World: Death at Prayers

Nestled among emerald rice fields and sheltered by the Marine-garrisoned Danang hills, Ap Quang Nam was a showcase village. Passing Marine patrols and their frequent guests were greeted by smiling “hello-okays” from the hamlet’s neatly dressed children. Ap Quang Nam’s market bustled with black-pajama-clad women, hunkered down to argue prices. One band of men and women sifted gravel to sell to a Danang construction firm—the village’s latest self-help project. Each day Navy medical corpsmen held a clinic for boils and bruises, passed out soap, administered an occasional injection.

Ap Quang Nam’s mayor was something special too. Slight, gaunt of face behind a thick mustache, Ngo Tuong, 49, was a Popular Forces soldier who had come back home to serve as mayor only last month. Tuong liked to wear a black beret and a camouflage suit in making the rounds of his constituency, was both efficient and remarkably honest. Though he carried a pistol, he disdained a regular Marine guard detail, rightly judging that it would not sit well with his villagers. Anyway, there seemed little danger. Ap Quang Nam had been so thoroughly pacified after the marines drove the Viet Cong north of the Ca De River eight months ago that only occasional mines had shattered its tranquillity. Until last week, that is, when Tuong called a Buddhist prayer meeting at the house of his aunt in the village.

Suddenly two Viet Cong, who had slipped into the village the night before and hidden in a nearby house, burst in on the 40 worshipers. One fired a Czech burp gun, instantly killing the two officiating priests and Tuong’s aunt, and hitting Tuong in the shoulder. Unable to draw his pistol, Tuong ran. A second burst cut him down in mid-courtyard. As so often happens in the terrorist war, the two assassins escaped in the confusion. In angry frustration, Tuong’s nephew seized a long knife, raced next door and stabbed to death the man who had taken the assassins into his house overnight.

Tuong’s death was another grim example of the Communists’ use of terrorism and atrocity against South Viet Nam’s 37,000 local officials, more than 1,400 of whom were killed or kidnaped last year alone. Nor are officials the only targets. Two weeks ago in Phu Yen province, where Korean and Vietnamese forces are guarding peasants bringing in the rice harvest, two mine explosions killed 54 farm workers riding in a civilian bus. And in Saigon last week, two claymore mines set off near the back gate of the South Vietnamese Armed Forces Headquarters failed in their mission to kill a major military leader, but did kill five soldiers and seven civilian passersby, and wounded more than 60 others.