Word: binh
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Battle on the Boulevard. The mortar shells and the ultimatum were fired at the struggling new state of South Viet Nam (pop. 10.5 million) by a war lord named General Le Van Vien-a man who used to be a river pirate and now runs the Binh Xuyen (pronounced bin soo yen), one of South Viet Nam's exotic alliances of political and religious sects, with its own private army of 8,000 uniformed men. The general often seems like an inclusive version of Murder Inc. and the police force, for his Binh Xuyen controls Saigon's prostitutes...
...benefactor, thereby helping Bao Dai to live in sunshine and sloth at Cannes on a total income of $3,400,000 a year. General Le Van Vien got on well with the French colonials, but Nationalist Premier Diem recently stopped the government's handsome subsidy to the Binh Xuyen and shut down the general's gambling dens in the name of anti-Communist "disinfection...
...check the mortar damage and comfort the wounded. Brushing aside the general's ultimatum, Diem called up Vietnamese army reinforcements to relieve a couple of hardpressed Vietnamese garrisons near by. Thundering to the scene in trucks, the reinforcements were ambushed along the Boulevard Gallieni by well-placed Binh Xuyen machine gunners, but the Vietnamese government troops piled out, unlimbered a 37-mm. fieldpiece, battered point-blank at the Binh Xuyen, and then charged...
...formerly a Saigon customs clerk. Hoa Hao is a rowdy sect of dissident Buddhists professing its belief in abstinence and prayer. Its founder, the late Huynh Phu So, augmented his fame as a healer when, the story goes, he was sent to a lunatic asylum and converted his psychiatrist. Binh Xuyen is an organization of bandits, in mustard-colored uniforms, who control both the brothels and the police of Saigon under a handy arrangement with the absentee chief of state, Bao Dai. Their commander, General Le Van Vien, was once a river pirate. Pronounced 'n go (as in come...
...caught in an ambush set by the discredited but still powerful rearguards of his country's past-feudal warlords, religious fanatics and big-city hoodlums, with French colonials hovering indistinctly in the background. About 30,000 well-armed troops of the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao and Binh Xuyen sects (long subsidized by the French) were out in coalition against Diem's national government, lobbing mortar shells into peasant villages to demonstrate their lethal potentialities. Hostile Vietnamese politicians in Europe were trying to persuade Riviera-loving Bao Dai, the absentee chief of state, to go home, fire Diem...