On June 11, 1963, Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk and religious leader in the former Republic of Vietnam, sat cross-legged, eyes closed, and head still as flames began to engulf his body. Accompanied by hundreds of fellow monks who formed a human barrier to block arriving fire crews, Quảng Đức burned for about 10 minutes before collapsing along a busy intersection in downtown Saigon.
Arms curled into the air, hands balled into fists; legs, still holding a bend upright; back, fallen flat on the pavement as pillows of white smoke rose from a charred chassis of burnt flesh. A sight serving as a horrific casualty of a message that endures to this day.
David Halberstam, a reporter on the scene then working for The New York Times, later described the sight in his memoir of the Vietnam War, The Making of a Quagsire: “I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think … As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.”
The stills of Quảng Đức’s burning body, captured by photojournalist Malcome Browne for the Associated Press, found their way into print just 15 hours after the shutter clicked. Flown on a commercial flight in secret to Manilla with the aid of “pigeon carriers” — civilians enlisted to bypass government censorship — the photos were then wired by radio to the global press. But of all the major newspapers in America to receive Browne’s photo in its heavily cropped state, only the Philadelphia Inquirer was willing to run it initially in full. The New York Times passed entirely, citing the graphic nature of the photo as unsuitable for Americans to see at the breakfast table. None of this stopped Browne’s photo, now known as “The Burning Monk,” from shocking an American public now demanding answers about their country’s involvement in Vietnam.
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Two weeks after Quảng Đức’s self-immolation a group of American clergymen paid for a full-page ad of the photo to run in The New York Times. The ad ran under the title, “WE, TOO, PROTEST.” The clergymen, organized under the group, Minister’s Vietnam Committee, professed four points of protest in solidarity with Quảng Đức:
(In the words of the original ad)
- Our country’s military aid to those who denied him religious freedom.
- The immoral spraying of parts of South Vietnam with crop-destroying chemicals and the herding of many of its people into concentration camps called “strategic hamlets.”
- The loss of American lives and billions of dollars to bolster a regime universally regarded as unjust, undemocratic, and unstable.
- The fiction that this is “fighting for freedom.”
They urged others to join them, to write to Congress and the President himself; in their own words: “[To] help focus the conscience of America on our involvement in grave injustice in South Vietnam.”
***
Two years ago, I gave a presentation on “The Burning Monk” for a war literature course. I chose not to put the photo of Quảng Đức’s suicide on the projector. Instead, I offered the class a warning on the nature of the photo — making it an individual choice to Google “The Burning Monk.” My professor looked like he’d seen it enough times to have buried some place deep and dormant in his mind. My classmates, those who chose to search for it, their eyes, half-fixed to the sight before them, moved back and forth from laptop screens to me.
I wasn’t the only one to present on the Vietnam War during that war literature class. But I was the only one who spoke from the side of the easily forgotten — the millions of innocent Vietnamese civilians killed, tortured, abandoned, and displaced in two decades of conflict. I spoke of how the world had changed, could have further changed, and came so close to changing, from the efforts of just one man. I also made Quảng Đức seem superhuman. I floated the idea that maybe in another timeline, all of this pain might have ended before so many more would die.
I was wrong then. Thinking about Quảng Đức’s act this way is deeply flawed. In glorifying his act as superhuman, in a moment captured by chance, I gave the impression that one man, alone in his sacrifice, was responsible for the consequences of that day. Quảng Đức’s choice that day is inarguably an incredible display of courage. (Even if, and I feel some need to say this, I don’t support self-immolation in any form — the cost of human life, to me, is too high.) It may have galvanized the movement to bring down the autocratic Diem regime in Vietnam, and awakened the conscience of the American people. But I amend my view of “The Burning Monk” now, to acknowledge not solely where movements begin, but to recognize where true power is created: when the most ordinary of people come together.
***
What drives a man to light himself on fire? Quảng Đức’s act had spiritual and political dimensions. Age 73 at the time of his self-immolation, Quảng Đức believed the sacrifice of the body to be a religious act, and the forfeit of his life “as a donation to the struggle.” In a letter written before his suicide, addressed to the Republic of Vietnam’s President, Quảng Đức writes, “I pray to Buddha to give light to President Ngo Dinh Diem, so that he will accept the five minimum requests of the Vietnamese Buddhists.” Quảng Đức asked Diem to be “kind and tolerant towards his people and enforce a policy of religious equality.”
Quảng Đức’s act was also an attempt to seize the attention of the global press. The monks who accompanied him believed it to be one of the only ways to cut through the mass censorship established by Diem’s regime. Browne, hearing rumors from monks for months that “something big was going to happen,” was one of the only western journalists to believe them the day of Quảng Đức’s burning. He claims that the monks had been calling foreign correspondents since the previous spring, but were not taken seriously.
A month before Quảng Đức’s self-immolation, a few hundred miles away along the furthest point of southern control in Hue, thousands of Buddhist monks took to the streets in protest. Thich Tri Quang, a prominent leader amongst the Buddhists gathered in Hue, organized a demonstration in response to the tearing down of Buddhist flags at a local pagoda the day prior. Tri Quang’s march endured fire hoses, stun weapons, bullets, and even the detonation of grenades by police. Eight people were killed, several just children. Three days prior, Vatican flags had been allowed to fly at a local Catholic church in celebration of Archbishop Ngo Dinh Duc — President Diem’s brother.
Diem was a president of a republic only in name alone. In principle, and in action, he was a brutal autocrat who favored and supported the expansion of Catholicism at the cost of suppressing the much larger, well-established, Buddhist population of Vietnamese. Diem’s regime ruled with absolute power over the citizenry. Elections were staged and manipulated. (In the 1955 national referendum, Diem reportedly won 133 percent of the votes cast in Saigon.) The press became state controlled; censored heavily to prevent opposition parties from forming — allowing only favorable views to Diem and his party to be published. Secret police were weaponized in mass raids targeting Buddhist pagodas; a report by the Department of State suggested over a thousand monks were arrested in a single day during the Xa Loi pagoda raids.
I don’t suppose some of this sounds familiar?
***
In the almost 250-year history of America, the nation has never experienced such uncertainty around its democracy as it has in the last year.
College campuses, once havens for young people exercising their right to figure out their lives as they protest injustice, teeter on the precipice of giving into ideological fealty under the Trump Administration. Book publishers hemorrhage exorbitant legal fees; fighting the erasure of, amongst a great deal of things, America’s past. Public media — everything from PBS to the unsung heroes of smalltown stations — legislatively gutted. Legacy papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, sued in excess, and repeatedly. Perhaps most concerningly, cable broadcasters, settling lawsuits — only to be muzzled permanently by the transfer of ownership into a new American oligarch class eager to earn favor.
Getting stopped, searched, detained, denied entry, and seeing your residence in this country revoked for texts to a friend, family member, or colleague at work, critical of the administration and its allies, is the America of today. Where protesting, perhaps the most American of rights, now carries with it the risks of being treated and prosecuted as a domestic terrorist. Or killed.
The late Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, wrote in his posthumous memoir Patriot, that “When corruption is the very foundation of a regime, those who battle it are extremists.” “Extremist” might not be a one-size-fits-all approach to labeling dissenters in an authoritarian state. (No two authoritarian states are the same after all). But, every power-hungry isolationist seeks labels. Seeks the means to split the masses amongst one another — no matter how reckless, nonsensible, or childish. In Diem’s regime, “communist” was the label for those fighting his treatment of Buddhists. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine favors “pro-Nazi,” “little Nazis,“ and “neo-Nazis” under an effort of “de-Nazification.” Donald Trump, who has taken the practice to a place none have gone in America, spouts on a seemingly hourly basis everything from “antifa,” “radical-left,” “hate our country,” and, yes, like Diem, “communists.” Take your pick, the meaning, and aim, is all the same.
***
At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, a 42-year-old Barack Obama delivered a message to the American people that has felt so irretrievably lost today: hope. Hope as a commitment, a mandate, that under one people, one country, the defense for one’s neighbor — no matter how far apart we all stand — defines who we are as people. Hope, as an agreement to one another, to stand for each and every one of our neighbors when it is most difficult. Hope, that plays on in a saved minute-and-16-second clip of the former President’s address I keep on my phone: “If there is an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney, or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It is that fundamental belief. It is that fundamental belief, ‘I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper’ that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, and yet still come together as one American family.”
Trump doesn’t believe in the same version of America. He doesn’t refer to his detractors as brother nor sister. He calls them “vermin,” “animals,” and ironically, fascists, to demean, dehumanize, and energize those who pledge loyalty to him. His supporters, who pledge to carry out his orders without hesitation, are patriots. Trump idolizes strongmen like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, Viktor Orban, and more recently, Mohammed Bin Salman. (Bin Salman, who ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, defended by Trump at the White House last November.) He’s drawn to their lavish lifestyles and unnerving desire to project an image of strength, no matter the cost. Yet, despite his efforts to enact his own version of absolute power, Trump is plagued by the paranoia that befalls all regimes: what happens when ordinary people choose to act, not in absence of fear, but in spite of it — all for one another.
Our stories remind us of what makes America that famed promised land sacrificed, suffered, and stowed away in the dreams of those half a world away. Remind us of what we stand to lose when those who fear the power of differences being put aside for common humanity, seek to sever us from one another. Stories of unheard loss, suffering, and doubts, remind us that we are one people, one human race, not alone in our struggles. These stories reassert our sense of responsibility for one another, and like journalism, writing, or the larger democracy we seek to preserve for the next generation, it owes everything to the people that show up for it.
Men like Trump, fear not the truth and the truth alone. They fear what people choose to do with it. Afraid of the millions of young people on college campuses across the country walking in the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement and the mass protests of the Vietnam War before them. Uneasy at how a single movement this past June — the “No Kings” protests — became one of the largest organized demonstrations in American history. Trump, like the men he adores, is no fool to the threat posed to his power. Like them, he’s desperate to do anything, at the expense of any human life (his supporters included), for you to believe one man could ever be enough to destroy what we hold dearest.
***
I know it’s hard to remain hopeful right now. To believe that a better day can and will come. I’d be lying if I told you that far harder days aren’t on the horizon. That our basic human decency won’t be further strained to the point of complete collapse — at the cost of permanent loss. A future where our capacity for lasting darkness won’t be tested like Quảng Đức and the monks of South Vietnam. I can’t even say whether or not the days of Diem will emerge in the next election cycle, when we’ll know if we will have one. I can tell you though, that I still believe in America.
Had there not been a Malcome Browne or a David Halberstram, perhaps there wouldn’t have been the movement Quảng Đức’s sacrifice began. But had there not been the hundreds and thousands of monks willing to stand up against Diem’s cruelty then, before, and until change came, there wouldn’t have been a reason to believe. A reason to hold on and fight long enough for an American public to wake to the horrors of their government’s role in Vietnamese suffering. A reason to inspire, four years later, the infamous 1967 March on the Pentagon — where tens of thousands of Americans then, demanded the end to the Vietnam War.
Atop the red bricks of the University of Washington’s Red Square, with the best view of the Suzzallo and Allen Libraries, lays a bench dedicated to Alexei Navalny. On it, a plague reads: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good people to do nothing.”
When I see college students carrying “Abolish Ice” signs, walking in the middle of the night in the freezing cold to protest, not even a week after Alex Pretti’s killing. See old ladies taking the bus back after a long day of marching. See trains last June packed like sardines with “No Kings” signs, in protests rivaling any city in the country. See hundreds of you at this publication’s gala last October, standing up for one another, no matter your fears, in support of local journalism. There’s nothing that makes me more proud to be an American. Because for me, this is the America my parents sacrificed so much for. This is the America that gave us a home.
[Editor’s note (2/15/26 at 8:38 a.m.): A longer version of this opinion column has replaced a shorter version that was based on what appeared in the print edition.]
