Most of our local Buddhists weren’t exactly mainstream either

From Once a Warrior King by David Donovan.  Page 126.

The local Catholics might not have seemed to be mainstream Catholics like those I knew back in the States, but most of our local Buddhists weren’t exactly mainstream either. They were for the most part members of the Hoa Hao (pronounced wa-how) sect, an offshoot of Buddhism most of whose adherents live in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam. The Hoa Hao were strongly anticommunist. The Viet Minh, the largely communist Vietnamese guerrilla organization of the 1940s and 1950s, had murdered the sect’s founder and the Hoa Hao remembered that with a passion. They developed a bitter hatred for the Viet Minh and their successor organization, the Viet Cong. Thus it seemed that Hoa Hao units were always made up of aggressive and brave soldiers. Being in Vietnam was not nearly so hard when I was helping a people so clearly willing to fight for their own rights and their own protection.

Unfortunately, the government was not too happy with the Hoa Hao and was not inclined to be helpful when it came to dividing up the government programs and various forms of village and\hamlet assistance. It seems that in the late 1950s and early 1960s the Hoa Hao in the Mekong Delta and the Plain of Reeds had had enough of the central government’s disdain and malfeasance. Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of Vietnam at the time anda stereotypical product of the Catholic mandarinate, ran a government noteworthy for its corruption and lack of concern for the peasantry in the countryside. The Hoa Hao finally decided they had had enough. They formed their own quasi:government and their own army. They were determined to defend themselves against the communists and from harassment by the Saigon government, too, if need be.

President Diem sent in some of his own army units to quell the mini-rebellion, but after a few clashes with the Hoa Hao units he responded to American urgings and perhaps his own common sense and struck a deal with the Hoa Hao leaders. He guaranteed an amnesty, government support, and incorporation of the Hoa Hao fighting units into the regular Vietnamese army. Diem was a sly fellow, though, and when things died down a bit, he began assigning the Hoa Hao units and their leaders to places outside their traditional Delta homeland. President Diem sent the Hoa Hao way up north along the DMZ where they were used as cannon fodder by the South Vietnamese generals - at least that’s the way the Hoa Hao saw it - and they once again felt that their government had betrayed them.

When I arrived in 1969 the animosity toward the central government was still in the air. Ihad the feeling that the Hoa Hao leaders were biding their time, waiting for another opportunity to regain some degree of autonomy. For the present however, the more unifying theme of war against the Viet Cong was requiring everyone’s attention.