacify the insurgency and revitalize the economy through the “Reclamation Zone”, the “Silk Mileage Zone”, the “Attraction of Foreign Capital”, and the “Reclamation Zone”.
and other measures, and secured more US aid for Vietnam to build the Saigon-Bien Hoa highway, hospitals, schools, and so on. Thus, whatever the facts may be, we have tried to preserve the prestige of a high-ranking U.S. military official, and the scandal of the twin sister’s pregnancy will surely make it impossible for such prestige to continue to exist or even to serve as propaganda for attacking U.S. personnel in Vietnam.
It was clear that the problem could not be solved at its root through Major Minh’s placement of Water and Ree elsewhere, for in a few months’ time they would be in labor, and that would be news on the move; moreover, it was not a simple matter to dispose of the babies in such a way. The best thing to do was to send them abroad, for example, to an American base in the Philippines.
However, assassinations on the frontier in recent months have put that program on hold. So, we started with Mr. Imai, a Japanese engineering expert who is neither American nor Vietnamese.
At the end of 1956, Mr. Imai, together with 120 Japanese engineering specialists, arrived at the Nha Sampan Naval Base, 10 kilometers from Saigon, where there was a Japanese-funded naval ship repair facility. All the Japanese specialists were housed in a strong barracks dormitory built by the former French Expeditionary Force, surrounded by Admiral Kusakari’s naval base defense zone, and thus very safe. In that camp for Japanese specialists were housed the family members who came to Vietnam with them, as well as a better medical department, all of which were very suitable for housing the pregnant twins.
On the foggy morning of May 2, Major Quinn and I drove an MC jeep to Salt Bridge to pick up the two girls, Shui and Ly, and took them to the dock in Saigon to board the Hau Giang, a ship that had not yet been commissioned for use by the Vietnamese Navy, and headed south down the Nai River channel. “They were then taken to the Saigon wharf, boarded the Hau Giang, which had not yet been delivered to the Vietnamese Navy, and proceeded south along the Nai River channel.
A thick fog has fallen on the river and ships and motorized boats have stopped sailing. However, there were still a few Vietnamese fishermen traveling on the river in their boats. “Water and Ri leaned out of the engine room window and looked out through the fog, and soon they began to vomit. Their faces were pale and they looked at me from time to time, obviously feeling uneasy about this secret “trip”. Then they choked. I went over to them and comforted them, telling them not to be afraid and that we had arranged a comfortable place for them to stay. With tears in her eyes, one of them told me that they were very homesick and hoped that we would let them go back immediately.
They do not understand why we do this. Although some contraceptives are available in Saigon’s sleazy sex spots, such as the “human market”, there are still many unmarried Vietnamese girls with bulging bellies, hence the “water” and the “ri”.
Apart from some discomfort caused by the pregnancy reaction, they were not surprised by what they were used to. When I pointed to their stomachs and told them that I was going to try to get them to deliver safely, they said with certainty that it wouldn’t matter as long as they were allowed to go home.
Thanks to prior contact, Mr. Imai and an English-speaking Japanese interpreter were waiting for the ship when it docked.
Mr. Imai was under 40 years old, short and thin, and at first glance did not look very different from a Vietnamese. Dressed in a light blue shirt and wide white pants, he wore a pair of glasses and shook hands with us warmly.
As early as 1951, Lt. Col. Conine (then a Captain in the 1st Cavalry Division of the United Nations Army) had met Mr. Imai in Pusan, Korea, and therefore considered Mr. Imai to be absolutely reliable, and the fact that the Naval Ship Repair Yard itself had very few casualties was very advantageous to “Mizuho” and “Ri” in their long-term residence there. The naval shipyard itself had very few idle workers, which was very favorable for “Mizu” and “Ri” to stay there for a long time.
Lt. Col. Conain told Mr. Imai that the costs of the “water” and “rice” would be covered by military supplies, and that they would stay on the base for three months as handymen before being picked up by United States military personnel. Mr. Imai made careful inquiries about the situation and agreed to Lt. Col. Konain’s request.
I told “Shui” and “Ly” that they would be working as handymen at Mr. Imai’s residence on the base for a monthly salary of VND 1,500, which was a relatively high amount for mobile work in Viet Nam at that time. In particular, I told them that this matter was decided by the Saigon Police Department and that if they escaped during this period, the police would catch them and put them in jail.
“Water and Ree were clearly baffled by this secret arrangement and simply nodded their heads in obedience.
Everything seemed to be going very well, and the rumors about General Williams and his “love animal” faded away.
On a weekend afternoon in mid-August, Mr. Imai called from the naval base in Nha Sampan, informing us that “Water”
Mr. Imai and Mr. Satoshi had escaped from his residence and their whereabouts were unknown. Upon hearing this news, Major Quinn and I immediately rushed to Mr. Imai’s residence at the Nha Sampan Naval Ship Repair Factory in the rain.
Mr. Imai explained that Mizuki and Satomi had been staying with him very quietly and seemed to be very happy with their new living environment. However, from the end of July, they often complained of stomach pains, and Mr. Imai thought that it was due to their pregnancy, so he had them examined by a doctor, not realizing that it was a preparation for their escape. It was not until Mr. Imai returned to his house from the workshop at noon one day earlier, when he found a rope tied to the window of Mizuki’s and Satomi’s room, that he realized that they had escaped the night before.
Where could those two little girls, who were already 8 months pregnant, escape to? We contacted the Nha Sampan police station, but three days later, there was still no result. Major Kemin found their uncle, who said that “Shui” and “Li” had not returned since they disappeared a year ago.
The newspapers never reported anything about it, and the twins simply disappeared from Saigon.
We speculate that they may have fled to the countryside, where they settled after giving birth safely; perhaps they died of miscarriages on the way to escape, and were buried as if they had escaped from the “reclaimed land area” of the starving people; there is also a possibility that they met with misfortune, fell into the hands of the triads, and suffered the same fate as many unfortunate girls, struggling between life and death. They were struggling between life and death as many unfortunate girls do. But in any case, they do not appear again as a disturbing factor, so we gradually forget about them.
Soon that calm was shattered by Ho Chi Minh’s fury. In the last quarter of 1957, thirty incidents of armed terrorism occurred, and at least seventy-five local officials or their families were killed or kidnapped. On October 22 alone, three bombings occurred in Saigon, injuring 13 Americans.
At the end of 1958, the CIA intercepted a directive order from the Viet Cong Labor Central Committee to the Central Highlands Regional Command to “start a new struggle”. A month later, in January 1959, the CIA received a copy of the order directing the creation of two guerrilla operating bases: one in Tay Ninh province, near the Cambodian border, and the other in the western part of the Central Highlands. According to reliable information, the tenth meeting of the Politburo of the Ho Chi Minh faction of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) was held in May, declaring that “the time has come to advance the armed struggle” and to unify “by all measures other than peaceful means”. It was also planned that such a struggle would begin in October 1959, when the dry season arrived. All available materials indicate that this was the starting point for North Vietnamese subversive activities against the Republic of Viet Nam.
The captured members of the VC Transportation Group 599 admitted that they had made five deliveries of firearms and ammunition, mainly high explosives for sabotage, to the VC in the Central Highlands. The Viet Cong terrorists in the Central Highlands had transferred these explosives to the southern provinces to carry out their terrorist activities of blowing up government offices, police departments and United States military bases.
On July 8, 1959, the dormitory area of the Bien Hoa U.S. military base, located 25 kilometers north of Saigon, was suddenly bombed, killing two U.S. officers and wounding fifteen others on the spot. These were the first American military personnel to be killed by the Viet Cong since the start of the Vietnam War.
According to the police department’s intelligence network report, a dozen Viet Cong who blew up the U.S. military base in Bien Hoa fled upstream to the Nai River by boat, and the Bien Hoa Police Department, the Security Corps, the Luo Beggar Civilian Guards Regiment, and the Army’s Twenty-Third Division immediately set up searches in the vicinity of the two banks of the Nai River and in the village of Nai Hoa. I led the twenty-member anti-terrorist detachment of the Jiading Civil Guard Regiment to arrive at Bien Hoa in the afternoon of July 9, and boarded a motorized boat prepared by the Bien Hoa Police Department, and we headed for the upper reaches of the Nai River. However, there was no hope of finding the terrorists at this time because they had already dispersed to various villages to hide, and the local farmers were more than happy to provide hiding places for them.
Nevertheless, four Viet Cong terrorists were captured by the police in Muraku Township, Shimbuchi County, and one of them was a young girl named “Mizu” who had escaped from Mr. Imai two years earlier.
When I saw Water in the interrogation room of the Bien Hoa police station, I had no recollection of her. Her face did not have the look of fear that it had two years ago. When I spoke in Vietnamese to the police captain in charge of the interrogation, Tran Cong Quy, “Water” recognized me. She looked at me with wide eyes, which made me wonder.
“Do you recognize me?” I asked her in Vietnamese, also feeling as if I had seen this gorgeous girl somewhere before.
She nodded. “You’re the one who sent us to the Bud Sampan shipyard.” She said boldly looking at me with a look that brought me right back to her.
I stopped answering her for fear that she was going to tell what had happened before in front of Captain Katsura. However, I had a clear recollection of what they looked like. It seemed that they had run away to the Viet Cong, and at their age and experience, they were very receptive to Viet Cong propaganda.
“Water” insisted from the start that she had been working in a small hotel in the township of Murakami, that she did not know about the explosives hidden in the store, and that she had never been to the American military base in Bien Hoa at all. Captain Gui was a short but very strong middle-aged man. He walked from the interrogation table to the wall, picked up a wooden stick, and then beat her with that stick himself.
“Water” dodged and screamed that she was innocent.
In fact, prior to the interrogation, two other Viet Cong terrorists had already confessed to the fact that the sisters “Water” and “Ri” had prepared tools for them and had cut the power lines between the border and the United States military base for them.
I took Capt. Katsura by the hand and urged “Water” to tell us everything and she would be released. I also told her how worried I had been about them for two years, and hoped that she would not violate the laws of the Government for things that she did not understand at that age.
“Xin dung ep uong toi nua!” “Shui shouted, still insisting that she was innocent and not involved in any Vietcong terrorist activities. Captain Gui cursed and swung a wooden stick, hitting “Water” in the head. “Water screamed and crouched down clutching her head, blood dripping from between her fingers.
She whimpered and complained about the police, saying that they couldn’t catch the Vietcong and were beating them instead. There were also a couple of sentences apparently from VC leaflets accusing the Vietnamese government.
Captain Gui forced her to her feet, tied her hands behind her back with a rope, and then threw the other end of the long rope up into the air and down around a wooden beam. The two policemen yanked on the rope so hard that Water was immediately suspended with only her toes on the ground. She cursed loudly and began to swear at Captain Gui. She was then hoisted even higher, her feet completely off the ground. The police tied the ropes securely to the posts, then each took a wooden stick and took turns beating her on the buttocks. Soon, sweat dripped from the corners of Water’s forehead and blood soaked into her pants. At this point, Captain Gui went over to her, pulled down her pants, and ordered the officers to continue beating her. “Water’s bare buttocks were already covered with raised welts, and a few were soaked with blood. Her head gradually dropped to her chest and she stopped writhing.
The policeman untied the ropes from the post and “Water” fell from the air to the ground with a dull thud as her head hit the ground hard. After about ten minutes, “Water” gradually woke up, moaning and trying to turn over, but the police stepped on her waist. Capt. Guei told the two policemen, “Khai diem! Then he asked me to walk out of the interrogation room with him.
I know what a Vietnamese police officer means by “Dhai diem”, and no police officer who carries out torture can be mistaken. This term is used exclusively for female prisoners, and mostly refers to tortures other than the usual beatings, such as rape, stabbing of the breasts, pouring chili water into the vagina, burning with fire, or inserting a wooden stick into the anus, and other tortures that cause great pain to the female prisoners. Many women prisoners have confessed their “crimes” (whether or not they are actually guilty) after such torture and have been sentenced to imprisonment or death.
In Vietnamese, the same word is used for inquiry, interrogation, torture and corporal punishment: “tra tan”.
Two years ago, the Saigon police arrested a waitress at the Machasti Hotel after finding stamps with Ho Chi Minh’s head on them in circulation. As they could not get a confession, the police sentenced the waitress to death after making her accuse many people by using the above-mentioned brutal criminal laws and fabricating that she was a cadre of the Vietcong lurking in Saigon and in charge of certain activities. Long after the incident, the police discovered by chance that the person who had distributed the stamps with Ho Chi Minh’s head on them was a Polish representative on the International Supervisory Commission. That incident led to a strike in Saigon in the service sector and some other industries.
However, the police continued to use the same old, inhumane interrogation methods on prisoners, so much so that the United States intelligence services were later inspired to provide the Vietnamese police with a batch of new electrocution tools.
That evening, the torturing police reported to Captain Gui that “Water” had confessed to her participation in the bombing of Bien Hoa and the United States military base and had given the addresses of other fugitive Vietcong hiding places. The police followed her lead and arrested several people, finding weapons and explosives in their homes.
I met “Shui” in a cell at the Bien Hoa City Police Station Detention Center, where prisoners in flagrante delicto were being held. She was sitting on a wooden bed without a mosquito net, her left foot wrapped in gauze.
When she saw me walk into the cell, “Water” broke down and cried. She told me that the police had broken two of her fingers and her left leg, and that after she had told them everything, the police had not released her as they had promised, and had not even given her medical treatment. I assured her that I would immediately inform the police to take her to the hospital and try my best to persuade them to release her; in addition, I asked them about the events that had taken place after they had escaped from Mr. Imai’s residence.
She said that they had travelled on a fishing boat to Bien Hoa province’s Bun Lac commune, where they had soon given birth in the home of a farmer who had adopted them and to whom they had given their babies. A few months earlier, the farmer had led them to join a Vietcong terrorist cell and had killed a policeman. The sisters were mainly responsible for liaising between villages and distributing leaflets. “Ri” escaped the net when she moved with another terrorist cell before the police arrested them. “Shui promised that if she ever saw Ri again, she would not allow her to carry out her terrorist activities.
We were so pleased with Water’s cooperative attitude that we immediately sent her to the hospital for treatment. A few months later, she recovered from her injuries and began working as an undercover agent for the police. We discovered that although she was only sixteen years old, she was a very capable agent and quickly provided a great deal of reliable information on the new terrorist organization, the Southern Liberation Front, which had just been established.
One day in April 1961, “Water”, who always disguised herself as a girl selling goods to carry out reconnaissance activities, went to Bien Hoa sawmill workers and learned that the terrorists were planning to blow up the Xin Yuan Theatre on July 4, when many government officials and American advisers were to be present for a commemorative event. The police made a tight arrangement based on this information and immediately caught the terrorists red-handed when they placed the explosives under the seats.
Because of her activities in Bien Hoa, which attracted the attention of the Viet Cong, we transferred her to the anti-terrorist detachment of the Guardia Civil Regiment in Jiading in late 1961. By that time, the Security Corps had been transferred to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of National Defense, and the Civilian Guards Regiments in various areas had been merged into the Security Corps. This made the Security Corps the equivalent of a regular army. In terms of organization, the provincial capitals had a battalion of the Regiment, the counties had one or two companies, and each commune had ten to fifteen soldiers. At least at the battalion level, there were American advisers to help and guide in training and equipment.
President Ngo Dinh Yen’s decision to strengthen the armed forces was taken on November 5, 1960, at a time when the North Vietnamese had already sent a large number of trained southern terrorists into the southern provinces to carry out assassinations and bombings in the past two years, causing fear and anxiety among the civilian population.
With the help of a surrendered member of the North Vietnamese infiltration terrorist organization, “Water” penetrated their inner circle and gained a lot of information on terrorist activities in the western part of Gia Dinh Province. In order to name “Shui” to be used by the Vietcong, we selectively allowed her to disclose some information to the terrorists.
After the Vietnamese Lunar New Year in 1962, the terrorists began another large-scale attack. At that time, Shui sent a message that her twin sister, Ly, had arrived in the village of Sinh Qui Shang in Gia Dinh Province, and that she was trying to win her over to the side of the Government. A few days later, however, Shui was discovered by the Vietcong, who took her to the village of Sinh Qui Shang in Gia Dinh province.
As an abominable mole, he strangled the young girl, who was only sixteen years old, with a rope and stripped her naked and hung her in front of the door of the police station of that town in Xinbei, Jiading City.
We later learned from the arrested terrorists that Water had exposed himself when he tried to get Ri to work for the government, and that Ri had immediately disclosed this to the VC cadres. The VC cadres were informed of this immediately. At that time, there was an unwritten rule within the Vietcong terrorist organization that members who turned themselves in or defected would be executed. The arrested VC also said that before she was executed, Shui begged for forgiveness, but the VC cadres said that she did not agree because she had betrayed many of her comrades.
In the American mind, the real outbreak of the Vietnam War would have been after the 1960 dry season, when U.S. military personnel began to engage in combat against terrorism.On February 8, 1962, Secretary of Defense McNamara said, “U.S. training of the Vietnamese Army has at times been carried out in a combat situation. As a result of occasional shootings and explosions against U.S. personnel, they have also fired back at attackers in self-defense.”
In the face of increasingly frequent large-scale armed attacks by the North Vietnamese and their erratic guerrilla operations, the Republic of Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense is credited with, and U.S. officials feel confident in, the development and implementation of the Strategic Village program as an all-encompassing counter-guerrilla strategy for the Vietnamese countryside, where Viet Cong terrorist guerrillas operate. Implementation.
This strategy is a plan to regroup the peasantry in fortified villages where the Government will implement a series of political, social and economic measures designed to purge the Viet Cong of its sympathizers and supporters by improving local services and increasing security, while at the same time keeping the people loyal to the Government.
The National Assembly of the Government of Viet Nam adopted the plan in April and adopted the strategy in the form of the Mekong Delta and extended it to the whole country in August. Mr. Ngo Dinh Nhu, Adviser to the Government and brother of President Ngo Dinh Yen, became the head of the Special Committee on Strategic Villages, which includes the Ministers of Defence, Home Affairs, Citizenship, Public Security, and Bili Warfare, and has set up committees on strategic villages in the central and southern parts of the country.
Getting the peasants into the strategic villages is an arduous task, and the United States needs an additional $55 million a year in aid for this purpose, which is given directly to the provincial governments to spend. On a public occasion, President Ngo Dinh Yen was pleased to say: “The strategic villages have dealt a severe blow to Communist tactics by forming a continuous line of fire from villages and clusters of villages, thus denying the Communists the facilities to push the traditional front lines and to launch the kind of attacks they could so easily have carried out not so long ago by means of decentralized raiding tactics. “
Prior to my transfer to the Vietnamese Special Forces as a training advisor, I visited many strategic villages in Gia Dinh Province, each of which had a population of about 500 to 1,000, compared to the usual 100 to 500 in the former Vietnamese villages. In order to increase security, the strategic villages were separated from the outside world by three barriers: the outermost layer was made of bamboo sticks and nails buried in the earth, with two militiamen guarding the road; barbed wire, a strip of land buried with nails and automatic mines, and a trench about 10 meters before the barricade, two meters wide and one and a half meters deep, with nails buried at the bottom of the trench; and the last layer of defenses was a one and a half meter high earth wall, with bunkers and watchtowers closely spaced apart. The last layer of defense was an earth wall about one meter and a half high, with closely spaced bunkers and watchtowers.
In order to avoid contact between villagers and the Vietcong, every villager over the age of 10 was required to have a plastic ID card with his or her fingerprints on it, and to exchange the yellow ID card for a green pass at the village gate when going out. At the time, the Americans believed that this strategy of the Vietnamese Government would stabilize the situation in the South by increasing the isolation of the Viet Cong terrorists.
However, this method first aroused the indignation of a large number of Vietnamese peasants, who did not intend to move from their traditional villages to such restricted places. Many peasants then began a passive resistance, refusing to move from their land and ancestral farms. Those who had already moved into the strategic villages also actively cooperated with the Viet Cong in various activities to destroy the strategic villages.
It was during an attack on a strategic village that “Ri” was arrested.
At noon before the rainy season of 1963, “Ly” and two other Viet Cong broke into the watchtower of the strategic village of An Binh, Mode County, and attempted to kill the soldiers guarding it. However, when the other soldiers at the watchtower realized what they were trying to do and raised the alarm, the Vietcong who had entered the strategic village with her quickly fled, while she was captured by the soldiers and the farmers in the village.
One day in late March, I saw the name “Satoshi” on the list of prisoners at the Mude Police Station. According to the Chief of the Mude Police Station, “Satoshi” was very stubborn and had refused to confess to anything for a month since his arrest, and had even attempted to escape by grabbing a gun when the police were not on guard.
That afternoon, as I was preparing to return to Jiading City, a group of police officers returned to the police station after escorting “Li” on a parade. Her hair had been cut off on both sides by the police, leaving only a strand of long hair on the top of her head, and her face had been painted with various kinds of paints so that it was impossible to tell what she looked like. The onlookers followed her to the door of the police station, at which point she turned to the crowd and opened her mouth and whimpered. The Security Corps soldier who accompanied me to Shode told me that her tongue had been cut out. I had no sympathy for “Ri”. She had killed many people, including her own sister, and was guilty both legally and morally. There is no reason to be too harsh on a terrorist like her.
Of course, in carrying out the strategic village program, the army had harmed many innocent civilians because the Vietcong had a habit of blending in among them, making it difficult for soldiers to recognize them. With the magnetism of this unanticipated situation, senior White House aide Michael B. In a report to President Kennedy on February 11, 1963, Drester said, “It is anybody’s guess how many of the 20,000 Vietcong killed last year were completely innocent, or at least persuasive villagers; whether the Strategic Villages program is providing enough government services to make up for the sacrifices it requires; whether the silent masses of villagers are interested in the questions being asked of President Ngo Dinh Nhan about dictatorship and the reuse of relatives; and whether the government is willing to take on the responsibility of the Vietcong for the deaths of their relatives and for the deaths of those who are not. What is the reaction of the silent masses to the accusations made to President U Tin Yen about dictatorship and the reuse of relatives.”
This intransigent hard-line policy, which victimized the majority, was President Ngo Dinh Yen’s worst failure during his last year or so in office. President Ngo Dinh Yen’s heavy-handed policies and strategic village plans proved not to separate the Viet Cong peasants from each other, but rather to separate the peasants from the Government, resulting in weakened rather than strengthened security.
As both a devout Catholic and the product of a traditional bureaucratic ruling class family, President U Tin Yen was authoritarian and old-fashioned, rigid and bureaucratic, and viewed everyone with suspicion. His mental state was that of a “Spanish Catholic judge”.
His political machine is a selective and over-centralized family oligarchy. He trusted only his family, especially his brother, Wu Ting-ru, and his sister, Wu Ting-coward, who organized a semi-secret “hard-working party”. He kept up the facade of representative government, but in fact the essence of his government was dictatorship. All the measures he took aroused increasing opposition, to the extent that there were several attempted military coups in the last years of his rule.
IV. Inside the self-immolation of nuns and monks
On June 22, 1963, the air in Saigon was unusually dull and oppressive. Near midnight, an armored car pulled up in front of a heavily guarded building on Thu Bon Hun Street, not far from the Saigon High Court. A dozen heavily armed special police officers unloaded four heavy sacks from the vehicle and quickly carried them into the building. As they were carrying them, something in the sacks was writhing violently and making mumbling noises.
The clash between 20,000 Buddhists and police in Hue a month ago, the 700,000 people who attended the funeral of Venerable Quang Duc in Saigon-Thiep a few days ago, and the strikes by taxi, water, electricity and textile workers that followed one after another have caused protests against the Ngo Dinh Yen regime to develop into violent actions. The crisis grew worse as the confrontation became a focal point for widespread political discontent with the U Tin Yan regime and his brother, U Tin Ru. Ngô Ting-ru and his wife, a cool-headed beauty, had by now assumed public power: he ordered the immediate deployment of special police to eliminate the rising violence with a “resolute hand” and set a deadline for identifying those behind the disruptions at the funeral of the Venerable Master Quang Duc.
A basement inside the building was filled with all sorts of torture devices, and a bloody corpse was hanging from an iron hook on the ceiling. In this eerie room stood a middle-aged man in military civilian clothes, the younger brother of President Ngo Dinh Yen, the Central Military Governor Ngo Dinh Chun, who had just returned from Hue. It was under his orders that the special police secretly arrested the four Pyongchon sect nuns who had been in hiding for years.
As a staff member of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) station in Saigon, I was present at the interrogation of the so-called “terrorists”, nominally in order to communicate between the CIA and the Vietnamese police, but in fact to supervise the activities of the Ngo brothers, who were already rejected by almost all the Vietnamese.
“Get them out!” Wu Tingxuan ordered.
The mouth of the sack unraveled, and four nuns with their hands tied behind their backs and cloth stuffed in their mouths were dragged out. The robes they wore had been torn to rags, their faces were covered in dust, and their gazes glared angrily at Feng Wu Tingzhu.
“Why did you arrest us here?” A middle-aged nun questioned as the special police ripped the cloth from their mouths.
Wu Tingzhu didn’t answer, just sized them up with a grim face.
“What law have we broken by holding a funeral for the high priest, Venerable Guang De?” The middle-aged nun then questioned, her voice a little hoarse. “You have banned the holding of Buddhist ceremonies for no reason, arrested and killed Buddhists, forced Venerable Guang De to death, and now you have us captured here, is this what the freedom and peace that the President guaranteed is all about?” Her face rose to work, and the more she spoke, the angrier she became, shouting these words with almost all her strength.
“con ba nang ac la mi!” (This bitch is so mean!) Ngoc Dinh Chieu cursed in Vietnamese. In reality, he did not hear the middle-aged nun’s rebuke. He had heard that kind of talk many times, perhaps too many. All people, including Buddhists, began to openly stand up against them. Wu Ting-hsin, along with his brother Wu Ting-ru, felt that their government was too weak and that the Americans were reaching deeper and deeper, causing them to compromise again and again. Under pressure from the outgoing U.S. ambassador, Mr. Nolting, and from Colonel Lucien Cornyn of the Chinese Intelligence Service, Wu Ting-hsiu and his brother, Wu Ting-ju, began to openly oppose them. Under pressure from the outgoing U.S. Ambassador Nolting and Colonel Lucien Cornyn of the Chinese Intelligence Service, President Wu Ting-yen was forced to sign a joint agreement on June 16, in which the government agreed to the five demands of the Buddhists, and Yan made arrangements with the Buddhists for the funeral of the Venerable Master Kwang-t’ai. However, despite their efforts, the funeral unexpectedly turned into a public march against the government. The more than 700,000 citizens of Saigon-Dyke who took part in this anti-government action poured into the streets and clashed with the police, leading to paralysis throughout Saigon.
The cause of this unprecedented riot was the banning of Buddhist flags in Hue in May, despite the fact that the Ngo brothers, sons of Ngo Dinh Khoi, Minister of Ceremonies and Palace Supervision to Emperor Thanh Tai of Vietnam, are Catholics, with Ngo Dinh Yen (Ngo Khoi Dinh’s third son) being called Jean Baptiste Batiste Batiste Batiste Batista. The full name of one of them, Ngo Dinh Yen (the third son of Ngo Khoi Dinh), was Jean-Baptiste Baptiste. The full name of one of the sons was Jean-Baptiste Wuttingyan. As the brothers had just celebrated their acceptance of the bishopric by raising the Catholic flag in their hometown of Hue, they declared, in the name of the government, that the raising of the Buddhist flag was strictly forbidden, an ill-advised decision destined to cause a great deal of controversy in Vietnam, where the majority of the people are Buddhists.
On May 8, the birthday of Buddha Sakyamuni, more than 20,000 Buddhists and tens of thousands of people held a powerful procession after a protest rally that day. At the behest of Wu Tingru, the Catholic vice-governor ordered the marchers to be shot at, killing nine and wounding fourteen on the spot. However, this brutal suppression by the dictatorship provoked even larger demonstrations, hunger strikes and other political activities. At this point, the U Tin Yan regime, instead of becoming more rational, is bent on answering the angry people with tear gas, batons and arrests.
On the morning of May 10, three monks and sixteen nuns were stripped naked, their hands tied behind their backs with long ropes, and escorted by the police through Lixin Street. This barbaric and brutal method of suppression did not quell the riot, but confirmed the propaganda of the Vietcong on the other hand, and even the terrorists who were carrying out assassinations in South Vietnam stopped their actions.
On June 11, Venerable Quang Duc, a 70-year-old monk in Saigon, poured gasoline on himself in the center of a street and set himself on fire to protest the government’s actions. The incident shocked U.S. Army Commander Paul Harkins and Ambassador Nolting in Saigon. After consulting with Lt. Gen. Yang Mingming, they went to the Independence Palace that night to negotiate with President Ngo Dinh Nhan. At the same time, U.S. Secretary of State Kress, Secretary of Defense McNamara, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Taylor (later Ambassador to Vietnam) called President Ngo Dinh Yen. The New York Times published facsimile photographs of Buddhist monks walking naked under police escort and the self-immolation of Venerable Quang Duc, and appealed to the U.S. government to “apply economic pressure”.
On June 17, Saigon’s English-language newspaper, The Times, published an article that made a veiled attack on the United States and Buddhists and implied that the self-immolating Venerable Quang Duc had been drugged to death. The article concluded, “The government and police are investigating the case.”
The above is the premise behind the secret arrest of four Binh Trang Buddhist nuns. The Saigon Special Police Department received a secret report that Venerable Quang Duc was poisoned and carried to the street to be burned as a result of a sectarian struggle, and that the masterminds behind this were Viet Cong terrorists. The report also said that on July 2, Buddhists would hold a larger protest.
There is no time for further hesitation, and the matter must be clarified before July arrives. That was why Wu Tingzhu personally attended the interrogation of the four nuns of the Hirakawa Sect. No matter what means were used, they had to be forced to confess to the murderer, and besides, Wu Tingzhu had never limited his means to achieve his goal. Before the interrogation, he specifically instructed Lieutenant Colonel Hui, who was in charge of this interrogation, that he could use any harsh instruments of torture to force them to confess, with the only condition being that he must leave them alive.
This is to avoid any trouble that may arise later.
However, Wu Tingzhu was so enraged by their rebuke that he could hardly resist the urge to rush up and tear this audacious nun apart. He whispered to Lieutenant Colonel Hui, “Do it, it’s up to you.” With that, he turned around and left the basement.
Lt. Col. Fai gave the order, and a dozen or so thugs swarmed over the four nuns, pinned them to the ground, forcibly stripped them of their clothes, and then twisted their hands in reverse, forcing them to stand naked in front of Lt. Col. Fai.
Lt. Col. Huy, who trained at the U.S. military base in Clark, Philippines, in 1954 and served as President Ngo Dinh Nhu’s chief of guard, was known for his ferocity and brutality. Since his transfer to the Saigon Police Department in 1955, he became an active practitioner of Ngo Dinh Nhu’s “iron fist” policy.
He personally killed dozens of “Viet Cong” during the “Communist Control” campaign, and in early July 1955, he arrested and interrogated a female elementary school teacher named Nguyen Thi Thuyet. Nguyen Thi Cuong was 28 years old, a mother of three, and pregnant. Lt. Col. Huy personally tortured the pregnant woman, employing a variety of tortures specifically designed to deal with female prisoners. He electrocuted Nguyen Thi Thu Thuyet’s sexual organs, burned her feet with fire, pierced her nipples with needles, and cut her flesh with a scalpel… Finally, he personally hanged her alive in the interrogation room and threw her body into a cave on the outskirts of Saigon. Nguyen Thi Thuyet’s body was found in a bloody mess.
The brutal atrocities of Lt. Col. Huy provoked massive demonstrations. In North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh personally participated in the denunciation rallies, and crowds in both the North and South strongly demanded that the Ngo Dinh Yen government severely punish the culprits. However, despite President Ngo Dinh Yen’s decision to arrest Lt. Col. Phuong for public trial, his brother Ngo Dinh Ru protected Lt. Col. Phuong and soon assigned him to a special police unit under his direct control.
That incident aroused the strong dissatisfaction of Chief Richardson of the Saigon Station of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and at the same time deepened the suspicion of Generals Yang Wenming and Tran Van Dung towards the Ngo brothers, and laid the groundwork for the Ngo brothers to be killed later.
Right now, facing the four naked nuns, Lieutenant Colonel Fai’s violent nature surged up suddenly. The women he had tortured flashed through his mind, and he seemed to hear again the screams and pleas that had satisfied him, and to see again their faces contorted with pain and their spasming bodies. It was all too familiar to him, all too necessary. He had all the means to break a woman’s will, from all kinds of abuse to unbearable torture of the sensitive parts of their bodies.
Since he took pleasure in torturing female prisoners, he didn’t expect them to confess right off the bat.
The infamous KKK leader, Hill H. In describing his feelings about killing seals (the KKK’s term of contempt for black women. He described his feelings when he abused seals by saying, “It takes a process for them to go from physical pain to mental breakdown, and that process should be slow, brutal, and heartbreaking.”
Lieutenant Colonel Fai was exactly that kind of person, and instead of immediately torturing them, he scrutinized the four nuns’ naked bodies with interest, his gaze as if he were appraising several heads of livestock.
The middle-aged nun at the head of the group looked to be over forty years old, with a bulging nose and concave eyes, skinny and bony, with only her two drooping breasts and sparse pubic hair proving that she was a woman. Right next to her was a short and stout nun, about thirty years old, with a muscular body and dark skin. Her fists were clenched as if she was ready to fight to the death.
They are two nuns named Jing Yuan and Dai Yuan in the secret report. They were photographed by the secret agent as organizers and planners during the procession and funeral. It was found that they both belonged to the Binh Chuan sect, a police arm supported by former Army Chief of Staff General Nguyen Van Sinh, which had been in constant force in Saigon since 1955; in the fall of the same year, Ngo Dinh Yen ordered the army to suppress the Binh Chuan sect, thus successfully defeating Emperor Bao Dai to become president. The Binh Kheon sect has always been bitterly resentful of this and has been waiting for an opportunity to retaliate, and several assassinations and terrorist incidents since then have been linked to the sect. The night before the self-immolation of Venerable Guangde, someone discovered that Yuan had walked into Venerable Guangde’s meditation room.
“It must be her who poisoned her!” Lieutenant Colonel Fai thought to himself as he stared at the short and stout nun. “I’m afraid dealing with her will take some work.”
His eyes moved to another young nun’s body, then stopped still. Her name was Jing Zhen, she was twenty-two years old, with clear eyebrows and white skin, her two hemispherical breasts and slightly chubby body made it hard to believe that such a beautiful girl would also vanish into the empty world. Her face was horrified, her mouth slightly open, but her eyes glanced from time to time at the corpse hanging on the iron hook.
“It would be fitting for such a beautiful woman to stand in the human market.” I thought to myself, feeling very sorry for her.
The young nun was about fourteen or fifteen years old, with thick forward protruding lips, a long upper body, and pubic hair that had not yet grown, although her breasts had begun to develop. She was humiliated by the fact that she was standing naked in front of the man like this, her face flushed and tears welled up out of her eye frames and trickled down her cheeks.
Lt. Col. Hui sneered, pointed at them and said: “The government has now found out your crimes, there is no use denying it,” he paused and then said: “I have long seen that you are really fucking chanting and practicing, secretly working for the Vietcong. Today, if you understand better, you should confess before it’s too late, so that you don’t confess later and suffer all the pain in your skin and flesh.”
He stopped and waited for a moment, yet the four nuns did not speak. It was all the same in the beginning, which he expected.
He walked up to Rim and reached out and patted her firm breasts, pinching and pulling her nipples out again. It was at this point that the edge suddenly roared and lashed out at him with a kick, but it missed, and Lt. Col. Fai, anticipating the edge’s violent temper, dodged out of the way. He shook his head with a smirk and ordered his thugs to tie her to the torture rack.
Shizuru was strong and powerful, and desperately kicked and scratched and bit, and it took a great deal of effort on the part of several of the thugs to tie her up to the torture rack in the large font. At this point, Jing Yuan also cursed and tried to fight her way out of the beaters’ grip and pounced on Lt. Col. Hui.
“You old bitch!” Lt. Col. Fai cursed, punched and kicked Jing Yuan, knocking her to the ground before ordering his thugs to gang-rape her in front of the other three nuns until she passed out. For the better part of an hour, Lt. Col. Fai sat on the interrogation table, smoking a cigarette as if nothing had happened, a cold smile on his face.
The brutal gang rape was over and the thugs carried Shizumi out.
Lieutenant Colonel Fai walked defensively up to Rim and pressed the butt of his cigarette into her belly button. To his surprise, Had Edge bit her thick lip and glared at him with an angry gaze, not letting out a cry of pain.
The cigarette butt twisted out, leaving a black mark on the bellybutton of the edge.
Lieutenant Colonel Fai shook his head again out of habit, as if not dismayed by this first failure. He had encountered too many of these tenacious women, and while they amazed him with their superhuman fortitude in enduring physical pain, they were women after all, no matter what. It was enough that unless they could survive without their flesh, the pain of the skin and flesh would always cause their fortitude to crumble. Of course, this would require a certain amount of means and time. Lt. Col. Fai firmly believed in this, though sometimes this belief of his wavered in certain women who swore to die, and then what awaited them would no longer be survival, but a slow death in agonizing pain. It was then that Lt. Col. Fai would try to prolong their agonizing process as long as possible. He hoped that they would collapse at the last moment.
From the moment they met, Lieutenant Colonel Fai realized that the central figure of this interrogation was the strong and powerful Rim. With his years of experience in interrogation, he read the conclusion from Rim’s face: she was not only capable of poisoning, but could even pick up a gun and kill people. Obviously, she must have played the role of an enforcer in the conflict between the Hirakawa Sect and the Takadai Sect. The weak Jing Yuan was one of the masterminds behind the scenes, with brains and sophistication, the possibility of opening a gap from her was slim to none, and torturing her was nothing more than killing a chicken for a monkey’s eye.
The trick had little effect on Rei Yuan, who had become so accustomed to all manner of beatings from her earliest years that she would have lunged to her death had she not been bound by the ropes. However, the sturdy ropes had her securely bound in a wide pattern to the torture rack and were strangled deep into her flesh. Her limbs went from engorged to numb, and the rope around her neck made her gasp for air.
Jing Yuan suffered gang rape, she saw all the scenes, feel particularly disgusted, not only because she is a nun, but she has never had a wave of unspeakable disgust for men, like hating flies like mood. Her dark eyes never radiated a gentle luster, her thick lips protruded forward, the contours of which were as distinct as a carving, and her firm breasts did not have a trace of fleshiness, but rather resembled two pieces of round, smooth, cold pebbles.
Lieutenant Colonel Fai knew in his heart that such a woman’s mind was extremely stubborn, and that breaking her bones wouldn’t bring her to her knees right away. Time, what they want now is time! He wasn’t interrogating an honest country girl, the crux of it all was that the mind of the ∶ edge wouldn’t even think about how unbearable the physical pain was, and how frightening the coming of death was. She doesn’t think about that, she doesn’t think about everything that Colonel Fai expects her to think about. That was the reason why all the torture she had been subjected to would come to nothing.
So, Lt. Col. Fai turned his thoughts to the marked Shizen and the little nun.
Against these two nuns, Lt. Col. Fai had a plan in mind, their terrified expressions and bewildered eyes, their half-open lips and shivering bodies told him that. But the question was, how much did they know about the inner workings of this poisoning case, and to what extent were they involved? They wouldn’t have known nothing, not at all! When they were secretly arrested, the three nuns were discussing something in a secret room in the nunnery, and the little nun was on sentry duty at the door. The nuns’ actions showed that they were accomplices, with Jing Yuan as the leader, Dai Yuan was responsible for the implementation, Jing Zhen might have acted as a liaison, and the little nun definitely knew something about the inner workings of the case. It seems that the breakthrough lies in the bodies of Jing Zhen and the little nun.
In order to make them confess the truth of the incident as soon as possible, Lieutenant Colonel Fai decided to inflict the harshest criminal punishment on Rim, so that even if he could not make her confess, he could use her pain to intimidate Shizhen and the little nun. He first ordered his thugs to beat her severely with a rattan whip, and then to brand her flesh with a red-hot iron; in a short time, the whole basement was filled with the smell of burning, and whenever she fainted, the thugs poured cold water over her body, and when she awoke, the torture continued.
This brutal torture lasted for nearly an hour, and almost all the flesh on Yu Yuan’s body was burned. Lt. Col. Fai ordered the thugs to use brushes to apply salt water to her body, and the pain that tore through her body caused her to scream. She kept shouting, “Kill me! Kill me!”
Seeing this, Jingzhen fainted and the little nun stared and hissed shrilly. Seeing that his purpose had been achieved, Lieutenant Colonel Fai dragged the little nun to another torture room.
It was a long time before the little nun came out of that torture room and was escorted back to her cell. Her face was pale, bent over and struggling to move her feet, teeth marks were left on her tiny breasts, and there was bright red blood on the inside of her thighs, so it was obvious at a glance what she had just gone through.
As the thugs escorted the newly awakened Shizuma into that torture chamber, Terunaga was reading the young nun’s confession.
Seeing that Jing Zhen was escorted in, he ordered his thugs to go and continue torturing Edge and Jing Edge with severe punishment. The two thugs exited the room in response, the torture room was silent, it was already 4:00 a.m. Fear and exhaustion made it almost impossible for Jing Zhen to open her eyes, she felt that Lieutenant Colonel Fai was constantly sizing her up, and her heart couldn’t help but jump straight to the ground. Suddenly, she fell to her knees at the feet of Commander Fai.
At about 9 a.m. on June 24, Wu Tingru and his wife were sitting under umbrellas by the swimming pool in the luxurious gardens of their private residence when a bodyguard informed them of Wu Tingzhu’s visit.
After reading the statement of the nun Jing Zhen, Mr. and Mrs. Wu Ting Ru were ecstatic, and asked Wu Ting Zhen to notify the Times to send out the article immediately and make sure that it was published in the newspaper on the same day; then, they immediately drove to the “Independence Palace” to inform President Wu Ting Yan.
President U Tin Yan received them with a grim face, and this attitude of his surprised Mr. and Mrs. U Tin Ru. During the bloody months, as President, U Tin Yen had been in favor of high-handedness against the riots and had personally signed arrest warrants for several Buddhists; even after the self-immolation of Venerable Master Guang De on June 10 and the large-scale armed conflict, he continued to take a dismissive attitude toward the Pentagon’s appeal.
Early that morning, President Ngo Tin Yen received a telephone call from United States Ambassador Nauertin. During the call, Ambassador Nolting asked him whether he had ordered the secret arrest of four Pyongchon nuns the previous day and informed him that one of the arrestees, a nun named Jing Zhen, was the niece of Major General Le Van Kim. Ambassador Nolting said that Major General Le Van Kim had received reliable information confirming the Special Police raid on the Buddhist monastery and the arrest of the nuns. Finally, Ambassador Nolting asked him to order the immediate release of the four nuns who had been secretly arrested in order to avoid a conflict between the army and the Government.
This news made Wu Tingyan very upset with his brother.
Although he had been indulgent towards several of his compatriot brothers, he was aware of the seriousness of the situation at this time, and during his first visit to Vietnam in April 1662, US Secretary of Defense McNamara politely expressed his concern about the narrow nationalist tendencies of the Ngo Dinh Nhu dictatorship, and hoped that he would “stabilize the situation in the South and win the war”. “.
Since then, Ambassador Nauldin, who is the closest friend of the Ng family, has also reminded the Ng Ting Cowards several times not to pit the military against the government.
When President Ngo Dinh Yen relayed Ambassador Nauldin s call to Mr. and Mrs. Ngo Dinh Ru, they were outraged, believing that the Americans were doing the internal affairs of the Republic of Vietnam. Mrs. Ngo Dinh Ru angrily shook Quynh Trinh’s statement and firmly advocated that not only would they not release him, but that Quynh Trinh and the others be sent to a special military tribunal to be sentenced to death.
President Ngo Dinh Yen’s attitude changed immediately. He sent Ngo Dinh Ru to immediately set up surveillance on the actions of Major General Le Van Kim, and at the same time, he informed the government member Le Van Kieu to prepare for the case to be taken up by the Special Military Court. However, before Ngo Dinh Nhu could make any preparations, the news of the secret arrest of the four nuns was published in the afternoon of the same day in the People’s Daily with the ulterior motive that the secret arrest had “seriously damaged the entire Saigon Causeway”. Hundreds of thousands of Buddhists and people flocked to the Independence Palace that night to demand that President Ngo Dinh Yen immediately release the four arrested nuns. A bloody clash between the Presidential Guard, the police and the protesters resulted in 15 deaths and more than 100 injuries.
The People’s Daily was the private publication of Information Minister Chen Zhengcheng, and its director, Chen Wuying, adopted an objective and critical attitude towards the Wu Tingyan government. This time, however, the disclosure of the government’s secret arrest of the four nuns revealed that even within the civil service, dissatisfaction with Ngo Dinh Yen and Ngo Dinh Ru was intensifying. Earlier, Defense Minister Nguyen Dinh Thuong had bluntly said, “The United States should not, under any circumstances, remain silent about what Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife have done.”
On 25 June, President Ngo Dinh Yen received information about the mobilization of troops by Major General Le Van Kim and the mobilization of troops by Major General Nguyen Khanh. The air in Saigon became tense, special forces led by Colonel Grass were stationed in the outskirts of Saigon as a defense, and President Ngo Dinh Yen, with the mediation of outgoing Ambassador Nauertin and Major Kornaien, reached a compromise with the army in preparation for the release of Quynh Trinh and the other four arrested nuns.
However, the tense situation has not improved, but rather intensified. In addition, the financial crisis that began at the beginning of the year has worsened, with prices skyrocketing and people suffering. This intensified the discontent with the U Tin Yan regime. Military officers tried to kill President Ngo Dinh Yen on two occasions, once in November 1960 and again in February 1962. That Vietnamese president was suspicious of the military. As a result, loyal cronies were placed in sensitive military command posts around Saigon, and a network of reliable military chiefs was created in all provinces, purging potential challengers and disaffected elements within the military command.
Nonetheless, the situation is deteriorating further, with Ngo Dinh Ru ostensibly gaining control of the military, but in reality most of the people within the government, including senior officials and generals such as Vice President Nguyen Ngoc Thuy, Minister of Defense Nguyen Dinh Thuong, Minister of Foreign Affairs Vu Van Mui, Minister of Information Tran Dinh Thanh Thanh, Presidential Military Advisor Lt. Gen. Duong Van Minh, and the Acting Armed Forces Chief of Staff, Major General Tran Van Dung and his aide, Major General Le Van Kim, have a growing rift with the Nguyen brothers. The rift with the Ngo brothers is secretly threatening the situation of the entire Republic more and more.
At such a time of crisis, the White House has maintained an ambiguous attitude of non-application, saying that the United States did not “plan” the coup, as many people thought, and that the entire coup was made and carried out by the Vietnamese themselves.
The reason why the U.S. was in such an inconsequential role in that coup was that the U.S. attitude toward Vietnam was in a period of fragmentation, with the newly appointed Ambassador Couch, representing the White House, and General Harkins, representing the U.S. military, disagreeing on virtually every major issue, and with the repercussions of their squabbling at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
At one point, the two of them even sent conflicting messages to the plotters of the coup plot.
The CIA’s Saigon station chief, John Richardson, had always supported Ngo Dinh Ru’s strong-arm tactics. Richardson, who had consistently supported the strong-arm tactics taken by Ngo Dinh Nhu, and whose careful fostering of Ngo Dinh Nhu had already aroused suspicion among the generals that this head of the CIA (referring to Station Chief Richardson) might be trying to weaken them, and that this brother of President Ngo Dinh Nhu’s was in the employ of the CIA. Later, this would become an important issue and would lead to the removal of Mr. John B. Richardson. Mr. Richardson’s removal.
At that time the CIA had agents in Vietnam of all stripes, and it is fair to say that we were given a far more comprehensive picture than any American or Vietnamese. We discovered the gulf between the bureaucratic rulers and the apathetic peasantry and its alienation from the urban middle class, and thus became worried about the situation. But when this concern of Station Commander Richardson was relayed by Ngo Dinh Ru to President Ngo Dinh Yen, President Ngo Dinh Yen complained that there were too many Americans conducting spies all over his country.
The escalation of this Buddhist demonstration shows that more and more people are openly standing against the government. Our intelligence network has even learned that the military generals, led by Lieutenant General Duong Van Minh, an advisor to the Presidential Advisor who is well known among Saigon’s generals, the civilian cabinet led by Vice President Nguyen Ngoc Thuy, along with the religious leader, Thach Chieu Quang, and the labor leader, Mr. Bao, are echoing each other publicly, semi-publicly, and privately. However, this information has somehow been tightly sealed by the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mr. John McCone. McCone; indeed, Ambassador Lodge, General Harkins and Mr. McCone had been practising mutual closure to the extent that President Kennedy was concerned.
As the nominal advisor to the Special Forces, I have been following developments closely and have reported everything (including details of the interrogation), in a timely manner, to Mr. Richardson.
At 11 p.m. on the night of 2 July 1963, five armored vehicles rolled into Shupung Hoon Street. It was raining heavily, there were no pedestrians on the street, and the rumbling of the armored vehicles was drowned out by the rain. A young officer in a Special Forces officer’s uniform got out of one of the armored vehicles and walked into the building of the Temporary Coordination Command of the Special Police.
“The situation is very urgent.” Lt. Colonel Fai told me with a tense expression, “I have to move the prisoners to a safe place immediately.”
“Are they to be sent to Chiwa Prison?” I asked.
“No, it’s even less safe there. Let’s go to Camp Longcheng!” I realized the gravity of the situation, as Camp Long Thanh was a secret training camp for special forces directly responsible for preventing military conflicts, and had been kept strictly secret from the military and the outside world. Colonel Le Quang Song, the chief of the Long Thanh Camp training camp, was a close general of Wu Tingru and led a powerful special forces unit equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry supplied by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). If it wasn’t due to necessity, I’m sure Wu Tingru wouldn’t have decided to send the prisoners there.
The prisoners who were secretly transferred to Camp Longcheng included, in addition to the four nuns, Tingkang, the editor of the Goodwill Newspaper, Du Guangwen, a member of the provincial legislature from Jiading, and a female radio operator from the Army Radio. All of these prisoners, handcuffed and with black cloth over their eyes, were escorted by Special Forces soldiers wearing white helmets to an armored vehicle parked outside the gate.
Looking at the convoy of armored vehicles disappearing into the rain, for the first time in my mind I questioned the solidity and ability to control the situation of the government of President Ngo Dinh Yen, who had been supported by the CIA and the U.S. military.
The next morning, when I heard the news of the attack on the Coordinating Command, Ngo Dinh Ru ordered the police to impose martial law and block all intersections, and suddenly the air in Saigon was tense, as if war was about to break out at any moment.
Colonel Cornayne arrived at the CIA’s Saigon station premises and, after three hours of secret discussions with Mr. Richardson, decided to send me to Camp Long Thanh as a Special Forces training consultant to investigate the condition of the weaponry there and the whereabouts of the seven prisoners.
“You know Colonel Le Quang Son.” Mr. Richardson said to me, “I will inform him that your going there is to enable the United States to react promptly to what is happening in time so that they are welcome. As for Wu Tingru’s place, I think it’s well taken care of.”
I am aware of Mr. Richardson’s special relationship with U Tin Yen and his beautiful wife. Many things that were rejected out of hand by the obstinate President U Tin Yan were instantly and satisfactorily resolved through U Tin Ru. Mr. Richardson, like Ambassador Nolting, was a close friend of the Wu family, understood their strong nationalistic and xenophobic feelings, never touched their sensitive nerves, and always advised them rather than commanded them, so that both Mr. and Mrs. Wu Tingyan and Wu Tingru were happy to listen.
Sure enough, Wu Tingru agreed to my going to Longcheng Camp almost without thinking, and provided me with all kinds of facilities for the trip.
On July 5, 1963, accompanied by Lt. Col. Huy, I arrived at about 4:00 p.m. at the secret base of Long Thanh Camp, located about thirty-five kilometers north of Saigon and intersecting with the Fifth Division under the command of Col. Nguyen Van Thieu.
The camp of the Ryusei Battalion is very large and extremely tightly guarded, with armored vehicles and heavily armed Special Forces soldiers in white helmets and armed uniforms at every intersection; the soldiers have the most advanced anti-personnel and anti-personnel automatic weapons and communications equipment provided by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and they closely inspect every vehicle that passes through the intersections. On both sides of the road, there were many concrete fortifications, obviously for defensive purposes; barbed wire was stretched between them and trenches were provided; automatic mines were planted in the area beyond the roadblock, and the nearest strategic village was eight kilometers away from Camp Lon Sung.
Despite the fact that the officer at the checkpoint knew Lt. Col. Fai, he checked his pass very carefully and replaced it with a red verification plate at the last roadblock. Lt. Col. Fai told me that even if Wu Tingru came here, he would need to go through the same check.
Along the way to the camp’s headquarters, we saw soldiers of the special forces and tanks training under the scorching sun. Not far from the headquarters there is a military airfield where three T-28 fighter-bombers and one HU-IB helicopter are parked.
The command post was housed in a sturdy concrete-framed house surrounded by tall palms and pineapple trees that shaded the area, making it very cool.
Colonel Lai Kwang-sung, a loyal supporter of the Ng family, and I had known each other since 1961.
“Since Colonel Lansdale’s return, the United States has become more and more conservative.” He said to me in French: “These insurgencies have taken place in the Army sector, and during the Hue unrest in June, the Army put up a lot of obstacles to the operations of the Special Forces.”
“Does the recent mass movement have anything to do with the Army’s attitude?”
“The situation isn’t completely clear.” He replied. “But I think it’s related.”
“Then why are the prisoners sent here instead of to Shikwa Prison?” I asked.
“Because these inmates are characters with backgrounds, and some people are doing everything they can to find them.”
“Do you mean the Army guys?”
“Not exactly.” He replied, “Ting Kang, for example, was an agent sent to the south by Ho Chi Minh. There was an armed attack on a police station on the same day he was arrested.”
“Perhaps you already know about the attack on the Coordinating Command the other day?” I asked, “Did you think that incident would have something to do with the Army? Or what people in the Army had something to do with it?”
“Since the person who attacked the command headquarters was not caught, it cannot be blamed on the Army with certainty. However they are in possession of the fact that we arrested a female radio operator of the Army radio station, and in addition, the fact that among those arrested was the niece of the Chief of the General Staff, Major General Le Van Kim, makes it all the more suspicious.”
He stood up, took a file out of the safe and handed it to me.
“This is the statement of the female radio operator of the Army Radio.” He said, “She confessed to having made contact with Jiguang Seki for a general.”
In the evening, Colonel Le Quang Son and I went to the concrete bomb shelter where human prisoners were held by the airfield. When we walked in, the prisoners were repenting under the supervision of a captain with a whip and five soldiers. A portrait of President U Tin Yan hung on one wall, and seven prisoners knelt on the ground with their hands stretched out in front of them and their eyes fixed on the portrait as a sign of remorse. That method was actually a form of corporal punishment often used during the “Communist Control” period to make the prisoners repent of what they had done and make alternative choices while in physical pain.
The seven inmates looked like they had been kneeling in that position for a long time, their flat outstretched arms trembling constantly, sweat on their faces.
“Please give me a break!” The female newsagent in her coffee-colored khaki Army uniform pleaded, not daring to stray her eyes from the Shaw image on the wall. Her uniform was soaked with sweat and her arms were trembling terribly.
“No talking!” The captain barked, cracking his whip across her back.
Suddenly, the body of the councilor named Du Wenguang swayed and fell toward the front. “I’m having a heart attack!” He gasped in pain, his face pale as he tugged at his chest with his hands.
The captain cursed angrily and went over to him and whipped him in the face while kicking him. At first the councilor rolled and pleaded, but gradually he stopped moving and let the captain and the soldiers kick and beat him, lying on the ground and trembling.
“Stop!” Colonel Le Quang Son ordered. He put his hand close to the congressman’s nostrils and realized that his breathing was already extremely weak.
“Get him to the doctor!” He ordered.
Four soldiers came over and grabbed him by the arms and legs and carried him out.
“This guy is very stubborn.” Colonel Le Quang Song introduced me: “He relies on his relationship with Prime Minister Guo Congde to incite mass marches and submit petitions . After the Buddhist incident, he encouraged the parliamentarians to protest to the president, a very dangerous character.”
“Will you cause more trouble by arresting him?” I asked.
“The operations to arrest these people were conducted in secret, and the news was blocked from the public, except that the arrest of the four nuns was spread through some unknown channel. It seems that there may have been a problem within the Special Police, so the prisoners were transferred here for detention.”
From the point of view of security, it was very safe for the prisoners to be detained at Camp Long Cheng, where the officers and men had little intercourse with the outside world, and where even correspondence with their families was relayed through other departments and subjected to strict scrutiny, and where Wu Ting Coward treated his loyal and close-knit unit with extra favor, and with supplies and equipment much better than those of other Army units.
When other troops reached the point of not being able to pay their salaries, the Longcheng Battalion was not affected in the least, and even soldiers who had difficulties at home might receive additional subsidies.
In addition, in order to make the soldiers get rid of their homesickness, Wu Ting-ru authorized the unit to bring the captured young women back to the camp after each sweep, and of course those women were kept as a unified property in a fortification at the Longcheng camp, and were distributed to the soldiers of each battalion in turn on every weekend. Thus, all of the above measures made this unit a formidable force for U Tingru to contend with the Army. I believe that in the event of a coup d’état, the Ryusei Battalion will inevitably fight the coup forces to the death.
However, a few days after my arrival at the Rongseong camp, an event that affected the entire political situation broke out: the seven key criminals detained at the Rongseong camp, led by the second lieutenant of the Special Forces who had been sentenced to probation by them, escaped on a rainy night from a swampy area that was free of mines and barricades.
Three days before that event, on 15 August, President Ngo Dinh Yen, at a press conference to see off the departing Ambassador Nauertin, announced that he had accepted Ambassador Nauertin’s plea to reconcile with the Buddhists, stating that his “policy toward the Buddhists has always been to reconcile with them”. This attitude was undoubtedly a gesture of understanding in response to President Kennedy’s appeal, and led many Americans and Vietnamese officials who had opposed him to believe that he would make more concrete moves to further reduce tensions.
But late at night on the fourth day after President U Tin Yan gave these assurances, the seven prisoners involved in the oppressive policies of Mr. and Mrs. U Tin Joo a few months earlier finally persuaded a second lieutenant of the special forces of the Ryong Thanh Battalion and escaped under his leadership through the undefended swampy area to the west.
The prisoner’s escape was discovered by a staff sergeant in charge of a night patrol. Since it had been raining heavily for several days, he and the other soldiers on patrol took shelter under an F-23 fighter plane. When the rain subsided a little after 2 o’clock at night, he led his soldiers on a routine check in front of the sturdy concrete bomb-proof room where the prisoners were being held. When they arrived there, they saw that the door to the bomb shelter was open and empty, and that two sentries had been killed in the guardhouse outside the door.
The alarm of the Ryusei camp went off, and the soldiers who were sound asleep awoke and poured out of their barracks and began a search. They soon realized that the prisoners had fled to the west towards the swampy area, and immediately marched off in that direction.
I was waiting in his command with Colonel Le Quang Son when I heard close firing from the west, and it appeared that they had taken fire with the soldiers.
At 3:40 a.m., the sound of mingled footsteps came from outside the command post, followed by a major commander and several soldiers bringing in the muddy, cloaked female Army radio operator. He reported that the second lieutenant, who had covered the escape of the prisoners, had supplied the prisoners with Colt automatic rifles, and that there had been a gunfight with the army in the swamp, which had resulted in the killing of the congressman and the second lieutenant, the drowning of one of the nuns who had plunged into the swamp, and the capturing of the Army Radio woman, but the three nuns and Tinkang, the editor of the newspaper Kindly Newspaper, had escaped across the swamp.
Colonel Le Quang Song was extremely shocked by this news, and he was aware of the serious consequences that could result from the escape of the four prisoners from the Long Thanh camp. He ordered the Special Forces to search the neighboring areas and strategic villages to catch or kill the four prisoners, and immediately interrogated the newspaper woman.
The woman was taken to the bomb-proof room where the prisoners were being held, where the soldiers stripped her of her soaked uniform and beat her severely with belts. Covering her face with her hands, she lay prostrate on the ground, letting the belt whistling and raining down on her body, and steadfastly refusing to tell the direction in which the prisoners had escaped.
“Asshole! I’ll beat you to death here if you don’t speak up!” Colonel Ri shouted, kicking her violently in the ribs. The newswoman rolled in agony on the ground, her long hair, sticky with mud and water, wrapped around her cheeks.
“oi chao oi!” she screamed miserably as she covered her kicked ribs with her hands, which had apparently been broken by Colonel Ri Guangsong’s kick.
Colonel Le Quang Son walked over to her, grabbed her by the hair, stepped on each of his legs on his skeleton shoulders, and made her lie on her back on the ground, and then pounded her cheeks with his fists on one side, while pressing the prisoners tightly to ask them where the prisoners had gone.
The newswoman’s face immediately swelled up and her lips were cracked by the stamping, and blood flowed from the corners of her mouth and nose. Nevertheless, she insisted that she did not know where the prisoners had gone.
“Beat her to death! Tell me or beat her to death!” Colonel Ri Guangsong roared furiously, swinging his arm hard.
Several soldiers grabbed her ankles and dragged her to the wall, then lifted her upside down and inserted her feet into two iron hoops on the wall to secure them, so that she was hanging upside down with her face against the wall. Two soldiers, each holding a wide bamboo board more than a meter long, began to beat her buttocks. The bamboo board with the sound of the wind touched her skin, making a crisp sound, and with each stroke, the clear skin of her buttocks raised a high greenish-purple scar.
At first the newswoman screamed and pleaded, but then she gradually stopped screaming and her arms dropped.
The soldiers bound her wrists, passed the rope through the hoop on the wall, and yanked her up until her hands were next to her heels, her body was held out in front, her waist bent back into a bow, so that she hung flat in the air as if she were kneeling on the wall, and then splashed her with cold water to wake her up. The Colonel Commander put the gasoline-dipped cloth into two empty canning jars and burned them for a while, then removed the cloth and snapped the jars over the newswoman’s taut breasts, which were immediately sucked into the jars, with the nipples and areolas protruding, and the skin fading from red to purplish-black.
(11 lines redacted here)
Both of the newswoman’s breasts were almost pumped into the canning jar, and she wriggled in agony, trying to shake it off, but it was firmly attached to her chest. The soldier brought in another large rock from outside and bound it to her hips. This caused her back to arch even more, almost as if it had snapped, and her stomach pushed out downwards.
“Burn her!” Colonel Le Quang Song shouted anxiously: “If she refuses to talk, burn this bitch right now!!!”
(6 lines redacted here)
At about 5:00 a.m., under this excruciating torture, the newspaper woman finally confessed where the four prisoners had escaped to.
When the soldiers untied the newspaper woman from the wall, she was already dying, the skin on her stomach burned to a charred black color, her navel protruding, and both of her breasts becoming bruised and protruding. She lay helplessly gasping for breath on the ground, staring blankly upward; it was clear that she was not going to live.
“vui xoo chet!” (Bury her!) Colonel Le Quang Song ordered, and then returned to the camp command headquarters with me. He immediately asked for Wu Tingru’s phone and reported to him everything that had happened at Camp Long Thanh. Wu Tingru was so shocked by this unexpected event that he cursed Col. Le Quang Song on the phone and then hung up the phone.
A few minutes later, Ngo Dinh Ru called again, ordering the special forces of Long Thanh Camp to immediately prepare for combat to prevent changes in the Army’s 5th Division, which is based in the northern part of Long Thanh Camp and led by Colonel Nguyen Van Thieu.
Colonel Nguyen Van Thieu, commander of the Army’s 5th Division, is an extremely special character, but this went unnoticed at the time. His unit was under the dual direction of Major General Tran Van Dung, acting Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, and Major General Nguyen Khanh, Commander of the Army’s Second Military Region. The defense zone housed the Republic of Vietnam Air Force base of Air Major General (later Lieutenant General) Nguyen Cao Chi.
The pilots of the five new A-1 fighters arriving from the United States were all his close officers. As a result, he was in possession of a then-unknown and powerful army. However, Wu Tingru was so confident at the time that he thought he had firmly mastered the army through several purges, a thought that led him to take further risky actions.
On August 19, three nuns who had escaped from the Long Thanh camp and returned to Saigon, namely Jing Yuan, Duc Thanh and Jing Trinh, doused themselves with gasoline and committed self-immolation in front of the Independence Palace, while distributing a leaflet exposing the barbaric acts perpetrated by Lieutenant Colonel Thuy, an officer of the Special Police, against them and other captured persons.
Saigon, which had been quiet for a while, was abuzz again, and all Buddhists flocked to the Presidential Palace to protest and demand that the culprits be severely punished. At the same time, Saigon’s auto workers, dock workers, textile workers, water and electricity workers also held a general strike to protest against the government’s broken promises: hundreds of rental cars whizzed angrily through the streets in a heartfelt show of defiance against the apathetic government; and demonstrations erupted one after another from Ca Dyi, Gia Dinh, Hue, Da Nang, and elsewhere, creating a momentum of unprecedented proportions.
However, even so, Mr. and Mrs. U Tingru treated these demonstrations with extreme indifference. Mrs. Wu even described the self-immolation of nuns as “burning game”. As they had done before, Ngo Dinh Nhu ordered the Special Police to come out and shoot dozens of people, and then, through the Saigon Times, which they controlled, described those shot as ex-sectarian gangsters who had strayed into Saigon.
Two days later (August 20), in the dead of night, Special Forces in white helmets and army soldiers in paratrooper uniforms suddenly launched “root and branch” raids on Buddhist monasteries throughout the country, and more than 1,400 people, mainly monks, were arrested, many of whom were severely beaten or killed.
This brutal unified search and seizure operation was orchestrated by Ngo Dinh Nhu, who bypassed the normal Army chain of command and ordered it himself. Whether President Ngo Dinh Yen (who had given sacred assurances to Ambassador Nolting and the Vietnamese people) had given his consent in advance or had simply accepted it after the fact has never been made clear, since a few months later he was killed by soldiers in the military vehicle of the coup forces, along with Ngo Dinh Yen, who had planned the event.
Because the Army had issued orders the day before the raid, U Tin Joo had many of the Special Forces soldiers wear borrowed uniforms from the paratroopers; at the same time, U Tin Joo cut the telephone lines to the U.S. Embassy in an attempt to keep U.S. officials unaware of the truth of the events that were unfolding in order to dupe the U.S. officials into believing that it was the Army that had carried out the repression, in violation of his own promises.
In view of the above, the United States Embassy placed the blame on the Saigon Army in its initial report to Washington. However, this false accusation was quickly cleared up with the assistance of the acting Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, Major General Tran Van Dung.
In the midst of the press conference held by Wu Tingru to celebrate the pacification of the Buddhists, there was an episode in which the Foreign Minister, Wu Guangmu, shaved his head like a monk, and holding a speech prepared under the authorization of Wu Tingru, announced his resignation from the post of Foreign Minister with immediate effect to express his strong protest.
On August 27, I attended a reception hosted by Mr. and Mrs. Ngo Dinh Ru as an advisor to the Special Forces Training Course, which was attended by Vietnamese government and military officials, ambassadors, and all members of the Saigon Station of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
When Lieutenant General Yang Wenming came over to shake Mr. Richardson’s hand, I heard him whisper to Mr. Richardson in French, “You know what? The Special Forces have killed people with the weapons you sent.”
Obviously, Lieutenant General Yang Wenming was very annoyed with Wu Tingru for stealing the Army’s name to conduct the search. This sentiment was also evident in other officers. Thus, another plot for a military coup was being carried out in secret.
The meeting between Colonel Kornaien of the CIA and Lieutenant General Yang Mingming in Nha-Il was held on October 2, when another Buddhist set himself on fire in the square in the city center, which added a somber atmosphere to the talks. Their meeting lasted 70 minutes and was conducted in French, a language with which Lt. Gen. Yang Mingming is well acquainted.
Lieutenant General Yang Mingming said that he did not expect “any concrete support” from the U.S. for the coup, but that he needed concrete assurances from the U.S. that they would not obstruct its implementation.
Among the Vietnamese, Lieutenant General Duong Minh was known as “General Damien” because of his large stature. He served as a military adviser to the Presidential Office, was a talented combat commander and was highly regarded in the officer corps.
When Lt. Gen. Duong Van Minh named the names of those involved in the coup, Col. Conain was shocked because the first person was his friend of many years, Maj. Gen. Tran Van Dung, acting chief of staff of the Vietnamese Armed Forces.
The whole list is written like this.
(1) Plan participant: Lieutenant General Yang Wenming, Military Adviser to the Presidential Office
Nguyen Dinh Thuan, Minister of National Defense
Major General Tan Boon Tun, Acting Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces
Major General Le Van Kim, Deputy Chief of General Staff of the Armed Forces
Brigadier General Tan Sin Khiem, Chief of the Joint General Staff
(2) Supporter of the plan: Major General Nguyen Trung Thi, Commander of the First Military Region.
Major General Nguyen Khanh, Commander of the Second Military Region
(3) The list of plan sympathizers: Major General Son Muro Dinh, Military Governor of the Third Military Region and Saigon, which included almost all senior officers of the armed forces of the Republic of Viet Nam, came as a shock to Colonel Konain.
Lieutenant General Yeo Minh Minh told Colonel Kornaien that their coup d’état was going to be carried out in three ways: (1) by assassinating Ngo Dinh Coward and Ngo Dinh Chien and retaining President Ngo Dinh Yen in office; and (2) by having the military forces, especially those in Bien Hoa, surround the coup forces in Saigon in a direct firefight with the forces loyal to President Ngo Dinh Yen and divide Saigon into several zones to be cleaned up one by one.
Lieutenant General Duong Van Minh believes that the 5,500 soldiers in Saigon may be loyal to President Ngo Dinh Yen and fight the coup forces.
“The most dangerous characters are Ngo Tingru, Ngo Ting Chon and Ngo Chong Hau.” Lt. Gen. Yang Wenming said, “Wu Chong-hsiao, once a communist and still sympathetic to the communists, is seeking a cease-fire agreement with Ho Chi Minh.”
He told Colonel Cornayne that he himself had no ambitions, nor did any of the other generals. “However,” he said with a smile, “General Son Muro Kyung is an exception, and Brigadier General Nguyen Sin Khiem may play both sides of the fence.”
Ambassador Lodge’s reply to Lt. Gen. Yang Mingming was: 1. that the U.S. would not interfere with their plans; 2. that would look into his plans other than the assassination plan; and 3. that he would continue to aid Vietnam as long as he was able to gain the support of the people and win the war against the North Vietnamese.
Ambassador Lodge said that if the future Government had a significant proportion of qualified civilian leaders in key positions, it would be very likely to be as strong as the one described above.
Generals Duong Van Minh and Tran Van Dung, both full-fledged nationalists, resented all forces supported by outside forces, and especially loathed CIA cronies like the Ngo Dinh Ruys. They told Ambassador Lodge that changing the political situation was a matter for the Vietnamese themselves, to hold democratic elections, and not to be “servants” of any country, especially the United States.
Ambassador Lodge expressed support for their vision, but had reservations and doubts about whether democratic elections were compatible with objective reality in the circumstances prevailing in Vietnam.
Theoretically, we could have conveyed the coup plot to the legitimate government of President Ngo Dinh Yen, which would undoubtedly have stopped it. But from a practical point of view, the coup was a matter for the Vietnamese themselves (who had kindly informed us), and the Americans were not the French governors of yesteryear; President Ngo Dinh Yen’s government, though very favorable to the United States in many respects, had aroused the indignation of the people, and it would be detrimental to the image of the United States to endeavor to defend a government that did not have the support of the people.
It was at this point that the French and the Communists in North Vietnam suddenly launched a “diplomatic offensive” to take advantage of the situation.
Back on August 29, French President Charles de Gaulle made a deliberately evasive public statement on Vietnam, tracing the history of that part of French Indochina that belonged to France until 1954, and then saying poignantly, “France’s hope for Vietnam is to allow its people, and its people alone, to choose, without foreign influence, the way to determine their own destiny. the way of their own destiny, without foreign influence.” At the same time, he sent diplomats to make contacts between North and South Vietnam, trying to take advantage of the situation to restore France’s image.
The French Ambassador to the Republic of Vietnam, Mr. Roger Lalouette. Mr. Roger Lalouette, the French Ambassador to the Republic of Viet Nam, hinted several times to Ngo Dinh Luu that the United States was planning to kill his brother.
Returning to Saigon from Hanoi, Jacques Débidzon brought with him the astonishingly contradictory speech of Ho Chi Minh. Jacques Derbyshire returned to Saigon from Hanoi with the astonishingly contradictory statement of Ho Chi Minh. During a meeting in Hanoi between Derby Trong and Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Viet Cong, Ho Chi Minh went so far as to claim that his opinion of Ngo Dinh Yen, whom he had once dismissed as a “feudalist” and an “American puppet,” had “greatly changed. Hu said, “I’ve changed my opinion of Wu Tingyan. Ho Chi Minh said, “Ngo Dinh Yen is a good Vietnamese, a patriot, and he has many qualities that are very valuable.”
However, President U Tin Yan and U Tin Ru ignored these pleasing indications and were, in fact, closely watching the changes within the army.
As early as August, he had received information that military officers were preparing to stage a coup on the 31st, but the officers did not have the support of Saigon’s military governor, General Son Muro Dinh, and the coup was shelved. The Saigon Times blamed U.S. interference for the coup, which did not take place. However, Ngo Dinh Nhu did not rest on his laurels and decided to purge the army of suspicious elements as soon as possible.
At this time, the key figure was Major General Son Muro Kyung, Saigon’s military governor and commander of the Third Military Region, as the Army’s most powerful regular units were under his leadership. The young general was brought to the side of the coup generals after Major General Tran Van Dung used his vanity to drive him into conflict with Ngo Dinh Nhu. Before that, as a precaution, the coup plotters had enlisted military commanders under him.
Major General Son Moo Dinh’s wife was a very beautiful French girl, and it was rumored in Saigon that the lecherous Ngo Dinh Ru had made an attempt on his life at a ball in the absence of Major General Son Moo Dinh. This was a great insult to Major General Son Moon-jeong, and it was not until Mr. and Mrs. Ngo Dinh Ru personally came forward to explain the incident that it was brought to an end.
Major General Chan Boon Tun revisited the matter and confirmed it, and Major General Son Murotseong finally believed the rumor. Shortly thereafter, U Ting-yen learned of the officers’ coup plot and placed the information before the young officer, whom he believed to be loyal to him, and asked Major General Son Murodzin to assist him in setting a trap for the other officers. Oh Ting-joo’s plan was to stage a fake coup to induce public exposure of the opposition to President Oh Ting-yan, and then use Major General Sun Muro-jin’s army to put down the real coup plot.
However, Maj. Gen. Sun Muroju immediately told Maj. Gen. Chan Boon Tun, acting chief of staff of the armed forces, about Wu Tingru’s counter-plot plan.
On November 1, at ten o’clock in the morning, Ambassador Lodge accompanied Admiral Harry Felt, who was visiting Saigon, on a courtesy call to the Presidential Palace. Ambassador Lodge accompanied Admiral Harry Felt, who was visiting Saigon, to the Presidential Palace for a courtesy visit. The coup forces had been secretly deployed in and around Saigon the night before. At noon, Admiral Felt went to the airport with no idea of what was going to happen, and everything was as calm as usual.
At 1.45 p.m., Major General Tan Boon Tun telephoned United States military headquarters to say that the coup had begun. At 2 p.m., the coup forces occupied the radio station, the airport, the police headquarters and other important installations; at 4 p.m., the coup forces began to attack the Presidential Palace and the Special Forces barracks; and at 4.30 p.m., military officers declared over the radio that the coup had succeeded and demanded the resignation of U Tin Yan and U Tin Coward.
In fact, government loyalist officers had already detected signs of coup activity and alerted Wu Tingru to it, but Wu Tingru believed it was part of the fake coup he had organized with General Sun Murodzin and told his loyalist army commanding officers not to intervene. When the coup forces attacked the presidential palace, Oh Ting-ru called General Sun Murodzin to order a counterattack, but he was told that General Sun Murodzin was out of town.
Within three hours, all resistance had been crushed except for the presidential palace. Faced with calls for resignation, President U Tin Yan sent the generals to the presidential palace for consultations, a tactic used in 1960, when the coup was delayed long enough for troops loyal to President U Tin Yan’s government to move into the city, but at this point the generals refused to enter the palace.
Shortly thereafter, President Ngo Dinh Nhan dialed the U.S. Ambassador to Saigon, Mr. Henry Eubert B. Bowie. Mr. Henry Eubert Lodge. Lodge in Saigon to ascertain the attitude of the United States Government towards the military coup d’état that had taken place outside the windows of his presidential palace.
Ambassador Lodge does not show attitude. He said he heard the shots but did not know all the circumstances. “Also, it’s 4:30 a.m. in Washington, and the U.S. government is not likely to express an opinion right away at this time.”
U Tingyan was not happy about this, and he disagreed, saying, “But you must have some general opinion, because I am, after all, the head of state, and I have been trying to do my duty. I am trying to act according to the dictates of duty and conscience, and I believe in the latter in particular.”
Lodge replied that President Wu Tingyan had certainly done his duty, and had done it valiantly, and that he could not be blotted out for his contribution to his country. The Ambassador went on to say, “Now, I am concerned about your personal safety.” When Ambassador Lodge asked President Ngo Dinh Yen whether he had heard the suggestion that he would be allowed to leave his country safely if he agreed to resign, the President of the Republic of Vietnam, who had been surrounded by the coup forces but was still very stubborn, said firmly: “No.”
Thereafter, Ambassador Lodge asked with concern, “Please tell me if there is anything I can do to help your personal safety?”
However, President U Tin Yan said in the last words he intended to speak to an American, “I am trying to restore order.”
Before the evening had passed, President Ngo Dinh Yen and his brother Ngo Dinh Ru escaped from the besieged presidential palace through a dark tunnel. In the afternoon of the next day, they were arrested by insurgents on an embankment in the Chinese-populated part of town and shot in an armored personnel carrier rumbling through the streets of Saigon.
I later learned that the information on the strength and personnel of the Long Thanh Battalion had been forwarded by Colonel Cornell to General Chan Boon Tun ten days before the coup d’état. Thus, the powerful Special Forces did not play any role in the military coup, and Colonel Lai Kwang-sung went into exile.