Word: diem
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Cheers for Father. Le Huu Tu has so far managed to protect his bishopric from the Communists. Phat Diem is too small to warrant full-scale Viet Minh attack and too determined in its self-defense to be taken without such an attack. Le Huu Tu chuckles at his own cunning. Phat Diem people are happy about it too, because the net effect so far has been favorable : while other towns in the delta region have been systematically destroyed by earth-scorching Viet Minhs, Phat Diem and Bui Chu are alone unscathed...
...from steamer to shore was in danger of sticking on a mud-bank, crowds of men & women jumped into the river to their waists, virtually carried the whole sampan, including the bishop and his attendant priests, plus the American visitors. Along the road from the river to Phat Diem town, a group of young cyclists waited to greet the returning bishop. He had been away only four days, but the people seemed genuinely moved and excited in welcoming him back. Some knelt by the roadside. Mothers held out their bare-bottomed babies for the bishop's blessing. Little boys...
Taxation and justice are a mixture of old Indo-Chinese custom and Bishop Tu's improvisations. He names magistrates as well as every other important official in Phat Diem. "We are very human here," he explains. "If we catch a thief we just keep him in jail for a few months, and then if he is converted to the church or shows himself repentant we let him go. We have no capital punishment. We have no corporal punishment either. Of course, when we catch a spy we beat him. But that is not to punish him. It is only...
Though Bishop Tu is also commander in chief of the private army of Phat Diem and Bui Chu, operational control is in the hands of dapper Ngo Cao Tung, who looks ten years younger than his 40 years, claims to have served as a major on Chiang Kai-shek's staff and as military counselor to the Nationalist commander in chief in South China. He arrived in Phat Diem last May. Under him are two regular battalions of 1,700 men, known as Groupe Mobile Autonome. His uniform, a strange mixture of his own and the bishop...
...Phat Diem's southern border, where mountains leap suddenly from the rice plain like rocks from the sea, the Viet Minhs occasionally raid the bishop's territory. But so far there has been no big attack. Bui Chu and Phat Diem still manage to maintain their independent existence. At the back of Monsignor Le Huu Tu's episcopal palace, the lathes grind out crude grenades, mortars and one Rube Goldberg contraption, proudly described by one of the priests as "our flying bomb...