The Dragon Lady's BBQ
On most of my adventures, I'm not invited to build nuclear weapons.
I was nineteen in 1963 and had moved to Isla Vista to take another run at college.
You literally become more worldly in your outlook through the immersion in a University community, even through the casual way I regarded my studies. In the study of wide swaths and arenas of history you begin to build your own concept of what the world is and how it works.
During my short 1961 foray at UCSB, I lived in Carpinteria and had little contact with anybody on campus except the few people I had shared a classroom with for an hour and then went our separate ways. This time I was able to get a second floor IV apartment with a guy who was looking for a roommate on a message board. We shared that place for a semester and then he joined the Air Force and I never saw him again. But the two guys who lived directly below us became my very good friends: Dennis Barrett and Scott Beamer.
Every Friday downstairs was a dependable open house TGIF party. During the week, Scotty, Dennis and their loose clan of friends like myself, would offer casual invitations to ladies who seemed fun to drop by, look in, and check out the scene with no commitment no pressure. The apartment was on the ground floor and was just a few steps off the street, where hundreds of students a day would pass by to or from campus. On Friday afternoon, the door open, the music from Scotty's stereo, the sound of a raucous bridge game and offers of copious amounts of cheap beer and spoolie, was a dependable parade of fun people. It worked well with my practice of catch and release as far as ladies went.
Recipe for spoolie: a gallon of red wine, a gallon of white wine, a fifth of vodka, a bottle of Hawaiian Punch Base. Tastes like birthday party punch, knocks your block off.
Just as important, Scotty and Dennis were well read, hip and serious about what they were learning. It began to change me; I wanted that for myself.
I didn't do well academically in the Fall Semester 1963 at UCSB. I flunked accounting, though I learned the basics of bookkeeping that served me many times in adult life. I did pass Subject A, the required course for college level writing, turns out that was the most useful class I took. My full time job at the gas station and my new social life left little time to keep up with schoolwork.
I spent a semester at Santa Barbara City College, now with an urgent goal to get back into the University. I still lived in IV and got more sensible about the drinking and partying. Still, I had no academic goals. I took required basic classes. My major wandered about the catalog from Mathematics, to Economics, to English. The summer of 1964 I was still trying to find my way, and I took an anthropology course, "American Indians North of Mexico". For me, it was a seminar on the European colonialism that came to dominate the world and how its historical arc was encircling my generation of Americans.
Here's the deal. Even the poorest of white kids in Southern California enjoyed a legacy as heirs to the worldwide European colonial empires of the 16th century. We're tumbled along on the still breaking waves of those conquests, and swept down the coast on ancient currents. At the University, we built our personal libraries of historical resources, we learned to sort fact from fiction, and formulate our own unique and ever changing idea about what the larger picture might be in every sense.
I was born in Long Beach, California, on the South-facing coast of the Tongva nation. The Puva tribe occupied the lands around Signal Hill and Long Beach. My mom was born in Brea, the inland center of Tongva territory. Her parents were recent arrivals from Maine. My father was born in Williams, Arizona, Havasupai country. His father had left England in 1880, and by 1899 he had become a Methodist preacher in a dusty Arizona copper-mining boomtown, Jerome. There he met my father's mother, who was born in the land of the Wichita People in Kansas. By the time I reached my teens, we were living on the Coast of Santa Barbara County, in the heart of Chumash world.
Growing up, I was only vaguely aware of these native populations that once had Southern California as their aboriginal home. In grade school, I lived in the San Fernando Valley, within the Los Angeles County School system where we received a little instruction about the Tonva-Yangna people that had lived there. They were described as acorn grinding hunter-gatherers who lived in wiki-ups. The narrative was that they had been assimilated into the mission, and after that their history just ended.
By the time I was in high school in the late 1950's and we were living in Carpinteria, I had heard about the unique Chumash settlement that was located there, but to my knowledge, no descendants of the original population remained. Their disappearance had begun at first contact with Europeans.
My Summer Session 1964 Anthropology class was about Indigenous Americans. It was an ideal location to study the Chumash. UC Santa Barbara is a stunningly beautiful campus on a large bluff above the Pacific Ocean with 3 miles of beachfront. Here a portrait of the entire catastrophe of European contact with indigenous cultures can be seen in the landforms. The European Nations; the English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish; had been establishing colonies all over the world. Coastal areas were the easiest to subdue with cannon fire from their 16th century warships, and easiest to profit from the resources with trading vessels. Western North America was one the last places with unexploited resources for the taking. The indigenous hunter-gatherer tribes were armed only with arrows and spears.
In 1769, Captain Gaspar de Portola, explorer and conquistador of the Spanish Empire in service of the King of Spain, led an expedition of conquest into Alta California. His entourage consisted of 67 men: soldiers, priests, an engineer, surveyors, servants, and native translators. It was an often repeated formula of everything needed to inoculate a pristine natural world with the pillars of European civilization: Monarchy, military, clergy, commerce, technology, economics, politics, religion, architecture, written language, literacy, agriculture, metal tools and weapons, guns, horses and mules, wheeled wagons and carts, cattle; and European diseases. Though their great ships of explorers and traders passed through the Santa Barbara Channel since Cabrillo in 1542, this was the first overland introduction of European culture on the California Coast. In historical terms, it all came along very suddenly.
I've read the journals of Captain Portola, priest Juan Crespi, and engineer Constanso, his record keeper; especially when they were traversing places I know very well, like Carpinteria. It was his expedition that gave the town its name. The Chumash called it "Mishopsno", but the Spanish named it "the carpenter shop" because of the canoe building activity under a sycamore tree beside the creek. Probably the most advanced technology on the North American Coast was the tomol canoes fabricated with redwood planks and caulked with a mixture of tar and pine pitch. Portola found an elaborate tomol crafting enterprise under a sycamore tree beside the creek. It's been only 250 years. The tree is still there.
The ancient Chumash culture was overwhelmed. Within the next hundred years, after the Presidio (1782) and the Mission (1786) in Santa Barbara had been established, many of the Chumash who survived the diseases had become wards of the mission where, for all purposes, they were enslaved. They were forbidden to speak their own language or engage in their ancient ceremonies. Their wampum beads could no longer be used as a currency between people and tribes for a several reasons. Cheap steel needles made it easier to drill the especially hard shells used in wampum making; and the colorful glass beads that the Spanish brought with them were dazzling when compared to wampum. The native trading system was gone. Alta California became a burgeoning Spanish Colony.
The UCSB campus is 25 miles north of Carpinteria. When Portola's expedition reached the mouth of what is now the Goleta Slough, they encountered an island sitting in the middle of a large lagoon. The Chumash called it Helo. The Spanish named it Mescalitan Island, because it reminded them of a major Aztec city, Mescaltitlan on the western coast of Central Mexico; the same kind of island in a lagoon. It was covered with oak trees, their acorns the staple of the Chumash diet, and a thriving community of 800 people. With two fresh water springs and abundant fish, crabs, clams and shellfish, it had been inhabited for thousands of years.
By 1870, a hundred years after Portola, most of the indigenous people were gone from the island and low budget "shore whaling" of grey whales and occasional humpbacks started being practiced. A small boat, eventually genuine Boston whaler double ended rowboats, with primitive harpoon guns and a six or eight man crew could go a short ways into the channel, kill a whale and drag its carcass back to Goleta Beach for rendering. Like cotton, spices, sugar and slavery, whale oil was a commodity valued in the trade made possible by world circling sailing ships.
However, a dead whale was not a payday. It had to be butchered, and only the thick layers of blubber had any value, the rest was thrown away, much of the work was done by a team of Jamaicans employed by the Santa Barbara Whaling Company. To render the blubber into oil it had to be cooked in large cauldrons before being put in barrels for worldwide trade. The operation there at the mouth of the Goleta Slough needed a lot of firewood, and there it was: the oaks of Mescalitan Island. In the period of 8 years, by 1878, the whalers cut down and burned every single one of them. Mescalitan Island had been left stripped of trees.
The flesh and bones of the whale carcasses were towed a short way off shore, if not left to rot on the beach, and the relentless California current scattered the skeletal remains down the coast. From time to time, whale skeletons are uncovered when storm surf batters the beaches to the east.
The use of whale oil was in decline at this time because petroleum products were coming into use and the invention of natural gas lighting and then the light bulb. By 1893, even the whaling operation at Coho Bay near Point Conception closed down. The new exploitation was drilling for oil.
In the 1941 buildup for the war in the Pacific, 90% of the barren Mescalitan Island was bulldozed into the lagoon and surrounding estuaries to build a Marine Corps air base, and the roadbase for Hollister Avenue across the north edge of the wetlands. The campus of UCSB and the adjoining student residential community of Isla Vista sit on the bluff west of the lagoon. It was also a large Chumash village, Anisq'Oyo. It also became part of the Marine Airbase and in the 1960's when I was there, there were a number of two-story military barracks, and quonset huts still in use as offices and classrooms.
Today you can look out from the campus bluffs toward the airport, and envision a much larger Island surrounded by a lagoon and vast saltwater marshes where now long runways of the Santa Barbara Municipal Airport crisscross the bulldozed flatlands. Beneath the surface are buried remains of a thriving Chumash world. Mescalitan Island, which was considered the largest shell mound midden on the west coast, is now a pathetic stump covered in low brush, sitting next to the sewer treatment plant. It is surrounded with a chain link fence to protect the few remaining artifacts from plunder.
The systematic suppression of indigenous language and culture and the indoctrination into Roman Catholic Church was a formula being executed worldwide by the French, Portuguese and Spanish. In Southeast Asia, it was the French whose early traders and missionaries established a foothold, paving the way for investors like the French East Asia Company to carve out plantations for rubber and rice, enslaving the local people to do the work.
Unavoidably, the French had to get involved in the regional and local politics, sometimes weighing in with naval support and troops on behalf of one monarch or another, or to defend the French trading interests and the missionaries.
Vietnam has a 3000-year history of repelling foreign invaders and occupiers, often the Chinese and even the Mongolians. To many Vietnamese, the French, the most recent arrivals, were not only military conquerors, they were religious invaders. By the 1800's their presence was very strong, and a new emperor Minh Mang, in 1825, issued an edict banning foreign missionaries. The ban was largely ineffective, but it led to the Le Van Khoi Revolt 1833-1835 led by southern Vietnamese, Vietnamese Catholics, French Catholic missionaries and Chinese settlers, and finally the help of Siamese troops. It took Minh Mang nearly 3 years to crush the revolt and in the end he executed hundreds, including several missionaries. In the years following his Catholic ban, priests and practitioners were persecuted, imprisoned and at times executed for their evangelism.
"The Westerner's perverse religion confuses the hearts of men. For a long time, many Western ships have come to trade with us and to introduce Catholic missionaries into our country. These missionaries make the people's hearts crooked, thus destroying our beautiful customs. Truly this is a great disaster for our land. Our purpose being to prevent our people from abandoning our orthodox way, we must accordingly completely eliminate these abuses."
...Minh Mang 1825 Edict against Christianity.
In 1857, on the pretext of protecting the missionaries and French plantation owners, Napoleon's armies and naval armadas invaded a vast swath of Southeast Asia to create "French Indochina", combining territories that are now Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and parts of China. In the following century of French rule, there was always the division of the populace into the westernized Catholics who dominated the government and commerce; and the indigenous Buddhist society that made up 80% of the population.
America's involvement in the Vietnam War officially began in 1964, but it had actually started immediately after WW II. The US and its European allies scrambled to form a new world order along the lines of the old world order. The French were keen to reassert their colonial hegemony in Indochina and fill the vacuum left by the Japanese defeat, but the communist Viet Minh was well established in the north. When the Chinese and the Russians recognized the regime in Hanoi, their leader Ho Chi Minh issued this prescient prediction to the French colonialists: "You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win."
France, like much of Europe, was destroyed in WW II. Among the world's advanced nations, only the United States had been spared the devastation of its industrial base, and thus had the money and the material capacity to underwrite the new colony of French Indochina, its capital at Saigon. French troops moved back in to bolster the government in Saigon led mostly by westernized Vietnamese Catholics, who struggled to subdue the indigenous communist regime of Ho Chi Minh in the North. By 1954, after a humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the French relinquished their claims to the entire region. In Geneva, a treaty was concluded and the country was "temporarily" divided along the 17th parallel to be unified in nationwide elections, and in the meantime military actions, covert operations and sabotage were supposed to be restrained on all sides. The powers in the US administration concluded that were the election to take place, Ho Chi Minh would win and all of Vietnam would be lost to Communism. Similar to the postwar model of the Korean Peninsula: a Communist regime in North Vietnam and a South Vietnamese government which "was essentially the creation of the United States," the Defense Department would later admit in the Pentagon Papers.
And so, the great historical arc of European colonial empires had come to encircle my generation. After the French left, a series of governments in Saigon increasingly relied on US military aid, and the use of more and more US military advisers. With modern naval and air weaponry, the US tried to bolster the west-leaning South Vietnamese government in a religious/ethnic civil war that had been simmering for centuries. Except in this age, the binary geopolitics of the worldwide Cold War, military hardware was provided to both sides. The north, enlisting the help of a former foreign invader, China, and a distant European nation, Russia, was now allied in an ideology of communist revolution to repel the remnants of European invaders. The French military was gone, but the Catholic Church was still the largest landowner in the country, and the Archbishop, the highest-ranking cleric in the country, was the President Diem's older brother. Diem's younger brother was his right hand man in power. The high ranking military officers and elites in the South were Vietnamese Catholics, corrupt and brutal oppressors of the Buddhist majority. Without American assistance, the regime could not have existed. South Vietnam was accused of being an American Colony with a puppet regime.
It was not exactly a puppet under control. Besides the rampant corruption among officials and insiders, there was much of what Diem's cabal of Catholic elites was doing that was deeply troubling to the US; especially the religious persecution and violent crackdown on Buddhist observances. The regime forbade the display of a Buddhist flag on Vesak, the Buddha's birthday. The annual holiday followed soon after the Archbishop's birthday weeks before when the Vatican flag had been flown proudly in celebration. There was a great uproar about the flag ban among the Buddhists in the city of Hue, near the North Vietnamese border. To quell the demonstration, police and soldiers threw hand grenades and fired their rifles into the crowd, killing nine people. US officials were shocked.
Weeks later, South Vietnamese Army troops (ARVN) poured chemicals on praying Buddhists at another protest in Hue, provoking even greater outrage. The US government had lost faith in Diem to govern the country, and began to seek other options; US presence in the country was at the invitation of the South Vietnamese government, so the solution could only be replacing the leadership.
A koan: a question that somehow sticks in your mind and puts it to work. "How does a Buddhist go to War?" On June 11, 1963, in his most profound teaching of all, a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, walked to the center of a busy intersection in downtown Saigon. You will remember this teaching. You know the photo of it. He sat down in the cross-legged lotus position of meditation. His attendants poured 5 gallons of gasoline over him, and stepped back. Then he lit a match.
"Dragon Lady" Madame Nhu, Diem's sister-in-law, issued the statement: "Let them burn and we will clap", referring to the event as a "Buddhist barbeque".
At the time, I wasn't much interested in religion or the government of a far off country; but this pair of images, Thich Quang Duc burning and the Dragon Lady clapping her hands was a combined vision that stuck in your mind, even if you paid little attention to world politics or knew anything about Buddhism.
On August 21, ARVN Special Forces directed by Diem's younger brother attacked pagodas all over South Vietnam and arrested 1400 people. Hundreds more were disappeared, presumed killed. At that, President Kennedy sent word to his ambassador to facilitate the removal of the Diem.
November 1, 1963, Diem was assassinated in a coup involving a group of generals, obviously with the approval and collusion of the US government. Three weeks later JFK was murdered.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
I was nineteen in 1963 and had moved to Isla Vista to take another run at college. You literally become more worldly in your outlook through the immersion in a University community, even through the casual way I regarded my studies. In the study of wide swaths and arenas of history you begin to build your own concept of what the world is and how it works.
During my short 1961 foray at UCSB, I lived in Carpinteria and had little contact with anybody on campus except the few people I had shared a classroom with for an hour and then went our separate ways. This time I was able to get a second floor IV apartment with a guy who was looking for a roommate on a message board. We shared that place for a semester and then he joined the Air Force and I never saw him again. But the two guys who lived directly below us became my very good friends: Dennis Barrett and Scott Beamer.
Every Friday downstairs was a dependable open house TGIF party. During the week, Scotty, Dennis and their loose clan of friends like myself, would offer casual invitations to ladies who seemed fun to drop by, look in, and check out the scene with no commitment no pressure. The apartment was on the ground floor and was just a few steps off the street, where hundreds of students a day would pass by to or from campus. On Friday afternoon, the door open, the music from Scotty's stereo, the sound of a raucous bridge game and offers of copious amounts of cheap beer and spoolie, was a dependable parade of fun people. It worked well with my practice of catch and release as far as ladies went.
Recipe for spoolie: a gallon of red wine, a gallon of white wine, a fifth of vodka, a bottle of Hawaiian Punch Base. Tastes like birthday party punch, knocks your block off.
Just as important, Scotty and Dennis were well read, hip and serious about what they were learning. It began to change me; I wanted that for myself.
I didn't do well academically in the Fall Semester 1963 at UCSB. I flunked accounting, though I learned the basics of bookkeeping that served me many times in adult life. I did pass Subject A, the required course for college level writing, turns out that was the most useful class I took. My full time job at the gas station and my new social life left little time to keep up with schoolwork.
I spent a semester at Santa Barbara City College, now with an urgent goal to get back into the University. I still lived in IV and got more sensible about the drinking and partying. Still, I had no academic goals. I took required basic classes. My major wandered about the catalog from Mathematics, to Economics, to English. The summer of 1964 I was still trying to find my way, and I took an anthropology course, "American Indians North of Mexico". For me, it was a seminar on the European colonialism that came to dominate the world and how its historical arc was encircling my generation of Americans.
Here's the deal. Even the poorest of white kids in Southern California enjoyed a legacy as heirs to the worldwide European colonial empires of the 16th century. We're tumbled along on the still breaking waves of those conquests, and swept down the coast on ancient currents. At the University, we built our personal libraries of historical resources, we learned to sort fact from fiction, and formulate our own unique and ever changing idea about what the larger picture might be in every sense.
I was born in Long Beach, California, on the South-facing coast of the Tongva nation. The Puva tribe occupied the lands around Signal Hill and Long Beach. My mom was born in Brea, the inland center of Tongva territory. Her parents were recent arrivals from Maine. My father was born in Williams, Arizona, Havasupai country. His father had left England in 1880, and by 1899 he had become a Methodist preacher in a dusty Arizona copper-mining boomtown, Jerome. There he met my father's mother, who was born in the land of the Wichita People in Kansas. By the time I reached my teens, we were living on the Coast of Santa Barbara County, in the heart of Chumash world.
Growing up, I was only vaguely aware of these native populations that once had Southern California as their aboriginal home. In grade school, I lived in the San Fernando Valley, within the Los Angeles County School system where we received a little instruction about the Tonva-Yangna people that had lived there. They were described as acorn grinding hunter-gatherers who lived in wiki-ups. The narrative was that they had been assimilated into the mission, and after that their history just ended.
By the time I was in high school in the late 1950's and we were living in Carpinteria, I had heard about the unique Chumash settlement that was located there, but to my knowledge, no descendants of the original population remained. Their disappearance had begun at first contact with Europeans.
My Summer Session 1964 Anthropology class was about Indigenous Americans. It was an ideal location to study the Chumash. UC Santa Barbara is a stunningly beautiful campus on a large bluff above the Pacific Ocean with 3 miles of beachfront. Here a portrait of the entire catastrophe of European contact with indigenous cultures can be seen in the landforms. The European Nations; the English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish; had been establishing colonies all over the world. Coastal areas were the easiest to subdue with cannon fire from their 16th century warships, and easiest to profit from the resources with trading vessels. Western North America was one the last places with unexploited resources for the taking. The indigenous hunter-gatherer tribes were armed only with arrows and spears.
In 1769, Captain Gaspar de Portola, explorer and conquistador of the Spanish Empire in service of the King of Spain, led an expedition of conquest into Alta California. His entourage consisted of 67 men: soldiers, priests, an engineer, surveyors, servants, and native translators. It was an often repeated formula of everything needed to inoculate a pristine natural world with the pillars of European civilization: Monarchy, military, clergy, commerce, technology, economics, politics, religion, architecture, written language, literacy, agriculture, metal tools and weapons, guns, horses and mules, wheeled wagons and carts, cattle; and European diseases. Though their great ships of explorers and traders passed through the Santa Barbara Channel since Cabrillo in 1542, this was the first overland introduction of European culture on the California Coast. In historical terms, it all came along very suddenly.
I've read the journals of Captain Portola, priest Juan Crespi, and engineer Constanso, his record keeper; especially when they were traversing places I know very well, like Carpinteria. It was his expedition that gave the town its name. The Chumash called it "Mishopsno", but the Spanish named it "the carpenter shop" because of the canoe building activity under a sycamore tree beside the creek. Probably the most advanced technology on the North American Coast was the tomol canoes fabricated with redwood planks and caulked with a mixture of tar and pine pitch. Portola found an elaborate tomol crafting enterprise under a sycamore tree beside the creek. It's been only 250 years. The tree is still there.
The ancient Chumash culture was overwhelmed. Within the next hundred years, after the Presidio (1782) and the Mission (1786) in Santa Barbara had been established, many of the Chumash who survived the diseases had become wards of the mission where, for all purposes, they were enslaved. They were forbidden to speak their own language or engage in their ancient ceremonies. Their wampum beads could no longer be used as a currency between people and tribes for a several reasons. Cheap steel needles made it easier to drill the especially hard shells used in wampum making; and the colorful glass beads that the Spanish brought with them were dazzling when compared to wampum. The native trading system was gone. Alta California became a burgeoning Spanish Colony.
The UCSB campus is 25 miles north of Carpinteria. When Portola's expedition reached the mouth of what is now the Goleta Slough, they encountered an island sitting in the middle of a large lagoon. The Chumash called it Helo. The Spanish named it Mescalitan Island, because it reminded them of a major Aztec city, Mescaltitlan on the western coast of Central Mexico; the same kind of island in a lagoon. It was covered with oak trees, their acorns the staple of the Chumash diet, and a thriving community of 800 people. With two fresh water springs and abundant fish, crabs, clams and shellfish, it had been inhabited for thousands of years.
By 1870, a hundred years after Portola, most of the indigenous people were gone from the island and low budget "shore whaling" of grey whales and occasional humpbacks started being practiced. A small boat, eventually genuine Boston whaler double ended rowboats, with primitive harpoon guns and a six or eight man crew could go a short ways into the channel, kill a whale and drag its carcass back to Goleta Beach for rendering. Like cotton, spices, sugar and slavery, whale oil was a commodity valued in the trade made possible by world circling sailing ships.
However, a dead whale was not a payday. It had to be butchered, and only the thick layers of blubber had any value, the rest was thrown away, much of the work was done by a team of Jamaicans employed by the Santa Barbara Whaling Company. To render the blubber into oil it had to be cooked in large cauldrons before being put in barrels for worldwide trade. The operation there at the mouth of the Goleta Slough needed a lot of firewood, and there it was: the oaks of Mescalitan Island. In the period of 8 years, by 1878, the whalers cut down and burned every single one of them. Mescalitan Island had been left stripped of trees.
The flesh and bones of the whale carcasses were towed a short way off shore, if not left to rot on the beach, and the relentless California current scattered the skeletal remains down the coast. From time to time, whale skeletons are uncovered when storm surf batters the beaches to the east.
The use of whale oil was in decline at this time because petroleum products were coming into use and the invention of natural gas lighting and then the light bulb. By 1893, even the whaling operation at Coho Bay near Point Conception closed down. The new exploitation was drilling for oil.
In the 1941 buildup for the war in the Pacific, 90% of the barren Mescalitan Island was bulldozed into the lagoon and surrounding estuaries to build a Marine Corps air base, and the roadbase for Hollister Avenue across the north edge of the wetlands. The campus of UCSB and the adjoining student residential community of Isla Vista sit on the bluff west of the lagoon. It was also a large Chumash village, Anisq'Oyo. It also became part of the Marine Airbase and in the 1960's when I was there, there were a number of two-story military barracks, and quonset huts still in use as offices and classrooms.
Today you can look out from the campus bluffs toward the airport, and envision a much larger Island surrounded by a lagoon and vast saltwater marshes where now long runways of the Santa Barbara Municipal Airport crisscross the bulldozed flatlands. Beneath the surface are buried remains of a thriving Chumash world. Mescalitan Island, which was considered the largest shell mound midden on the west coast, is now a pathetic stump covered in low brush, sitting next to the sewer treatment plant. It is surrounded with a chain link fence to protect the few remaining artifacts from plunder.
The systematic suppression of indigenous language and culture and the indoctrination into Roman Catholic Church was a formula being executed worldwide by the French, Portuguese and Spanish. In Southeast Asia, it was the French whose early traders and missionaries established a foothold, paving the way for investors like the French East Asia Company to carve out plantations for rubber and rice, enslaving the local people to do the work. Unavoidably, the French had to get involved in the regional and local politics, sometimes weighing in with naval support and troops on behalf of one monarch or another, or to defend the French trading interests and the missionaries.
Vietnam has a 3000-year history of repelling foreign invaders and occupiers, often the Chinese and even the Mongolians. To many Vietnamese, the French, the most recent arrivals, were not only military conquerors, they were religious invaders. By the 1800's their presence was very strong, and a new emperor Minh Mang, in 1825, issued an edict banning foreign missionaries. The ban was largely ineffective, but it led to the Le Van Khoi Revolt 1833-1835 led by southern Vietnamese, Vietnamese Catholics, French Catholic missionaries and Chinese settlers, and finally the help of Siamese troops. It took Minh Mang nearly 3 years to crush the revolt and in the end he executed hundreds, including several missionaries. In the years following his Catholic ban, priests and practitioners were persecuted, imprisoned and at times executed for their evangelism.
"The Westerner's perverse religion confuses the hearts of men. For a long time, many Western ships have come to trade with us and to introduce Catholic missionaries into our country. These missionaries make the people's hearts crooked, thus destroying our beautiful customs. Truly this is a great disaster for our land. Our purpose being to prevent our people from abandoning our orthodox way, we must accordingly completely eliminate these abuses." ...Minh Mang 1825 Edict against Christianity.
In 1857, on the pretext of protecting the missionaries and French plantation owners, Napoleon's armies and naval armadas invaded a vast swath of Southeast Asia to create "French Indochina", combining territories that are now Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and parts of China. In the following century of French rule, there was always the division of the populace into the westernized Catholics who dominated the government and commerce; and the indigenous Buddhist society that made up 80% of the population.
America's involvement in the Vietnam War officially began in 1964, but it had actually started immediately after WW II. The US and its European allies scrambled to form a new world order along the lines of the old world order. The French were keen to reassert their colonial hegemony in Indochina and fill the vacuum left by the Japanese defeat, but the communist Viet Minh was well established in the north. When the Chinese and the Russians recognized the regime in Hanoi, their leader Ho Chi Minh issued this prescient prediction to the French colonialists: "You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win."
France, like much of Europe, was destroyed in WW II. Among the world's advanced nations, only the United States had been spared the devastation of its industrial base, and thus had the money and the material capacity to underwrite the new colony of French Indochina, its capital at Saigon. French troops moved back in to bolster the government in Saigon led mostly by westernized Vietnamese Catholics, who struggled to subdue the indigenous communist regime of Ho Chi Minh in the North. By 1954, after a humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the French relinquished their claims to the entire region. In Geneva, a treaty was concluded and the country was "temporarily" divided along the 17th parallel to be unified in nationwide elections, and in the meantime military actions, covert operations and sabotage were supposed to be restrained on all sides. The powers in the US administration concluded that were the election to take place, Ho Chi Minh would win and all of Vietnam would be lost to Communism. Similar to the postwar model of the Korean Peninsula: a Communist regime in North Vietnam and a South Vietnamese government which "was essentially the creation of the United States," the Defense Department would later admit in the Pentagon Papers.
And so, the great historical arc of European colonial empires had come to encircle my generation. After the French left, a series of governments in Saigon increasingly relied on US military aid, and the use of more and more US military advisers. With modern naval and air weaponry, the US tried to bolster the west-leaning South Vietnamese government in a religious/ethnic civil war that had been simmering for centuries. Except in this age, the binary geopolitics of the worldwide Cold War, military hardware was provided to both sides. The north, enlisting the help of a former foreign invader, China, and a distant European nation, Russia, was now allied in an ideology of communist revolution to repel the remnants of European invaders. The French military was gone, but the Catholic Church was still the largest landowner in the country, and the Archbishop, the highest-ranking cleric in the country, was the President Diem's older brother. Diem's younger brother was his right hand man in power. The high ranking military officers and elites in the South were Vietnamese Catholics, corrupt and brutal oppressors of the Buddhist majority. Without American assistance, the regime could not have existed. South Vietnam was accused of being an American Colony with a puppet regime.
It was not exactly a puppet under control. Besides the rampant corruption among officials and insiders, there was much of what Diem's cabal of Catholic elites was doing that was deeply troubling to the US; especially the religious persecution and violent crackdown on Buddhist observances. The regime forbade the display of a Buddhist flag on Vesak, the Buddha's birthday. The annual holiday followed soon after the Archbishop's birthday weeks before when the Vatican flag had been flown proudly in celebration. There was a great uproar about the flag ban among the Buddhists in the city of Hue, near the North Vietnamese border. To quell the demonstration, police and soldiers threw hand grenades and fired their rifles into the crowd, killing nine people. US officials were shocked.
Weeks later, South Vietnamese Army troops (ARVN) poured chemicals on praying Buddhists at another protest in Hue, provoking even greater outrage. The US government had lost faith in Diem to govern the country, and began to seek other options; US presence in the country was at the invitation of the South Vietnamese government, so the solution could only be replacing the leadership.
A koan: a question that somehow sticks in your mind and puts it to work. "How does a Buddhist go to War?" On June 11, 1963, in his most profound teaching of all, a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, walked to the center of a busy intersection in downtown Saigon. You will remember this teaching. You know the photo of it. He sat down in the cross-legged lotus position of meditation. His attendants poured 5 gallons of gasoline over him, and stepped back. Then he lit a match.
"Dragon Lady" Madame Nhu, Diem's sister-in-law, issued the statement: "Let them burn and we will clap", referring to the event as a "Buddhist barbeque".
At the time, I wasn't much interested in religion or the government of a far off country; but this pair of images, Thich Quang Duc burning and the Dragon Lady clapping her hands was a combined vision that stuck in your mind, even if you paid little attention to world politics or knew anything about Buddhism.
On August 21, ARVN Special Forces directed by Diem's younger brother attacked pagodas all over South Vietnam and arrested 1400 people. Hundreds more were disappeared, presumed killed. At that, President Kennedy sent word to his ambassador to facilitate the removal of the Diem.
November 1, 1963, Diem was assassinated in a coup involving a group of generals, obviously with the approval and collusion of the US government. Three weeks later JFK was murdered.
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