Once Upon a Distant War: David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett--Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam Battles - Softcover

Prochnau, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679772650 ISBN 13: 9780679772651

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1996

Synopsis

Once Upon a Distance War tells the stories of such young Vietnam war correspondents as Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett, and David Halberstam, providing a riveting chronicle of high adventure and brutal slapstick, gallantry and cynicism, as well as a vital addition to the history they shaped. -Prochnau . . . tells a Vietnam story we haven't heard before. . . . Complex, witty, and humane.---Tobias Wolff. of photos.

About this title

About the Author

William Prochnau and Laura Parker wrote collaborative articles for Vanity Fair, where Prochnau was a contributing editor. Prochnau, a former national correspondent for The Washington Post, was the author of three acclaimed books. He died in 2018.

From the Inside Flap

Distance War tells the stories of such young Vietnam war correspondents as Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett, and David Halberstam, providing a riveting chronicle of high adventure and brutal slapstick, gallantry and cynicism, as well as a vital addition to the history they shaped. "Prochnau . . . tells a Vietnam story we haven't heard before. . . . Complex, witty, and humane."--Tobias Wolff. of photos.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Once Upon a Distant War

David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett--Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam BattlesBy William Prochnau

Vintage Books USA

Copyright © 1996 William Prochnau
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780679772651

Chapter One

A NICE LITTLE WAR IN A LAND OF TIGERS AND ELEPHANTS

Malcolm Browne, a tall and gawky thirty-year-old formerchemist whose red hair would soon turn sandy, stepped down in asweat from Flight One, Pan American's new around-the-world jetservice.

Saigon's heat, humid and oppressive at 96 degrees, hit the newman from the Associated Press like a wave. Just out of Baltimore,where winter had arrived in a sudden early surge, Browne worethe only suit he owned, a wool one. Over one shoulder he luggeda useless topcoat; over the other a battered $25 Japanese camera hehad picked up secondhand.

On the hot tarmac at Tan Son Nhut Airport two photographerstook his picture, one for South Vietnam's secret police, the otherfor a small English-language newspaper called the Times of Vietnam.It would not take Browne long to realize that there was little differencebetween the two. Otherwise, the arrival did not seem auspicious.No military man met him with a jeep and driver as acorrespondent from America's premier news-gathering agencymight have been welcomed to a war zone in another time andplace. Those at the American Embassy, soon to be bogged downwith an onslaught of arrivals of a different sort, noted the date--November11, 1961, a Saturday--with only passing interest. Beneathlazily turning fans inside the low, open-air terminal building,South Vietnamese customs officials languidly riffled through hissingle suitcase, glanced without interest at the wry smile onBrowne's passport photo, and waved him through.

In the beginning it was such a nice little war.

"A dapper, debonair little war in a land of tigers and elephants,"enthused the CIA man in one of the dark novels written later byWard Just, a distinguished correspondent whose life after Vietnamwas consumed by bleak, Conrad-like trips deep into the Americansoul.

In 1961 the United States stood at the height of its power, primedby a national "can-do" attitude that anything lay within its reachand sustained by a near-religious certainty about the rightness ofits goals. During this first of the few, but hyperkinetic, Kennedyyears, "saving" South Vietnam became one of those goals. Thetrickle of Americans passing through Saigon during the fiftiesturned abruptly into a relentless stream.

The newcomers had little historical reference to the place. Vietnam,clinging to a tropical peninsula south of China, was not aprominent Second World War battleground still tugging at Americanmemories. Nor had the French in their final colonial strugglein Asia just a few years earlier left Americans with more thanscratchy, newsreel-vague recollections of a strange war in an unknownplace called Indochina. The American government hadspent $2 billion supporting that lost cause and another billion afterthe French departed in 1954. But, to workaday Americans, Vietnamremained as distant and obscure as any place in the world. OfficialWashington did not know it much better. Two examples make thepoint:

George Reedy, an aide to Lyndon B. Johnson, accompanied theVice President on a visit early in 1961. Reedy, an intelligent man,realized soon after he landed that he didn't have the foggiest notionwhere he was. He found a map, searched for Saigon, and positionedit in relation to more familiar landmarks to give himself thatsense of place that comforts seasoned travelers.

General Maxwell Taylor, a prince in Kennedy's Camelot and hisspecial assistant for military affairs, made a fateful fact-finding tripin October, only weeks before Mal Browne's arrival. A newspaperreporter following Taylor observed that, throughout his inspectiontour, the general continually referred to the object of his attentionas South Korea.

Both Johnson and Taylor returned to Washington and recommendedmajor increases in military aid for the little Asian troublespot, seeing it as a strategically crucial Cold War prize.

Vietnam, a place so foreign to their experience that it often tookon a storybook surreality, captivated Americans. It became a fairykingdom, a toy country as alien and enticing as the Siam of TheKing and 1, as remote and mystically alluring as Shangri-la. Vietnamwas not simply exotic. It was erotic. And narcotic.

In the cities women of exceptional Asian beauty--tiny, porcelain,ephemeral images of perfect grace--wafted past. They did notwalk, they glided, oblivious to the Western faces swiveling to followthe silken trail of their raven hair and flowing white ao dais,the uniquely Vietnamese pants-gown that so remarkably enhancedtheir femininity. Or they flowed by in serene waves on fleets ofSaigon bicycles, their conical sun hats tilted back neatly on proudshoulders.

Buddhist monks, with heads shaved and lithe bodies cloaked insaffron robes, moved silently through a babble of Hindu moneychangers. Down narrow Asian alleyways expatriate Chinese withthree-strand beards and opaque eyes introduced visitors to theancient pleasures of the poppy--one pipe, two pipes, three pipes,four; the brown gum bubbling into amber, the rock-hard smoker'scouch softening to velvet at the first inhalation, the stranger driftingblissfully to a still more exotic land.

Outside the cities, the countryside turned to a poet's panoramaunchanged for centuries. To the south of Saigon, in the broad deltaof the Mekong River, ageless peasants toiled in endless green seasof rice. To the north, sinewy Montagnard tribesmen still carriedspears as they had in the Stone Age, the men clad in loincloths, thewomen bare-breasted.

Strange religious sects abounded. One, the Cao Dais, kept a pink-and-bluecathedral. A single huge Masonic eye hovered over thechurch's entrance. Inside, the Cao Dais worshiped icons of theirsaints--Buddha, Joan of Arc, Jesus Christ, and Victor Hugo--withequal passion. Vietnam's Buddhists, who would soon move to theforefront of Mal Browne's story, were almost inexplicable in Westernterms, mixing ancestor and animal worship into their mysticjourney along their religion's Eightfold Noble Path. The little war flared intermittently in brutal attacks. Wispy figuresappeared suddenly in the black-pajama garb of peasants, didtheir violence, and then, just as suddenly, melded back into theshadows of triple-canopy jungle. A faceless youngster emergedbriefly from a sidewalk crowd and rolled a sapper's grenade into aSaigon bistro, then disappeared into the natural cover of teemingAsian streets.

The American-supported Saigon government called the guerrillasthe Viet Cong, a derogatory term for Vietnamese Communists.The Americans would bastardize the name further, abbreviating itto VC, codifying it in radio lingo as Victor Charlie, shortening itagain to Charlie, and, in the end, when the going got very rough,restoring a begrudging measure of respect. "Mister Charles," theAmericans would finally call the enemy when the war turned big,mean, and impossible.

But, in the beginning, even the war was an enticement. It gavethe outsider, as Graham Greene had described it while the Frenchstill fought there, "that feeling of exhilaration which a measure ofdanger brings to the visitor with a return ticket."

A few of the early arrivals found the country dark and ominous,and could not wait to leave. "It was a sinister place," said HomerBigart, a renowned New York Times war correspondent who arrivedsix weeks after Browne. "There was a feeling in the air. The placewas unlucky, and you could watch it corrupt the Americans." Hehated it.

But Bigart was an exception, and even he did not foresee howmuch the place would corrupt or how much the visitors wouldcorrupt the place. In 1961 there was no sense of impending disaster,no sense of an Apocalypse Now future. Vietnam remained a placewhere adventurers could roam, and unwary nations as well asunwary men fell hopelessly and dangerously in love, captivated,sucked up, as Michael Herr would put it much later and long afterit was too late, by some sort of irresistible Venus's-flytrap.Halfway around the world at the White House on November 11,1961, the day Mal Browne arrived in Saigon, the National SecurityCouncil met in an unusual Saturday session.

The Kennedy administration, after weeks of debate followingGeneral Maxwell Taylor's October inspection trip, approved a planto step up its military commitment to South Vietnam. Since 1954the United States had maintained a nominal force of 685 militaryadvisers in the country, the number allowed by the Geneva Accordsthat had ended the French colonial war and split the countryinto halves. Earlier in the year the Americans had secretly begunto violate the Accords, sending in additional advisers to help thebeleaguered South Vietnamese government. Now Washingtonwould commit much more--thousands of military advisers, squadronsof helicopters, detachments of armored personnel carriers,more dive-bombers, assault weapons, antipersonnel mines. This,too, the government would foolishly try to do secretly. The planwas called Project Beef-Up.

The Vietnam that became burned into the American psyche,a Vietnam with whump-whump-whumping Hueys and Cobras andChinooks blackening the skies, with half a million American soldiersbogged down hopelessly in the jungles . . . that Vietnam remainedyears away.

But this was the beginning.

As Mal Browne moved past the somnolent Vietnamese functionariesat Tan Son Nhut Airport, neither he nor his distant bosses atAssociated Press had any special insight into the luck of his timing.To his editors in New York the arrival marked only a routine transferof bodies at one of their backwater, if exotic, Asian outposts. ToBrowne, disengaging from his second failed marriage, the adventure,the romance, and the splendid isolation of the place were lureenough. He stood eleven time zones, almost a half-spin of theglobe, away from his old world. But the coincidence was remarkable,marking Browne forever as the first of a new and contentiousbreed of American war correspondent. No more unlikely charactercould have been cast in the role.

A loner in a boisterous crowd, Browne was a man of quirks andeccentricities. He even looked improbable, cutting the figure of anIchabod Crane, not a Hemingway, his six-foot frame carrying abare-sustenance 145 pounds, his Adam's apple ever pumping, hiseyes ever savoring one of life's hidden jokes. His redhead's skinwas almost translucent, so fair it lobstered up in minutes in Vietnam'shot sun.

Outside the airport he lighted up a cigarette, one from the fourpacks a day he chain-smoked. He held it between long spideryfingers, one of which sported a ring mounted with a golden death-head'sskull. In the heat his wool suit sagged into a wet wilt, causinghim to hike up the trousers and reveal the bright red socks hewore everywhere. During an army tour in the fifties he had foundred socks on sale at the PX and bought them all. He had worn themever since, and the spot of red would be there ever after, peekingout of the bottom of combat fatigues, business suits, and occasionaltuxedos. Mal Browne was a character. He cultivated his idiosyncraticimage; he liked to provoke.

Born in New York's Greenwich Village at the height of the GreatDepression, Browne came by his quirks honestly. The pubs andcoffeehouses of the Village had also given birth to the storied BohemianBrigade, a rabble-rousing tribe of nineteenth-century war correspondentswho delivered more terror to generals than truth tothe public during the American Civil War. But the youthful Browneshowed no early sign of following in those footsteps. The son of anarchitect father forced by the hard times to design wooden squirrelsfor Central Park, and a Quaker mother deeply devoted to pacifism,Browne turned his sense of adventure inward to science. He studiedchemistry and, for five years after graduating from Pennsylvania'sgenteel Swarthmore College, he probed for his truths in alaboratory. Only a late army draft call would pull him away fromhis test tubes. Sent to Korea with the postwar border forces, Brownefirst drove a tank, then landed a job on the soldiers' newspaper,Stars and Stripes. He began mixing new sets of chemicals, heatingphoto-developer fluid over bonfires in the harsh Korean winter. Helearned to type with his gloves on, two-fingered hunt-and-peckstyle at 10 below zero, and never returned to his test tubes again.

Vietnam hooked him quickly. Inside the toy country Brownefound a toy war.

To the south in the Mekong Delta, young Vietnamese troopsin baggy American-surplus uniforms marched off to battle withoversized M-1 rifles slung over their shoulders and live duckshanging, heads down and squawking, from their gun belts. AgingSecond World War fighter planes lumbered home from unexplainedsorties with arrows jutting out of their metallic hides. Thefirst of the crew-cut and leathery American "counterinsurgencyexperts," those Green Berets trained at distant Fort Bragg to survivealone in the jungle on a diet of palm tree rats and tropical beetles,told tales of shadowy hit-and-run ambushes by guerrillas whofought with coconut hand grenades and bamboo land mines, orsudden assaults by nomadic tribesmen still armed with shields andspears.

Inside that disarming time warp the newly arriving men fromthe high-tech other side of the world peered through their culturalfilter at a nice little war and came away with a fascinated, sanitizedillusion of immunity for both themselves and their mighty country.There were many illusions in Vietnam.

If the countryside and its little war were captivating, Saigon wasaddictive. The Europeans still called it the Paris of Southeast Asia,a city of broad avenues lined by tamarind trees, pastel French villashidden by walls splashed with flowering mimosa and brilliant bougainvillea,and bustling open markets where wrinkled peasantshawked black thousand-year eggs, fresh tiger lily buds, and theeveryday fare of fresh bok choy. Airline pilots approaching the citylooked out over a sea of low-slung, red tile roofs and radioed forlanding instructions from Paris Control, their code for the tower atTan Son Nhut.

But Saigon was also a place of endless Oriental intrigue, a bottomlesspit of plots and cabals and schemes. The Asians gave it adifferent nickname: "the forest of tigers."

Browne moved into a tiny office at 158 Rue Pasteur, kitty-cornerfrom the alternate palace of South Vietnam's puzzling leader, NgoDinh Diem--he could literally stare across the palace grounds,over the balustrade, and into the windows. Also across the streetsat the police station, a happenstance that at first seemed moreconvenient than ominous.

The office was a rudimentary workplace. Hungry dogs wanderedin off the busy street, as did prying plainclothes cops. Evenwithout the visitors, the place was cramped--a clutter ofbanged-up file cabinets, rickety desks, and two battered old Remingtonupright typewriters. The single green plastic phone hadbeen broken so many times it was patched together by dirty-whiteadhesive tape. In the back the bathroom doubled as a darkroom,with three Chinese stoneware jars of developer fluid perched precariouslyon the commode. Horst Faas, the German-born photographerwho arrived six months later, recalled that the enlarger sat ontop of the toilet seat. On busy days, which were coming, no one inthe office of America's leading news service took a pee.

The American media had not been particularly alert to theslowly accelerating developments in Southeast Asia in 1961. Theyear had been full of diversions, a time of great change and plentifulnews elsewhere, not the least of which had been the coming ofJohn F. Kennedy.

Kennedy had descended on Washington and the world's mostpowerful nation like a young king--dynamic, charming, vigorous,the first president born in the twentieth century, the first born inThe American Century. Coming after the lulling years of DwightEisenhower, Kennedy promised verve and action. The mediathrived on verve and action, these being basics, along with disasterand pathos, of an elemental definition of news.

Kennedy was also crisis prone. He had come into office soundingdire warnings about a nonexistent missile gap with the SovietUnion. But if the gap didn't exist, other problems did. Less thanthree months after his inauguration, a boyishly smiling Russiannamed Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth inspace. "I am eagle!" the cosmonaut exulted, and it seemed as if theSoviets not only had usurped America's new frontier but its historicemblem as well. Five days later American prestige took anotherbeating with the grotesquely failed Bay of Pigs invasion ofCuba. In June the new President met in Vienna for a testing of willswith the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev. Kennedy fared badly,although the media image of the handsome American royal comingup against the squat Russian peasant briefly disguised the failure.Kennedy would be that good at media images, the first to manipulatethem. But suddenly there were crises breaking out in Berlin,Cuba, the Congo, as well as the home-grown wrenching of racialturmoil in the South. None of these had an easy answer. And, afterVienna, the shell-shocked young President needed a place to provehis moxie, especially to the Russian who had pushed him aroundwith such ease. "We have to confront them," Kennedy privatelytold James Reston, the chief of the New York Times Washingtonbureau. "The only place we can do that is in Vietnam. We have tosend more people over there."

Rumblings of trouble had emerged from Southeast Asiathroughout the year. But in late 1961 Vietnam remained so low onthe radar screen of the distracted American press that Brownefound Saigon manned by a small and motley crew: a handful ofunderpaid wire-service reporters, struggling freelancers, and journalisticadventurers. The corps was bolstered by the wistful Frenchand the ubiquitous Brits, who kept a man or two on hand in memoryof empires lost.

By far the most memorable of the lot was a devilishly suavethirty-three-year-old Frenchman named Francois Sully, a part-timestringer for the American newsmagazine Newsweek.(1) Sully lovedcamaraderie, combat, adventure, women, and luxury, and spentmost of his life making all those loves compatible.

A teenage Resistance fighter against the Nazis, he arrived inVietnam in 1947 as a French paratrooper. He never went home,steering an expatriate course from failed tea planter to rogue warcorrespondent. No one fully trusted his news; it came spiced witha good French bias. But he was such a dazzling character, filledwith such wonderful joie de vivre, that he was beloved neverthelessby all but the governments who endlessly mucked around in Vietnam.The stories about him were legion.

Trapped behind enemy lines during the French war, he bluffedhis way out by pretending he was a Russian and shouting "Heongho!"--a triumphant "Hurrah!" for the revolution--each time heran into a guerrilla roadblock. During the war's last days he wangledhis way inside the doomed garrison at Dien Bien Phu. Afastidious dresser, he arrived at the besieged outpost in perfectlypressed fatigues, which he shed at the end of the day for a pair ofnavy-blue silk pajamas with white piping. Crawling into his sleepingbag, he toasted his grimy colleagues from a silver hip flask ofCourvoisier. "Good for the morale," he said with a grin, anddropped off to sleep amid the pounding of the incoming artillery.

In 1961 Sully was a handy person to know. The war was still sosmall--little more than hit-and-run skirmishes--it was often hardto find. The correspondents got little help from either the Vietnameseor American governments. The Vietnamese found the traditionof an unfettered press both alien and absurd. Why confide in foreignreporters about a war they were losing, sometimes embarrassingly?To the Americans the correspondents presented a lesscultural but nevertheless highly political problem.

This was not like past wars. Because Project Beef-Up directly andopenly violated an international treaty, Washington unrealisticallywanted to fight on the sly.(2) And it wanted the reporters to go alongwith the fiction, to play the ostrich. The emperor was naked, but itwould become unpatriotic to say he was wearing no clothes. Whenthe policy didn't work, American officials clammed up, coveredup, and lied--not only to the public and the press but eventuallyto themselves.

So the reporters had to find the war on their own. Information,good and bad, acquired by almost any means, became everything,and it came from strange places. The reporters frequented a collectionof cafes and bistros, making their rounds just as a reporterback home might do his daily check of the offices at city hall. It wasa romantic beat:

Brodard's, a sassy little French bistro famed for its ice cream andhot rumors; Givral's, the brassy, noisy cafe across Saigon's famedRue Catinat(3) from the Continental Palace Hotel; and the place thecorrespondents called Cheap Charlie's, a hole-in-the-wall, neon-litChinese restaurant where lunch went for twenty cents and informationwas often passed for less.

As Browne quickly discovered, getting the story in Saigon requiredwhat he later called "methods uncomfortably close to thoseused by professional intelligence units "

Over the next two years the rumor mill became such a Saigonfixture that the correspondents gave it a name: Radio Catinat. Pickingup word, maybe a few whispers from a wizened waiter atCheap Charlie's, the correspondents would bolt into the street, hailone of those beat-up little Renault taxis, and race to a nearby junglebattlefield. That was the way it worked: a tip, a dash, and take acab to war.

Nobody was better at the game than Francois Sully. After fourteenyears, he had sources planted in every office and smoke-filledhangout in town. He knew where to find the girls and where tofind the spies and, because the two seemed to go together, mixingbusiness with pleasure seemed the essence of Gallic good sense.And he understood things. He knew that, after a century of colonialism,the best eateries in town were French and Chinese. But he alsoknew that if you wanted to get in on the nightly gripe sessions ofthe Vietnamese military you went to one of downtown Saigon'stwo Vietnamese restaurants. Dong Khanh's was the favorite, andthere, over lemongrass soup and Ba Moui Ba rice beer, you couldget plugged into news of the latest plot to overthrow Diem ortoday's battle disaster in the south.

Sully and Browne made an unlikely pair. Browne would foreverbe the quirky loner, the skinny guy with red socks who went hometo his tiny apartment every night to listen to booming Wagnerianoperas instead of joining his buddies out on the town. A friendonce asked what he did each night at home and he replied, "Makepaper airplanes." The telling thing about Mal Browne is that thefriend believed him, envisioning an intent man laboring over afleet of intricately designed foolscap flying machines. Sully was sodifferent--outgoing and carefree, a man who would talk his waythrough the girls, the spies, and the bullets until his luck finally ranout a decade later in a burning helicopter. Even then he wouldmake one last valiant attempt to live, leaping from the plummetingmachine and dying hours afterward from his 75-foot fall ratherthan the flaming crash.

But in the beginning it was all so heady and exotic that, if theFrenchman mentioned that the target of the night was La Cigalle, agarish nightclub in the teeming Chinese district of Cholon, Browne,like the others, canceled everything else.

At La Cigalle, run by a tough Corsican, the information flowedwith the best French wines. Saigon bankers drank next to Viet Congspies and, as Sully pointed out, the bankers often had reason forinscrutability. Sometimes they were the Viet Cong spies and theViet Cong spies doubled for the government's secret police. Nothingwas as it seemed. Agents from half a dozen countries and asmany mysterious Vietnamese political factions mixed easily withAmerican colonels who drank too much and diplomats who chasedtoo hard. All too obvious CIA men eyed lingering French operativesfrom the Deuxieme Bureau as if they were the real enemy.Then, as a winsome Vietnamese singer warbled a sad ballad of lovein singsong French soon to follow the demand curve to canary-sopranoEnglish, someone whispered the tip: a hit-and-run ambushin the south--and the good guys got stomped, so don't expect tohear it from the embassy.

Early the next morning Browne jumped into a Renault cab andbumped south down Highway 4 into the delta. By evening he wasback in the little office on the Rue Pasteur, Saigon's timid lizardsskittering across the sick-green ceiling as he batted out his 500-wordreport, punishing the old Remington with the same hunt-and-peckassault he had learned in Korea. Browne was not a poeticwriter, and the Associated Press of the day demanded a straightforward,nuts-and-bolts approach. But the quiet ex-chemist had troublekeeping the exuberance out of those first stories. A wire manends his stories "30." But Browne so loved this place that he tooka few liberties. The name of the popular local rice beer meant"thirty-three" in Vietnamese. So he ended his early cables:

BA MOUI BA

BROWNE.

Then he headed for the radio-telegraph office, the PTT, stridingout into a warm evening filled with strange sights and wondroussmells, past darkened pagodas and tiny shops with joss sticks burningin the windows and shelves cluttered with healthy brain pillsand the ancient Chinese aphrodisiacs of powdered rhinoceros horn.

No aphrodisiac was needed. Browne had few illusions aboutVietnam's harsher realities. But like so many who came before andafter, he was quickly seduced. Mal Browne fell instantly and madlyin love--"the greatest love I've ever had," he said, "and the greatestI ever will."

One of the harshest realities about South Vietnam in late 1961 wasits ruling family. In a time when despotic leaders were as much therule as the exception throughout the world, the South Vietnamesegovernment was not the cruelest--nor even the cruelest supportedby the United States. But it may have been the most bizarre. CharlesMohr, whose bosses at Time magazine supported the family evenmore passionately than the U.S. government and thus opened theircorrespondent to unusual access to the palace, summed up hisimpressions succinctly: "They were the most neurotic family I'veever known about, even in history. They simply were a bunch ofdingbats."

Vietnam had been divided north and south in 1954, with theNorth going to the Communists who had ejected the French andthe South going to the non-Communists. Ho Chi Minh, a nationalhero who had led the anticolonialist revolution, took over NorthVietnam. The South had more trouble finding a natural leader. Butby late 1954 Ngo Dinh Diem, an obscure and often-puzzling asceticwho had gone into exile in Paris and the United States during thewar, took control in Saigon. Diem was staunchly anti-Communistand the United States bought in quickly. The new leader becameknown as America's Mandarin, her Puppet Without Strings.

A round little man with a soft, baby face, Diem could be spartanand monastic in his religious devotions, ruthless in his rule. Earlyin his regime he purged and killed thousands of political, religious,and other opponents as he consolidated power in his factionalizedand artificial nation. But recently he had become detached andinward, mystifying visitors with long, soporific monologues followedby longer retreats into deep meditations. In a land of manyunusual religions Diem practiced a stern form of Roman Catholicisminherited from proselytizing French priests. As his troublesgrew, Diem withdrew further, meditating more, communicatingless, and handing off many duties to his brother. It was a fatefulhand-off.

Continues...

Excerpted from Once Upon a Distant Warby William Prochnau Copyright © 1996 by William Prochnau. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679772650
• ISBN 13: 9780679772651
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 576