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In Hué, where last year's Buddhist troubles began, thousands staged torchlight parades, while young militants painted anti-Khanh slogans on walls. Schoolgirls dressed in white passed out mimeographed denunciations of "dictatorship," without specifically mentioning Khanh. The Buddhists also renewed their eternal complaints of "persecution" by Roman Catholic officials, a charge based on only a handful of incidents for which Khanh has invariably made amends. At Tuyhoa in central Viet Nam, an angry crowd of 4,000, led by children and pregnant women, blocked an armored army personnel carrier by throwing themselves in front of its oncoming tracks. According to the government, most were Viet Cong sympathizers.
Missing Monument. No one could be sure whether the Buddhists were deliberately trying to bring down the Khanh regime or whether they were only pressuring him to grant them and their political allies more power. At any rate, through it all Khanh's regime managed to preserve a kid-gloves approach, ordering police to avoid any display of violence. At the same time, the government attempted to placate the Catholics. One night 20 workmen quietly removed a 1,000-lb. monument to President Kennedy that had been installed across the street from Saigon Cathedral against the wishes of the city's Catholics, many of whom blame Kennedy for Catholic Diem's downfall and subsequent death.
In the war, meanwhile, it was one of the government's worst weeks. In Khien Hoa province, southwest of Saigon, two Viet Cong battalions ambushed one 350-man government battalion and killed 81 Vietnamese soldiers and four American advisers, wounded 54. Said a sympathetic U.S. adviser of the Vietnamese troops: "They are so tired they don't mind getting killed any more."
Still, the greatest present threat was not to be found in the guerrilla-ridden jungle but in Saigon, still uneasy under a state of urgency and an 11 p.m. curfew. As if they had never heard of the war, 2,000 students rallied in Saigon, calling for civilian rule. Several demonstrating students admitted that they were in the pay of discontented politicians. Fact is that the army is the only halfway stable element in the situation; the squabbling civilian politicians, plus their supporters among the intellectuals, would undoubtedly ruin what little there is left of South Viet Nam in short order, leading to neutralism. Government censors have lately tried to encourage the press to print "constructive" fiction and cut down on the interminable, vastly popular ghost stories. The prospect of more disorders in Saigon and another coup is the most haunting ghost story of all.
* In a village northwest of Saigon, there was even a kind of re-enactment of last year's notorious Buddhist self-immolations, though it had nothing to do with politics but was carried out by a jilted girl. As her former lover prepared to marry another, the girl crashed the wedding in a gasoline-soaked gown, set fire to her skirts, then chased the bridegroom with the evident intention of setting him on fire too. Guests intervened, and the would-be martyress was hospitalized.