21. Dissuading Protesters With Rain
American ideas about forcing the skies to give up their water survived into the twentieth century and the Vietnam War. By 1963, South Vietnamese president and US puppet ruler Ngo Dinh Diem was on the ropes. His regime, marked by extreme nepotism, extraordinary graft, and astonishing levels of corruption, was hugely unpopular. Between that, a steadily intensifying Viet Cong insurgency, and economic hardships, South Vietnam was seething.
Protests were erupting up and down the country, only to be brutally put down by Diem’s security forces. That only added more fuel to the fire, and gave the South Vietnamese more cause for protest. However, bad as Diem might have been, he was still America’s Man in Saigon. So the US government tried to do what it could to prop him up – before finally abandoning Diem and backing a coup that overthrew him. Before washing its hands of Diem, however, the US thought up some batty ideas of supporting him. One such was the idea to literally dampen protesters’ enthusiasm with man-made rain.