The generals’ story changed immediately. The new version was that Nhu had provoked the stone-cold assassin Captain Nhung into a murderous fury, causing him to shoot both men and stab them repeatedly. Given how pissed General Minh was at the brothers for refusing to surrender at the palace, it seemed a safe bet his longtime bodyguard hadn’t just flown into a white-hot rage but carried out the killings coldly and deliberately, on Big Minh’s orders.
The brothers’ death certificates were designed to humiliate. Both were demoted to posts they had held under the French: Diem to province chief, and Nhu to chief of library services.
News of the deaths spread like wildfire. Saigon’s streets erupted in celebration. Buddhists were triumphant. Homes of Diem’s supporters were looted, his mouthpiece newspaper trashed and set on fire. White mice scrambled to trade their tell-tale uniforms for less conspicuous clothing. Crowds that had been made to salute Diem’s portrait publicly tore it to shreds on the steps of the National Assembly. The headquarters of Madame Nhu’s Women’s Solidarity Movement was burned to the ground and an overzealous mob toppled the statue of the Trung sisters, beloved Vietnamese heroines, that the Dragon Lady had commissioned for six million piasters—with the sisters’ faces looking suspiciously like her own. Dance halls rolled out their dance floors and filled with forbidden tangos, raucous rock ’n’ roll blared from the bars, and political prisoners were set free. Dr. Phan, released from Con Son, was draped with garlands and carried through Saigon on the shoulders of his students.
All smiles, Lodge took congratulatory calls in his office, doors flung wide. Colonel Dunn eyed his boss basking in the compliments and broke out a bottle.
“Quite a finish for the country’s first chief executive,” he said, pouring bourbon for us both.
I didn’t speak.
“To fucking gangland murder,” he said, raising his glass. I raised mine in kind.
A grinning consular official entered Lodge’s office next door and offered hearty congratulations. Mike rose and eased the interconnecting door closed, shutting out the scene.
“Hallelujah,” he said, raising the bourbon to his lips. “They’re dancing a jig in Hanoi.”
Big Minh and General Don had also shown up with some of the rebel generals, he said.
“Lodge didn’t want to receive them,” Dunn murmured, “lest they look like happy conspirators reporting their success to their mentor and protector.”
“The winning team celebrating with their coach,” I said.
But in the end the ambassador couldn’t resist the shared moment of triumph. The generals confirmed that shutting down CIP had bolstered their cause. Lodge restarted the economic aid then and there, even upped it by twenty million bucks.
The word back in Washington was that President Kennedy was deeply upset, his cabinet still divided and full of misgivings. But not Lodge. Not a bit. The death of the Ngo brothers was unfortunate. But in a coup, he said, “order cannot be guaranteed everywhere.” The press and the public in the States were as much behind him as the people in Saigon. The ambassador wasn’t sweating the second-guessing and backpedaling going on in DC. Aftermath and consequences be damned. He had taken decisive action and was receiving the praise and thanks of citizens everywhere.
Come Monday, Cabot Lodge got his conference room back when the Buddhist monks he had been harboring left the chancery free men. On Lodge’s orders, Fred Flott flew to Dalat on General Harkins’s C-54 to collect the Nhus’ three younger kids and accompany them to Saigon. Their mother wanted her children sent to her in Los Angeles, but Washington had no interest in offering the family asylum. Lodge ordered Flott to escort the children to Rome, slowly.
The embassy improvised travel documents that Ambassador d’Orlandi gussied up with visa stamps. Three hours after arriving in Saigon, the youngsters and Flott were on a commercial flight bound for Italy, flying the long way round, making five stops en route in the hope Madame Nhu would be drawn out of the United States to comfort her grieving children. In Rome, Flott surrendered the kids to their uncle, the archbishop, and Madame Nhu finally left the US to rejoin them, declaring that “all the devils of hell are against us.” Then she demanded a visa to return to the States to raise some hell of her own. Request denied. Mike predicted she’d never set foot on American soil again.
Although Lodge lobbied for a proper burial, the bodies of Diem and Nhu had become political footballs, taken first to the Joint Chiefs’ headquarters to be interred like executed Colonel Tung and his brother, but quickly moved to the morgue at St. Paul’s Clinic, only to be transferred to the basement of the Joint Chiefs’ headquarters and from there into anonymous graves on the HQ grounds, their burial attended only by a Catholic priest and Diem’s nephew and niece. No stone or marker. Instead, a slab of concrete was poured over their graves to make the spot inconspicuous and keep it from becoming a rallying point for loyalists.
Saigon got back to normal. The race track, brothels and dance halls reopened. Korean and Filipino cover bands arrived to blast the latest rock ’n’ roll hits in the clubs and new bars along rue Catinat, called more frequently by its newer Vietnamese name—Tu Do. The port’s berths once again filled with unloading ships. Goods and materiel resumed arriving—and vanishing.
The rest of life soon reverted to the usual, too. Buddhists took to the streets to protest discrimination and started immolating themselves again. Rocks and sticks once more flew at the white mice and combat police huddled behind their round wicker shields. Demonstrators were again beaten and imprisoned. The poor cluttered the streets, sleeping rough. Kids pestered and bullied us for cigarettes and money, pushing against our pockets to try to make something fall out.
Mike Dunn and I met up to exchange scuttlebutt in the bar in the Caravelle. Mike asked after Sergeant Robeson. I told him Clovis was in Tokyo, recovering from his second surgery. He had managed to avoid getting evacuated stateside and hoped to recuperate in Japan, which meant he might make it back to us in Saigon instead of being reassigned elsewhere. In the meantime, Rider had teamed with me to hold down Robeson’s slot at CID and keep his bed warm at the Majestic. I did tell Mike the worst of it, that Robeson had lost a testicle and it was uncertain the other was functional.
“Does his girl know yet?” he said.
Before I could answer, he was called to the phone. I ordered a cosmopolitan and thought about Flippi. Him I’d told no one about. When I hadn’t shown for our first-of-the-month payday venture on the day of the coup, he’d proceeded alone. I only knew he’d successfully liberated the extortion money when I saw the package he’d left for me at the front desk. Thirty-eight thousand fucking dollars in hundred-dollar bills, and a note scribbled on Majestic stationery. Sorry you missed the party. Piece of cake.
Thirty-eight grand, it felt like a million—the most money I’d ever had in my hands at one time. I sent Flip a postcard: Thanks for the swell party favor. When I didn’t hear from him, I put in an international call to some basic training instructors we knew back in the world, hoping they had a clue where he was holed up, partying hard with his thirty-eight large and the extra twenty grand for re-upping. Had anybody sighted him?
Oh yeah, a pal confirmed. He had turned up in Nashville with his household effects. Or most of him. He’d been found in the freezer, bagged in plastic inside a long, zinc-lined casket. The head was missing, but it was Flippi all right.
The goddamn fool. Had he gone and done exactly what I’d said not to, taken off the Viet Cong collector instead of relieving the oil company guy of the money? Or was this payback for the other favor I’d asked him to do, disposing of the medium, Huyen?
After a last drink, I swayed home to bed for a troubled night’s sleep. At breakfast, Seftas and I were both wearing sunglasses. He said there were signs that Henry Cabot Lodge might be going home early. Praise for his courageous work in Viet Nam had erupted in a groundswell of support back home that was carrying him to
ward the race for the White House.
Lodge was being touted for nomination even though he claimed he didn’t want to run. Everywhere he went in Saigon, he was greeted by Vietnamese admirers with cheers of “Vive Capa Lodge!” I saw him one day outside the Rex Hotel pressing the flesh and basking in the movie-star treatment. People were smiling and bowing, laying mementos on him, asking for his autograph. Applause burst from the crowd as he waved a last time and turtled his head getting into the limousine. Emily, getting in the opposite side, saw me and came over. She held my face to kiss my cheek. “Don’t be a stranger,” she said.
Three weeks after the coup, JFK got lit up in Dallas by an ex-Marine rifleman. Lodge flew home to stand in the ranks of the official mourners. The newsreel at the Kinh Do theater felt like it came from another planet.
Early in the new year, a junior general named Khanh pulled off a second coup, ousting General Big Minh and the other top conspirators. An admirer of Diem’s, General Khanh hated them for killing the Old Man, yet the new coup was almost bloodless.
Almost. Detained along with the ousted generals was Big Minh’s bodyguard, Nhung, recently promoted to major. Under questioning, he admitted that he had executed both President Diem and his brother, and later even approached Associated Press chief Malcolm Browne looking to sell photographs of his handiwork.
“Unfortunately,” Seftas said, “Major Nhung grew distraught and committed suicide in his cell.”
“Shoelaces? Belt?”
“Shot himself in the back of the head is what I heard.”
As for the US Military, the Big Green Machine was clearly rumbling into life. Sef raised his glass to clink against mine. “It’s on, baby, it’s on.”
“You mean we ain’t gonna wind it down by next Christmas?”
“You wait,” he scoffed. “Marines are gonna wade out of the surf some morning, and the Hundred-and-Worst will unass their cloud wagons and drift down on their silky chutes like angels.”
“You really think this fucker is ratcheting up, not down?”
Seftas leaned toward me. “See that contractor at the end of the bar? His company is bidding on a job to lay eight hundred miles of undersea cable between Nha Trang and the Philippines. That sound like any of us are getting booted anytime soon?”
“Well, that’s good, then. But it’s beginning to remind me of Korea. ‘Can’t win, can’t lose, can’t quit.’”
The next morning I caught a chopper to Tay Ninh and met up with Reverend Crawford, who took me to the cardinal. I explained whose ashes I was carrying. Early in the afternoon while the province dozed, we added them to the family crypt. We placed offerings of fruit and flowers, lit joss sticks, touched them to our foreheads and stuck them in a small vase next to a candle. When the ceremony was over, the padre and cardinal walked away, talking. I slipped the Radom pistol under the white chrysanthemums and followed.
Afterword
The bodies of Ngo Dinh Diem and Nhu were exhumed in 1965 from beneath the blank concrete slab that marked their graves behind the Joint General Staff’s headquarters. They were moved to Mac Dinh Chi, the beautiful antique French cemetery in the center of Saigon, rich with elaborate sculptures and tombs of the famous, as well as the simple headstones of legionnaires.
In 1968, the government granted permission for an annual graveside memorial service. Three years later, on the eighth anniversary of Diem’s death, thousands gathered. Cabinet ministers attended, an army general offered the eulogy. Latin prayers were recited at the basilica and a requiem mass was held.
Less public was President Thieu’s involvement. A year prior to this commemoration, he had invited a Cao Dai medium to summon Diem’s ghost. Thieu was the Catholic colonel who—at the insistence of the top Buddhist generals—had led the assault on the Gia Long Palace, a fact Diem’s ghost knew only too well. Thieu asked what he could do for the deceased now.
Diem’s spirit complained that he was trapped by the Mac Dinh Chi cemetery’s encircling wall. A short time later a thirty-foot-long breach appeared in the western wall of the graveyard.
In 1983, the brothers’ remains were shifted again when the victorious Communist regime condemned the cemetery as a colonial relic, insisting that Vietnamese claim their kin and that the French government repatriate the bodies of their soldiers. Abandoned monuments were bulldozed and the field made into a park.
Diem’s body was reburied with his brother’s at Lai Thieu, a town northeast of Saigon. They were entombed near their brother, Can, and their mother. With the blessing of his brother, Brother Can had ruled Central Viet Nam as a dictator. After the coup, his land had been found to contain dungeons and mass graves. Can pleaded for asylum, but Lodge sent Lucien Conein to turn Can over to the new government for trial. He died by firing squad. Of the six Ngo brothers, the eldest was buried alive (along with his son) by North Vietnamese Communists, and three were executed by South Vietnamese. Diem’s monument bears only his baptismal name, Gioan Baotixita—Jean Baptiste. Nowhere does it identify the crypt as that of Ngo Dinh Diem, first president of the Republic of Viet Nam.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Viet Nam veterans for their help, encouragement, and shared memories: Robert Klett, Colonel Karl Hopp, Juris Meimis, Lenny Goodstein, Richard Stolz, Harry Pewterbaugh, George Ruckman, Ellsworth Smith, Dr. Douglas Bey, Tom Glenn, John Lathnin, Captain Fred Heather, Gene Hale, Kendrick Forrester, author Shaun Darragh, Robert Shookner, Special Forces Major Jim Morris, Jerome Gold, and the irascible Samuel Garrison.
And the civilians to whom I owe so much: Karen Palmer, Charles Ruas, Aleks Rozens, J. R. “Rip” Westmoreland, Stuart Fishman, Ira Pearlstein, John Thomas, Francis Karagodins, David Moehlenkamp, Michael Guinzburg, Sonia Rivera, T. Glenn Coughlin, Sister Y Panh, the Saigon Kids, Harrison Shaffer, and author Kathy Dobronyi.
I am much indebted to Takashi Oka for allowing me into his private files and reportage and to his daughter, Megumi Oka, for making that possible. Many thanks as well to Tom LoPiano, Jr. of Hansen & Hansen Arms & Antiquities on the Old Post Road in Southport, Connecticut, for so generously sharing his wealth of knowledge. Also to Lady Borton in Hanoi, and David Lloyd Sinkinson of Ho Chi Minh City, once called Saigon.
And my undying gratitude to Jeanne, for putting up with it all—and me. It couldn’t happen without her.
A Note from the Author’s Widow
A posthumous publication is always bittersweet. Juris died suddenly in November 2018, not knowing that his third novel would be published, much less by the house he had co-founded with Laura Hruska in 1986. It’s hard to imagine a more fitting home for the book.
My thanks on behalf of Juris go, of course, to Laura’s daughter, Bronwen Hruska, who took over the helm of Soho ten years ago and is, in Juris’s own words, “deeply intelligent, wonderfully candid,” and—his highest praise—“swell.” And although Juris didn’t know Juliet Grames would become his editor, he had long ago rightfully deemed her “brilliant.” My personal thanks go to both of them as well the rest of the Soho crew, especially managing editor Rachel Kowal, who was endlessly patient with me even though I am, as Juris loved to remind me, a publishing “civilian.”
In the early days of Soho, Juris, always a contrarian, went against conventional publishing wisdom by starting a line of international mysteries that were at once compelling stories and windows onto the history and culture of the places they were set. That was certainly his aim with Play the Red Queen. As with his earlier novel, Red Flags, Juris wanted to “bear witness,” as he said, to an underreported aspect of the Viet Nam war: the “elaborate, even treasonous corruption—and our complicity in it.” Exposing this part of the story of Viet Nam was his way to honor his fellow veterans; the Vietnamese people whose lives were so often at the mercy of those in power; and his beloved Montagnards, the indigenous peoples of the Central Highlands, where he served.
Juris said that Viet Nam had marked him for life. In the
end it marked him for death as well, through the toll Agent Orange took on his heart. Given the subject of Play the Red Queen, his final novel, it’s a terrible irony that the aerial spraying of Agent Orange—known first as Operation Hades and later, when that name presented a public-relations challenge, as Operation Ranch Hand—was initiated at the request of none other than President Ngo Dinh Diem.
Jeanne Heifetz
Brooklyn, NY
September 2019
Play the Red Queen Page 30