Buddhism by Catholics

Coming back from a trip to Dong Ha I found a Vietnamese constructing a small Buddhist shrine between the headquarters building and the photo-lab.

I took a couple of pictures before I asked him if he was a Buddhist Monk.

"No I'm not! I'm Catholic." he answered.

Turns out this was the norm. Here's the way it worked.

If you were a Catholic then you would be given the good jobs. Fork-lift driver, desk jobs, etc. If you were a Buddhist then you got one of the dirty jobs such as cleaning out the port-a-johns.

Over a beer I complained about this to Sgt. Steve Addington, my reporter buddy. Unknown to me Sgt. Addington wrote a story about the civilian job situation at FLC and turned it in. Because the FLC Information Office couldn't kill a story it went to the Combat Information Bureau (CIB) in Da Nang.

Steve was called into Da Nang to explain the story and was asked to kill it. Turns out the CIB couldn't kill the story without the reporter's permission either.

Steve agreed to kill the story if the hiring of Vietnamese at FLC was done without consideration of religion.

If I remember correctly the Vietnamese civil servant that did all the hiring at FLC was fired. Also hiring policies were corrected.

I like to think I remembered this story correctly. But in the big scheme of things I doubt that anything changed. The one constant in South Vietnam was that 5% of the population, Catholics, dictated life for the 95% of the South Vietnamese that were Buddhist.

[ next ]

-30-