Wanderer's Rest

To the people of Viet Nam, whether Christian or Buddhist, an unburied body is weight on the conscience of living men; its unseated soul wanders endlessly among the living, begging for suitable sepulcher. In the year in which Premier-President Ngo Dinh Diem has presided over the precarious young state of South Viet Nam, there has never been far from his mind the need to set one such wandering soul at rest.

In the general slaughter in central Annam following Emperor Bao Dai's surrender to the Communists back in 1945, Diem's brother Ngo Dinh Khoi and his eldest son were dragged out of their home and whisked away in a green Citroen to be shot near the village of Co Bi in the high, jagged mountains of the Chaine Annamatique. "I remember my brother Khoi," says Diem, who fled into hiding at the time. "He was the brightest son of our family of twelve, a tall, handsome man. The welfare of the people was his life's work." But the people's thanks, under the new Communist regime, consisted only in tossing his unblessed body into an irrigation ditch.

For nine years after Khoi's murder, the village of Co Bi remained under Communist control, making it impossible for members of the Roman Catholic Ngo family to find their relative's body. When at last the Reds were driven out, the local peasants were too afraid to talk. One ancient sampan man confessed that he had heard the shots and described the area where the murder had taken place. He promptly disappeared. An old ex-Communist surrendered to Diem's forces and admitted his son had taken part in the kidnaping, but the son had fled to the north with the Communist troops. At Diem's urging, the old man was sent north in secret to find his son. He came back a few months later with a sketch locating the grave, but when Diem's coolies began digging, they found only the bones of dead water buffaloes.

Last month a sick villager of Co Bi went to the scene of the digging and told the authorities: "I have tuberculosis, and I'm going to die. Now I can tell the truth." Showing how the stream of the irrigation ditch into which Khoi's body was dumped had changed its course, he pointed out the real grave. Twelve feet deep, the diggers found the bodies of Khoi and his son, easily identified by a set of gold teeth and a belt buckle.

Rescued from the unhallowed earth, the bodies were removed, placed in coffins and carried back to the family vault at Phu-cam, while 75.000 Vietnamese watched in awed silence. "His spirit infuses our people during this renaissance of independence," said Ngo Dinh Diem.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.