Ordeal in Viet Nam

The difficult lot of South Viet Nam's 300 foreign-born missionaries and church relief workers* has become doubly hard in the past month. Since the beginning of the Communists' Tet offensive, eight have been killed, and a dozen more either kidnaped or wounded; several churches and mission compounds have been destroyed or damaged by gunfire. Last week the Quakers' American Friends Service Committee, which operated a child day-care center and medical rehabilitation clinic in Quang Ngai, prepared to pull out of South Viet Nam. "The intensified military operations throughout the country," announced a committee spokesman in Philadelphia, have made it "impossible for us to continue."

The worst tragedy involving the missions took place early in the offensive when six American Protestants with the Christian and Missionary Alliance were killed at a compound near Ban Me Thuot in the Central Highlands, where the CMA ran a school and a leprosarium. According to survivors' accounts, the attack began before dawn when North Vietnamese sappers blew up a home in the center of the compound. The two occupants, Leon Griswold, 66, a retired insurance salesman from White Plains, N.Y., who had turned missionary, and his daughter Carolyn, 41, a youth worker, were fatally injured.

Death in a Bunker. Five other missionaries huddled in an adjacent house for two days as fighting raged, then took refuge in a hastily dug trench. Finally, the Rev. Robert Ziemer, 49, a minister from Toledo, Ohio, left the trench to plead with surrounding Communist troops to hold their fire. They shot him in the head and chest. Next to die was Nurse Ruth Wilting, 42, of Cleveland, who had gone to the clinic 200 yds. away for medicines; the Communists opened fire as she returned, and she fell into the bunker, mortally wounded.

Another minister, the Rev. C. Edward Thompson, 43, of New Kensington, Pa., stood atop the bunker, lifted his hands and cried out for mercy. A fusillade from a Communist automatic weapon killed him; his wife died moments later when the North Vietnamese sprayed the inside of the bunker with small-arms fire. On leaving the mission, the Reds kidnaped another American nurse, Miss Betty Olsen, 32, and Henry Blood of Portland, Ore., a member of the Wycliffe Bible Translators.

Buddhists & Christians. The major task of church groups now is trying to help the huge army of homeless refugees created by the onslaught. Viet Nam Christian Service, supported by Lutheran World Relief, the Mennonites and Church World Service, has assumed responsibility for refugee relief in a number of areas, including Gia Dinh, a suburb of Saigon; often braving Communist fire, service volunteers have scrounged lumber to rebuild homes, hauled food, water and sleeping mats to refugee camps. Catholic Relief Services is now attempting to house and feed 87,000 new refugees in 27 centers.

Though Buddhists and Catholics have long been political antagonists, a number of pagodas and churches have been turned into refugee centers, open to Vietnamese of either faith. A school operated by the Roman Catholic Salesian Fathers in the Go Vap district of Saigon, for example, has taken in more than 16,000 homeless, most of them Buddhists. At a Buddhist primary school in Saigon, Catholic nuns organized a makeshift dispensary for the hundreds of refugee families sheltered there; the hallways of the school were stacked with cans of cooking oil, rice and clothing donated by Catholic Relief. The CRS director in Viet Nam, Father Robert Charlebois, 36, of Gary, Ind., joined a Protestant AID official in setting up a clinic near Bien Hoa in a pagoda. A Buddhist monk was their translator--and many of the medical supplies were provided by the Protestant-backed World Vision International.

*Half of them Americans, most of whom are Protestants; the next largest contingent is 131 French Catholic priests and nuns.

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