The first rains of the monsoon 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...
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