The Devil King

When long-haired Rebel Chieftain Ba Cut lost his head to a government guillotine a year ago (TIME, July 23, 1956), officialdom in Saigon thought that the threat of rebellions by the country's fanatic, oddball religious groups was ended at last.

But a new religion sprang up from the remnants of the old, and throughout rural Viet Nam last week illiterate, black-clad peasants bolted their doors at sunset, murmured incantations to the lotus flower, and talked in fearful and guarded tones of the Devil King and his Flying Men. The Devil King struck first last month at a small village 100 miles west of Saigon. His men entered a village restaurant, cold-bloodedly executed 17 men, women and children; a Buddhist was beheaded while praying.

Stories of the Devil King's men flew from village to village. Some said they covered themselves with tiger skins, others talked of the Devil King's sorcerer, who carried the embalmed heads of two virgins in a leather bag. When a detachment of President Ngo Dinh Diem's infantry raided one bandit hideout near the Cambodian border, they found a copy of orders from the Devil King instructing his men to kill, sow confusion among the peasantry and disturb rural security. They were told that anyone who killed ten persons would become able to fly, and anyone who killed 20 would be able to make himself invisible as well.

Terrified villagers termed the Devil King's new order Dao Lui, the Religion of the Sword, because his men, whether earthbound, high-flying or invisible, are addicted to murdering their victims by plunging their pikes through the palm-leaf walls of village huts. Recently the late Ba Cut's mother reportedly joined the Devil King, bringing with her several hundred of Ba Cut's old followers. The Devil King ordered them to let their beards grow down to their navels, administered an oath during which the newcomers drank one another's blood mixed with rice wine. The peasants' terror increased when red rains (caused by dust particles in the atmosphere) fell in their villages, told each other frantically that the end of the world was coming and that only the Devil King and his Flying Men would escape.

In Saigon, government officials thought the Devil King was too well equipped with rifles, mortars and ammunition of mortal make, suspected that the real Devil King was a former Communist guerrilla chieftain named Muoi Tri.

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