Word: pagodaed
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Over and over, the desperate voice shouted into the telephone: "They are breaking into Xa Loi Pagoda. They are breaking into Xa Loi Pagoda." In the background, gunfire mingled with the confused screams of Buddhist monks and nuns and the clanging alarm of the huge brass gong that hangs in the bell tower of Saigon's largest pagoda. Suddenly the phone connection from the temple went dead...
...Using their rifle butts as clubs, squads of tough, riot-trained "special forces" smashed into the pagoda, battering a path through a small guard of young Buddhist monks. The troopers had a list, and each monk on the list was considered to be a "Communist in disguise." On the temple's second floor, one monk tried to resist and was thrown bodily from a balcony to the courtyard 20 ft. below. Other monks and nuns were routed from behind a flimsy barricade of wooden benches and forced outside by tear gas and gunshots...
Sacking the pagoda's main altar, the raiders carted away the charred heart of Buddhist Martyr Thich Quang Due, who last June was the first of five Buddhists to burn himself to death in pro test against the Diem government's anti-Buddhist drive. But the Buddhists managed to spirit out of the building the receptacle holding Quang Due's ashes. "The ashes are holy," said one monk. "We would give 15 lives to defend them." Two other monks escaped over the back wall of Xa Loi (pronounced sah loy) into the grounds of the adjoining...
...Pagodas, sporting protest signs in Vietnamese and English, became command posts where duplicating machines ground out hundreds of thousands of messages, and the sound of typewriters and telephones blended with the boom of temple gongs. Appeals for aid were broadcast to President Kennedy, Pope Paul VI, and U.N. Secretary-General U Thant. At a grisly, well-organized press conference in Saigon, Buddhist leaders introduced a tiny, withered Buddhist nun as a candidate for self-immolation in protest against the Diem government. When one Buddhist spokesman who had studied at Yale wanted to pass out the latest communiqués from...
...approach of government troops was signaled by the beating of temple drums and the clashing of cymbals calling for help. Beating pots and pans to rouse their neighbors, the angry populace poured from homes and raced to defend the city's temples. At Tu Dam Pagoda, monks tried to burn the coffin of a priest who had burned himself alive in the Buddhist suicide protest wave. But government soldiers, firing M1 rifles as they advanced, overran the temple, snatched the smoldering coffin away, and smashed a statue of Gautama Buddha. From the temple's treasury they took...