The AP Reporter and the Buddhist Monk

While president John F. Kennedy was talking on the phone with his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, on the morning of Tuesday, June 11, 1963, he suddenly, sharply, exclaimed: “Jesus Christ!”
 

The president’s outburst had nothing to do with his conversation with his brother. Rather, he was responding to a photograph splashed on the front pages of the newspapers just delivered to him. The photo showed 73-year-old Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc engulfed in flames on a street in Saigon, South Vietnam while sitting calmly—it seemed—in the lotus posture. 
 
The monk hoped that his drastic action might bring the world’s attention to what the Buddhists saw as the persecution against their religion by the Catholic regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Buddhist organizations had called for freedom from arbitrary arrest, the right to assemble in public, and an end to the supposed Catholic bias in appointing government officials.
 
The photo, which had been captured on a cheap, Japanese camera wielded by Malcolm W. Browne, the 32-year-old head of the Associated Press’s bureau in Saigon, retains its ability to stop conversations. It stands as an enduring symbol of the power of protest and one of the iconic images from the Vietnam War, alongside two other photographs that have been burned into the collective American conscience—Eddie Adams’s “Saigon Execution,” his graphic photo of a suspected Viet Cong guerrilla being summarily executed at point-blank range by a South Vietnamese police chief and Nick Ut’s “Terror of War,” showing a naked, nine-year-old girl screaming as she runs down a road with her skin burned from a South Vietnamese napalm bombing that mistakenly hit her village.
 
Browne knew he would be facing unique challenges in his post for the AP when he first arrived in the country on a Pan American flight at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport on November 11, 1961. He had not dressed for the climate; he wore a heavy wool suit and a topcoat in the oppressive 96-degree heat that he attempted to deal with by smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, a habit he later quit.
 

Although the heat caused Browne to sweat like a pig and feel miserable, at the same time, he was “delighted to be there. . . . It was just a glorious place.” After accepting greetings from his Chinese-Vietnamese assistant, Bill Ha Van Tran, who said, “Welcome to Viet Nam, Mal,” Browne headed toward the immigration counter to have his documentation checked. Two photographers were on hand to snap his photo. With his blond hair, blue eyes, and standing six feet, one inches in height, he made an easy target. Tran told him that one of the photographers worked for a local English-language newspaper, The Times of Viet Nam, while the other represented the government’s secret police.
 
Adapting to his new surroundings, Browne switched into clothing better suited for field assignments—khaki chino pants, a sports shirt, a canteen and belt (making sure to bring along on assignments a bottle of water-sterilizing tablets), and sneaker-like canvas shoes, the same as those worn by members of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (shortened to ARVN in press reports).
 
As the fighting grew more intense, he and other correspondents took to wearing “inconspicuous olive-green fatigues and boots with steel plates in their soles” to protect against the numerous booby traps scattered over the countryside. On any given day, Browne could arrive at his office “muddy and tired from a military operation in the countryside, hit the typewriter for a 300 or 400 word lead, shower and change into dinner clothes for some diplomatic dinner, then duck out before dessert to file a new lead or check out a tip.”
 
Browne discovered that U.S. government officials in Washington, DC, as well as those stationed in Saigon, appeared determined to reveal as little as possible about the United States’ growing involvement in the struggle—a situation Browne described as “America’s ‘gray war.’” Any mention of the word “combat” in connection with anything Americans did in South Vietnam “is avoided by all officials at any cost,” he reported. “Combat is a dirty word, despite the purple hearts awarded and ‘combat hours’ logged.”
 
In addition to facing stonewalling when it came to cooperation from U.S. officials, and pressure by such senior military leaders as Admiral Harry Felt, commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, to “get on the team” and support American policy in the region (a situation that never seemed to get better), reporters were confronted with outright hostility and sometimes violent reprisals from Diem’s government, which had instituted tight controls over its own media and kept a close eye on what reporters from other countries had to say about its rule.
 
Vietnamese officials expected U.S. journalists to support their fight against the Communists from North Vietnam and their Viet Cong allies in the south without question. “You all act as if you were just spectators here,” Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem’s powerful, fierce sister-in-law, said to members of the foreign press. “Don’t you realize you are with us and we need your support?”
 
While the Saigon government regarded correspondents as “scabby sheep,” and treated them accordingly, Browne recalled that the Vietnamese people were “friendly and agreeable,” and reporters could cultivate private sources among them.
 
To overcome the obstacles placed in their path and present an accurate portrayal of the war, Browne advised, a reporter had to be aggressive, resourceful, and use, at times, clandestine methods “uncomfortably close to those used by professional intelligence units.” Correspondents could expect only “very little help from most official sources, and news comes the hard way,” he added.
 
As officials learned, however, the new AP reporter, as one of his colleagues pointed out, “had no fear of sticking his nose where it wasn’t wanted.” Much later Browne realized that he had been guided in his thinking about the war from his previous experience working as a laboratory chemist. “So when I got to Saigon,” he remembered, “I was resolved not to treat this as journalism but as a piece of observation that should be as accurate and as telling as possible, looking for the truth behind the truth.”
 
Browne won the respect of his colleagues in Saigon for his professionalism, as well as high marks from U.S. ambassador Frederick Nolting for his sensitivity to the “nuances of the Vietnamese situation,” especially compared to other newsmen in the country. As his AP associate Peter Arnett later observed, Browne was not “one of the boys” when it came to the often lively “social life of those years” that he, AP photographer Horst Faas, and David Halberstam of the New York Times sometimes indulged in. “There was a comradery that existed beyond news competition, a sense of ‘us against the world,’” Arnett recalled. “Mal Browne was an intellectual who could stand above it all.”
 
Those who spent time in Vietnam covering the conflict grew increasingly frustrated by urging from their superiors in New York and elsewhere to be more like the correspondents of World War II, especially beloved columnist Ernie Pyle of Dana, Indiana. Brown considered Pyle to be “a great and courageous reporter who made World War II come alive for Americans. But that was World War II, and this is Viet Nam, where I expect Pyle would feel utterly lost.” Pyle’s faith in the basic goodness of an American fighting man might have been “sorely tested,” Browne observed, by “policies that compel this decent GI to shoot aging women (or be shot by them).” The Hoosier reporter, too, would also come to know that the cliches of the past war “just don’t seem to apply here, and that’s why explaining things to the folks back home (who basically rely on cliches) becomes so difficult,” concluded Browne.
 
Browne remembered that he had not come to Vietnam “harboring any opposition to America’s role in the Vietnamese civil war,” believing that since Kennedy’s administration had allied itself with the Saigon government, it only seemed natural for U.S. servicemen to fight back if fired upon. The AP reporter, however, did have concerns about the Kennedy administration’s unwillingness “to fight openly, preferring instead to wage a shadow war,” keeping news of it away from the U.S. public. “If we Americans had nothing to be ashamed of, why not frankly acknowledge our role as belligerents?” Browne asked.
 
During his years covering the war (Browne left Vietnam in 1966, returned for the 1972 Easter offensive, and was there for the fall of Saigon in 1975), he discovered that there were “no unalloyed good guys in Viet Nam. There were plenty of bad guys on all sides, and everyone sometimes stooped to savagery when it suited them.” As Browne pointed out, liberal actress Jane Fonda was just as naïve in her idealistic views of North Vietnam’s motives in the war as conservative actor John Wayne was in his idealized opinions about the U.S. Special Forces, the Green Berets. “Neither of these extreme views corresponded to the shades-of-gray distinctions we newsmen saw,” Browne concluded.
 
The situation in Vietnam proved to be “unique in many respects,” Browne said, because it lacked some of the key features of most wars in history. There existed no front “to march off to, camera and typewriter tucked into a rucksack,” he learned. The front could be everything from a once-peaceful village bridge where he had stopped to buy pineapple one morning and where “the Viet Cong killed 20 militiamen in a little post last night.”
 
But, most of all, he viewed the front as a remote hut late at night where villagers gathered to listen as an intelligent man dressed in a peasant’s black attire recite from memory from the works of General Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese commander who proved years before at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu against the French that “a peasant militia with the proper indoctrination can defeat even a modern army. Browne came to share the opinion held by many who became regulars covering the war that there were those who “either listened to other people as to what the war was all about and those who went out and got muddy boots. I preferred the muddy boots.”
 
Browne’s time as a conscript in the U.S. Army, serving in South Korea after the conflict there had ended, had not only given him a basic understanding of reporting, but it had also educated him in ways that proved useful during his time immersed in a war zone. He knew how to handle weapons and had insight into how soldiers thought, spoke, and acted. “In a world more often shaped by the sword than the pen,” Browne emphasized, close familiarity with soldiers and how they performed their duties would be crucial for historians and journalists.
 

Another skill Browne learned while serving in South Korea that came in handy in Vietnam was photography. He had visited the post exchange and purchased an inexpensive Japanese single-lens-reflex camera that served him faithfully over the years. The other members of the Public Information Office staff guided him through the process of taking and developing photographs, all done in less-than-ideal conditions, as the chemicals they used to develop pictures often froze at night in their poorly heated hut.
 
The staff’s “daily darkroom routine” included thawing out the chemicals while they melted snow for shaving, Browne recalled. He discovered that having a camera handy compelled the person carrying it “into the heat of the action. If you’re writing text, you can fake it. But if you’re carrying a camera, there’s nothing in the world you can do to fake it, and so you get your boots muddy; you become part of the scene, and that is absolutely vital to writing a text that’s convincing and which contains the essence of whatever it is that’s going on.”
 
As AP’s bureau chief in Saigon, Browne made it his policy that all correspondents should take pictures whenever they could, and that all photographers should gather information to fashion into news dispatches. “To do otherwise would have spread our meager resources too thinly, and it was a formula that worked,” he recalled. After all, reporters could always take the information supplied by a photographer and churn out a respectable story, and photographers could a newsman’s “technically lousy picture” and improve it enough so that it was publishable.
 
Browne discovered that the one-room, ground-floor AP office in Saigon offered the same challenges as had his accommodations in Korea, especially when it came to photojournalism. A frequent visitor to the office, David Halberstam of the New York Times, remembered that the space “felt more like a converted closet than anything else; if there were two people there at the same time then it seemed overcrowded.” With space at a premium, the office’s only bathroom became a rudimentary darkroom in which to develop and print photographs for distribution to AP outlets around the world.
 
Despite these difficulties, Browne persevered and was ready in the spring of 1963 when South Vietnam was wracked by demonstrations from organized members of the Buddhist community. On the evening of June 10, 1963, he received a call from one of his sources, a monk, tipping him off about an important demonstration planned for the next day: “Mr. Browne, I strongly advise you to come. I expect something very important will happen, but I cannot tell you what.”
 
The monk delivered a similar message to all the resident correspondents in Saigon, advising them to be at a small pagoda off Phan Dinh Phung Street; his counsel was ignored by most. As a wire-service reporter, Browne, however, could not take any chances at being scooped by his competitors on what could be a major news story. Also, the monk’s previous tips to him to him had all been good.
 
“They [the Buddhists] were perfectly serious about doing something pretty violent,” he recalled. “In another civilization it might have taken the form of a bomb or something like that.” Browne realized that any “ghastly human sacrifice” by the Buddhists would be futile unless “the Western press—the only free press in the country—carried the word to the outside world.”
 
Browne set off early in the morning on June 11, accompanied by his AP colleague Van Tran. The AP men arrived at the pagoda at exactly 7:50 a.m.; services were to begin at 8:00 a.m. and, as Browne noted, the Buddhists were known for being extremely punctual. The monks had set up a few chairs inside the pagoda for the newsmen who, in addition to Browne and Tran, included Simon Michau of Agence France Presse and Nguyen Ngoc Rao, a Vietnamese working for United Press International. “Tran and I had the only cameras,” Browne recalled.
 
At nine o’clock the chanting stopped and the approximately 350 monks and nuns, as if they had practiced the maneuver beforehand, began to leave the pagoda. They lined up in the alleyway and proceeded onto the street, walking down it while arranged in three or four rows. Some of the marchers unfurled banners with slogans printed in Vietnamese and English that beseeched President Diem to honor Buddhists’ demands. A grey Austin sedan with three to four monks inside led the march, an innovation for such demonstrations, Browne noted. “It seemed strange to me at the time that the monks were now riding instead of walking,” he recalled.
 
When the procession stopped, the monks who had been in the Austin got out; one of them opened the car’s hood and pulled out a five-gallon gasoline can made of translucent plastic and filled, it appeared to Browne, with a pink liquid. Two younger monks accompanied an older member of their order, who Browne later learned was Thich Quang Duc. “He [Quang Duc] was resting his hands on their arms, and going over to the center of this circle,” Browne said. Sweat broke out on the reporter’s brow as he got his camera ready, anticipating that “a horror show was at hand.”
 
A monk placed a small, brown cushion on the pavement, and Quang Duc positioned himself on it, crossing his legs in the traditional lotus position. From his location—about twenty feet to the right and a little in front of Quang Duc, who kept his head slightly bowed—Browne watched as the monks assisting Quang Duc emptied all but about one liter of the liquid over the old man, “soaking his face, body, robes and cushion.” The monks stepped away from Quang Duc, leaving behind the container, which still had some liquid inside.
 

At 9:22 a.m. Browne could see Quang Duc’s hands move a bit in his lap as he struck a match. The newsman called out to Tran, who stood in a different part of the crowd, about twenty seconds before this happened. As Quang Duc lit the match, Tran appeared at Browne’s elbow. Recalling the incident, Browne said: “In a flash, he [Quang Duc] was sitting in the center of a column of flame, which engulfed his entire body. A wail of horror rose from the monks and nuns, many of whom prostrated themselves in the direction of the flames.”
 
While the flames engulfed Quang Duc, two monks brought out a cloth banner with the words (in English): “A Buddhist Priest Burns for Buddhist Demands.” A slight breeze sometimes blew the flames from Quang Duc’s face enough so that the reporter could see that his eyes were closed and “his features were contorted with agony.” Despite the pain, the monk, Browne noted, kept his upright position, his eyes closed, his hand folded in his lap, uttering no sound as the flesh melted from his body. “The reek of gasoline smoke and burning flesh hung over the intersection like a pall,” the newsman said.
 
Browne found himself “numb with shock” at the horrible scene. Witnessing anyone commit suicide or suffer a violent death “is always a hard experience,” he later noted. “You can get used to it in war, but there was something special about this. It was kind of a horror.”
 
Despite the grisly scene, Browne acted almost automatically, shooting several rolls of 35-mm, black-and-white Tri-X film. “The one thing that sort of keeps you going in war, or in times of crisis like that, is having something to do,” he pointed out. Trying to keep his mind off the ghastly sight, Browne kept thinking: “‘The sun is bright and the subject is self-illuminated, so f16 at 125th of a second should be right.’ But I couldn’t close out the smell.”
 
Although police had finally arrived, they appeared as stunned by what they were seeing as Browne had been, “running around aimlessly outside the circle of Buddhists.” About three or four fire trucks arrived, accompanied by riot police equipped with helmets and fixed bayonets. “The riot police charged down the street in a wave,” he reported, “but stopped short in confusion a few yards from the circle.”
 
As the fire trucks started to move down the street, several of the monks blocked them by throwing themselves in front of their front and rear wheels “so that the truck could advance only by rolling over them,” Browne recalled. The monks ignored the blasting of one of the horn and siren of one of the trucks as its driver vainly tried to get them to move out of the way.
 
One of the younger monks in the crowd used a portable, battery-operated loudspeaker to repeatedly proclaim, in Vietnamese and English: “A Buddhist priest burns himself to death. A Buddhist priest becomes a martyr.” Later, when questions swirled about whether the monk had been drugged, Browne recounted that while he could not swear there was nothing wrong with the monk, “he didn’t stagger as he walked to his place. He appeared calm, and exchanged a few words with the two monks with him, just before they poured the gasoline.”
 
Browne, when later asked why he had not interfered, pointed out that he probably could not have done anything to stop Quang Duc’s self-immolation, as the “monks and nuns had clearly rehearsed their roles for the ceremony many times, and had prepared methods for blocking interference,” as they showed when they used their bodies to keep the fire trucks from moving.
 
He divulged, however, that trying to stop what happened had not entered his mind. “I have always felt that a newsman’s duty is to observe and report the news, not to try to change it,” Browne stated. He believed it was his job as a journalist to take the pictures and get them and his story about the event to AP’s wire service as quickly and efficiently as he could. “It is difficult to conceive of any newsman acting otherwise,” Browne concluded
 
With the appalling ceremony completed, Browne knew that he had to get his photographs out of the country as soon as possible, realizing that doing so “was a very difficult thing to do in Saigon on short notice.” What mattered to him was to get the raw film shipped by air freight or some other way to the closest transmission point (AP’s bureau in Manila in the Philippines), since the image would not be subject to censorship at that point. Thinking fast, he sent Van Tran to the AP office with the film and instructed him to arrange for an airfreight shipment and schedule a telephone call to the news agency’s Tokyo bureau, in that order.
 
Van Tran was able to find a “pigeon,” a passenger on a regular commercial flight from Saigon, to carry the film to the Manila AP office, which had the facilities to send it via radio circuit to San Francisco, and from there to the news agency’s headquarters in New York for publication by its clients all over the world.
 
For Browne’s images to appear in AP member newspapers, they had to make, AP officials estimated, a fifteen-hour, approximately 9,000-mile journey over the news agency’s wirephoto system. The image used by most newspapers was a tightly cropped one showing Quang Duc engulfed in flames with the Austin and a small number of the monks in attendance in the background. Later, Browne’s full sequence, including an expanded view of the self-immolation, described by AP’s editors as “The Ultimate Protest,” became available for publication.
 
The initial burning monk image competed for space on front pages of U.S. newspapers with news stories and photographs of Alabama governor George Wallace blocking the entry of two Black students—Vivian Malone and James Hood—into the University of Alabama. Those newspapers worried about their readers’ reaction to the burning monk sometimes used Browne’s photo showing the Buddhist monks blocking a fire truck with their bodies.
 
The reaction was immediate. While millions of words had been written about the Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam, Browne’s pictures possessed what the correspondent later termed “an incomparable impact.”
 
A group of clergymen in the United States used the photograph for full-page advertisements in the New York Times and Washington Post decrying American military aid to a country that denied most of its citizens religious freedoms. Vietnamese Buddhist leaders emblazoned the image on placards they carried during demonstrations. Officials in Communist China used the image for propaganda purposes, distributing copies throughout Southeast Asia and attributing the monk’s death to the work of “the U.S. imperialist aggressors and their Diemist lackeys.” 
 
When President Kennedy called Henry Cabot Lodge to the White House to discuss becoming the new U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, the president had on his desk a copy of the monk photograph. “I suppose that no news picture in recent history had generated as much emotion around the world as that one had,” Lodge noted.
 
Quang Duc’s sacrifice weighed on Browne, who died on August 27, 2012. “I don’t think many journalists take pleasure from human suffering,” he noted, but he did have to admit to “having sometimes profited from others’ pain.” Although by no means intentional on his part, that fact did not help, Browne noted. “Journalists inadvertently influence events they cover, and although the effects are sometimes for the good, they can also be tragic,” he said. “Either way, when death is the outcome, psychic scars remain.” 
 
There were other deaths that Browne witnessed in Vietnam—losses that became mere “footnotes” in the history of the war compared to the “theater of the horrible” that Quang Duc’s sacrifice represented for his cause. Browne, however, never forgot them.