THE smoke lifted quickly from the broad avenues surrounding Saigon's Gia Long palace. In the bright sunlight, the pattern of violence came clearraw shell holes, the black tongue-traces of flamethrowers, and the fine detail of the coup that overthrew and killed President Ngo Dinh Diem.
In August. Serious talk about an uprising had first started in August, after Diem raided the Buddhist pagodas. Lieut. General Tran Van Don, then acting chief of the Joint General Staff, got word that a coup seemed imminent, and felt (as he now explains it) that the moment was not right. He feared that whoever was planning...
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