Chapter 1: A Massacre in Eden CHAPTER 1 A MASSACRE IN EDEN JOHN HELBLE LOVED to drift along the Perfume River at night. For practically nothing he could rent a sampan and a Vietnamese boatman would steer him out into the middle of the wide, slow-moving stream. From there the low outlines of the old imperial capital of Hue were faintly visible along both banks, north and south. Helble floated on the calm, black water in near silence, past places where long-ago emperors marshaled armies, wrote poetry, and frolicked with concubines. Dim lights shone from both shores, but there was little traffic noise, for in 1963 few people in Hue drove after dark. Helble, the twenty-nine-year-old American consul in Hue, had many visitors from Saigon, often fellow State Department officers and their wives. They came north ostensibly on official business, but really to tour the Citadel, the unimaginably luxurious home of the Nguyen emperors, and the overgrown but still magnificent imperial tombs nearby. Helble''s entertainment program usually included a nighttime sampan outing on the Perfume.
He and his guests glided up and down the river, no particular destination in mind, as smaller, canoe-like vessels, their prows lit by lanterns, pulled alongside, offering Vietnamese delicacies cooked on the spot. There were various stories about how the Perfume got its name, but the best one was that it had been scented by orchids falling into its waters far upstream, in the foothills of the Annamite Mountains. Helble would always remember the languorous beauty of those quiet nights on the Perfume River. But when he arrived on its south bank one hot day in May 1963, he wasn''t playing tour guide; he was investigating a massacre. With its French doors and colorful border of tropical flowers, the South Vietnamese government radio station next to the river seemed an unlikely spot for bloodshed. But on the manic night of May 8, 1963, several thousand Hue residents, most of them Buddhists, had surrounded the station, demanding that it devote airtime to a commemoration of Buddha''s birthday. The station manager refused, and soldiers and militiamen moved in with rifles, concussion grenades, and armored vehicles. Gunfire erupted, along with violent explosions.
The terrified crowd fled in all directions, leaving behind seven lifeless bodies. An eighth person died later. Helble looked around the station the next day for anything that might shed light on what had happened. He found a bullet hole in a drainpipe attached to the building, and other damage probably caused by concussion grenades. But it wasn''t clear what triggered the violence or who was responsible. For the past two years, Helble had been trying to understand why things happened the way they did in Hue. Though he spoke fluent Vietnamese and had many acquaintances in the lovely city of 100,000, he had yet to figure out its power structure and how it worked. In some ways, Hue resembled a Sicilian hill town, placid and picturesque on the surface, but rigidly controlled behind the scenes by the Mafia.
The insular little city had no newspapers, minimal crime, and--at least until the May 8 slaughter--a docile population. Helble, his wife, and their young son had come to Hue in the spring of 1961, as the South Vietnamese government strained to put down a worsening insurgency by communist guerrillas called Viet Cong. In those days, the conflict seldom intruded into Hue, although Helble occasionally heard firefights between the VC and local police at a guard post on the far side of a large rice paddy behind his house. The war was fought mostly in the countryside, and a big part of Helble''s job was to travel around South Vietnam''s seven northernmost provinces, picking up information on local military, political, and economic conditions, and reporting it to his superiors at the U.S. embassy in Saigon. He roamed his mostly rural region in a Willys jeep, with a submachine gun known as a Swedish K on the seat beside him. His assistant at the consulate had acquired the weapon by trading a case of rum to an American military adviser, who was part of a growing contingent brought in to help the South Vietnamese army fight the VC.
Stationed four hundred miles away from his nearest boss, Helble had a large degree of autonomy, and that suited him just fine. He liked adventure and was unfazed by the dangers of circuit-riding through Viet Cong-haunted countryside. Gregarious, perceptive, and immensely curious, he was an ideal man for the Hue consulate, which functioned as a U.S. observation post for the upper third of South Vietnam, directly below the demilitarized zone that separated it from communist North Vietnam. A native of the mill town of Appleton, Wisconsin, Helble graduated from the University of Wisconsin and soon afterward joined the State Department. He underwent Vietnamese-language training and found himself at the bustling Saigon embassy in the summer of 1960. Within a few months, he learned just how volatile South Vietnam could be.
In November 1960, rebel paratroopers stormed into Saigon and tried to overthrow South Vietnam''s authoritarian president, Ngo Dinh Diem. The attackers surrounded Diem''s residence, Independence Palace, in the heart of Saigon. Helble heard about the incipient coup early in the morning and blithely decided to walk past the besieged palace on his way to work, noting anything that might be useful to the embassy. In front of the palace, he found paratroopers taking cover behind trees. Wrecked jeeps and soldiers'' corpses lay in the street. An intense firefight suddenly broke out between the attackers and troops defending the palace. Helble jumped over a low wall around a nearby villa, pressing himself flat on the ground behind it. As it happened, the house was occupied by William Colby, chief of the Central Intelligence Agency station in Saigon, and his wife and their four children.
"John, what the hell are you doing down there?" Colby shouted from a balcony. Helble scampered inside the house. The CIA executive was anxious to get to the embassy to carry out his duties and asked his unexpected guest to stay with his family. Helble agreed. For the next thirty-six hours, Helble carefully observed the fighting and telephoned blow-by-blow reports to the embassy. He watched as rebel troops, tanks, and armored personnel carriers exchanged fire with loyal soldiers around the palace, wincing as stray bullets shattered windows in Colby''s home. Artillery shells arced overhead and threw up geysers of dirt on the palace''s parklike grounds. When a group of mutinous soldiers set up a command post in the front yard, Helble went out and talked to the young lieutenant in charge, asking if Colby''s wife and kids could safely leave their house.
The lieutenant then marched up to the palace''s front gate with a white flag, talked to someone inside, and came back and told Helble: "OK, you can take them out now. We have agreed that there will be no firing." Colby''s family slipped away unharmed. Diem ultimately survived the attempted coup, calling in loyal troops from outlying areas to save him. HELBLE FIGURED HIS INTREPID reporting from the villa led to his promotion to Hue over a more experienced foreign service officer who''d been tagged to go there. His consular district was huge, covering thousands of square miles, with varied terrain that included beautiful white sand beaches on the South China Sea, thickly forested highlands populated by primitive tribespeople, and spooky jungles and mountains along the Laotian border that concealed dangerous animals as well as dangerous men. In his early days as consul, he was oblivious to the very real hazards of traveling in his new domain. When Helble first arrived in Hue, the departing consul, a high-spirited man named Tom Barnes, put him in a jeep and took him on a five-day orientation tour.
Their destination was Kontum, a market town in the mountainous Central Highlands. They started off by driving south along coastal Highway 1, one of the few paved roads in the region, and then west to Pleiku, a crossroads town and home to a major South Vietnamese army base. Normally, travelers made their way to Pleiku and then took an established road north to Kontum. But Barnes knew a shortcut, and the two Americans swerved off the main road onto a muddy track that led into the forest. They soon reached a village inhabited by mountain tribespeople. There they met a French priest who''d lived with the mountaineers for many years and reported that the Viet Cong were active in the area. The Americans got back in their jeep and continued along the isolated route, winding through mountain forests for hours as daylight faded. They finally arrived in Kontum after dark, parked in the American military compound, and joined some U.
S. Army advisers at a bar. One of them asked why the two diplomats were getting in from Pleiku so late. Helble replied that they hadn''t come from Pleiku; they''d taken the shortcut through the mountains. Silence descended on the bar. One of the advisers exclaimed, "You did what ? Nobody''s been down that track for years. It''s totally insecure." On a different trip, Helble had to slam on his brakes to avoid running smack-dab into a Viet Cong ambush in Quang Ngai Province.
Just ahead, guerrillas on both sides of the road were shooting at South Vietnamese militiamen who''d been riding in a truck. Helble jumped into a ditch and crawled over to the militiamen, getting off a few shots from his .38-caliber revolver, which wasn''t very effective for combat. (After that, he took the Swedish K with him.) The communists broke off the attack and melted into the landscape.