Word: binh
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Revolution swept the sunny, tropical Vietnamese city of Saigon last week, shaking and straining the antiCommunist, anti-French government of Premier Ngo Dinh Diem. The Binh Xuyen gangster sect, supported by French colonials, started a bloody uprising and was put down. While the fires of civil war guttered out in the refugee-crowded streets of Saigon (pop. 2,000,000), a Vietnamese general, supported by French colonials, tried a midnight coup d'état and almost succeeded. Locked in this squalid conflict were the precarious hopes of Vietnamese nationalism, the ambitions of French colonials and the committed prestige...
...absence of total reassurance from the U.S., these had the sound of late and futile words. The bristling headquarters of the Binh Xuyen gangster sect (which runs both the police and the prostitutes) lay only 800 yards from Freedom Palace; whenever loyal troops tried to move against the Binh Xuyen last week, a French general interposed: "Remember the truce, messieurs." Yet in Paris, a high French official privately assured newsmen that Diem could not put down the sects because his troops would refuse to fight...
...showered down upon Saigon (pop. 2,000,000), cooling the weather but not the city's jittery nerves. There were quiet Buddhist ceremonies in Chinese pagodas, a pink and white wedding at the cathedral, and an outward pose of calm. But heavily armed gangsters and cops of the Binh Xuyen sect, in their arsenic-green berets, patrolled the boulevards, ordering traffic, and blockading the city's approaches so that they could control the price and supply of rice. Steel-helmeted nationalist paratroopers of Premier Ngo Dinh Diem were also out on patrol, but they were restrained from getting...
Frustration in the Palace. After three hours and 15 minutes of sporadic fire, the Binh Xuyen were just about ready to quit. "Warmest compliments . . . The Fatherland is proud of you," Diem signaled his young soldiers-but into the midst of free South Viet Nam's first small victory wheeled a black French Citroen, a French general inside it. "Cease fire! Assume defensive positions!"the Frenchman ordered the astonished Vietnamese...
Next morning, wearied and frustrated, Ngo Dinh Diem went back to negotiation with the sects, while the Binh Xuyen resumed its arrogant patrolling and called up reinforcements. "Vietnamese anger is mounting," TIME Correspondent Dwight Martin cabled from Saigon, "and many foreign observers sympathize completely. It is probably too strong to say, as some are saying, that the French have a Machiavellian master plan to subvert the anti-French Nationalist Diem and with him the U.S. effort to save South Viet Nam from the Communists. But most Americans here conclude, nevertheless, that French actions and policies will have that effect unless...