Tran Ngoc Chau: Vietnamese soldier and influential American ally

While many commanders favoured pummelling the enemy with artillery and airstrikes, Chau focused on mobilising rural communities

Chau talks to the media in Saigon, 1969 (AP)

Tran Ngoc Chau was a Vietnamese soldier and politician who battled French colonial forces and later the communist Viet Cong, emerging as an influential American ally before being imprisoned in Saigon on treason charges.

He died on 17 June at a hospital in the West Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 96. His daughter Tamminh Tran Kapuscinska said the cause was complications from Covid-19.

Chau was part of a dwindling group of Vietnamese people whose lives were dominated by three decades of conflict, including the resistance against Japanese occupation during the Second World War, the battle for independence against colonial France and the war that followed the country’s 1954 partition, which pitted the communist north against the US-backed south.

That conflict remained a vivid and sometimes painful memory for Chau, who spent more than two years at a communist “re-education” camp in the 1970s and later fled with his family to the United States, where he wrote a memoir, Vietnam Labyrinth (2012), and was featured in the PBS documentary The Vietnam War (2017) by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

Among American military advisers and intelligence officials, he was perhaps best known as the architect of a novel counterinsurgency strategy that aimed to win hearts and minds in the countryside as the war escalated in the 1960s, and that partly inspired the CIA’s controversial Phoenix programme.

While many commanders favoured pummelling the enemy with artillery and airstrikes, or employed search-and-destroy tactics to drive the body count upward, Chau focused on mobilising rural communities, identifying and resolving the grievances of the country’s peasants and using deadly force only as a last resort.

“We should have been as capable as the communists,” he wrote in his memoir, “if we, and American leadership, had realised that at heart this war was less about battalions and more about the political cultural feeling of the people in hamlets who were the rural backbone of the nation.”

His approach made him an ally of US operatives such as Edward Lansdale and John Paul Vann, the subject of Neil Sheehan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography A Bright Shining Lie. Introducing Chau to Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who later became an anti-war activist, Vann called him “the most knowledgeable Vietnamese on the subject of defeating communist insurgency I’ve ever met”.

Chau found success against insurgents in part because he had been one himself. A self-described “son of the mandarin aristocracy”, he had trained to become a Buddhist monk before volunteering as an intelligence courier for the resistance during the Second World War. He later became a field commander for the Viet Minh, the anti-French coalition formed by Ho Chi Minh, and rose from squad leader to battalion commander.

But he resisted calls to join Ho’s Communist Party – “They didn’t respect our religion or traditions,” he later told Ellsberg – and defected in 1949 to join French-backed forces loyal to Bao Dai, the last emperor of Vietnam. When the French retreated from the region, he served as an army officer in newly created South Vietnam, training local defence forces in the Mekong Delta and rising to become a lieutenant colonel.

Under President Ngo Dinh Diem and his American-backed successors, Chau served as chief of the troubled Kien Hoa province, mayor of Danang and head of South Vietnam’s counterinsurgency training programme. It was there that he aimed to expand the anti-guerrilla efforts he had started in Kien Hoa, a region known as “the cradle of revolution” for its long-standing struggles with communist fighters.

As province chief, Chau overhauled Kien Hoa’s intelligence operation, creating a “census-grievance programme” in which officials were dispatched from village to village, where they conducted one-on-one interviews designed to elicit information about the enemy and complaints about corrupt local officials, who were then disciplined.

With support from the CIA, he also created “counterterror” teams that conducted clandestine missions to capture or kill enemy operatives, with inspectors appointed to investigate allegations of abuse. Official statistics suggested that those efforts were a success, with the estimated number of civilians living in government-controlled areas rising from 80,000 to 220,000 during his first year as province chief.

Chau’s initiatives “bore more than a passing resemblance” to the Phoenix programme, a CIA-coordinated effort that carried out tens of thousands of “capture or kill” operations from 1968 to 1972, according to historian Edward Miller. Critics said that operatives with the programme routinely tortured, murdered and assassinated South Vietnamese, accusations that American officials denied.

Chau later called the programme a “perversion” of his original ideas, and he was not directly involved in Phoenix’s creation. Frustrated by infighting within his counterinsurgency programme, he turned to politics and was elected to the national assembly’s lower house in 1967. He rose to become its secretary general, as well as an increasingly outspoken critic of President Nguyen Van Thieu, a former army friend.

Chau accused Thieu of presiding over corruption in the assembly, and he broke with the president in calling for political negotiations with North Vietnam in the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive. “Tet had convinced him that it was wrong to inflict on the Vietnamese people a war ‘without any end in sight’,” Sheehan wrote in A Bright Shining Lie, “and he thought that the Saigon side had a chance of surviving if it negotiated a peace in time.”

In an especially risky manoeuvre, Chau decided to act as a go-between in unofficial peace talks, meeting in secret with his brother Tran Ngoc Hien, a senior intelligence officer in the north. After the South Vietnamese government found out about the meetings, Chau was arrested in 1970 for “activities helpful to the communists”.

Chau resisted efforts by Vann and others to smuggle him out of the country, deciding that his departure would bolster allegations that he was a Communist Party agent. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison at a military trial.

Supporters in South Vietnam and the United States insisted the charges were politically motivated, driven by Chau’s criticisms of Thieu. And while the South Vietnamese supreme court ruled that the trial had been unconstitutional and annulled his sentence, Chau remained in prison for four years before being released to house arrest.

After North Vietnamese troops marched into Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in 1975, Chau was put to work at a communist re-education camp.

“After two years they let us visit him, and we hardly recognised him,” his daughter Kapuscinska said. “We saw an old man, just skin and bones. We had no idea it was him. It was a miracle he survived.”

Chau was released in 1978 and fled the country with his wife and five children the next year, buying room on a refugee boat carrying members of the country’s ethnic Chinese minority. They made their way to Malaysia and were marooned on an Indonesian island for months before reaching the United States.

Settling in Los Angeles, Chau studied computing at a community college and took low-paying jobs, working on an assembly line and in the kitchen at a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant before starting a desktop publishing business. For about five years, he and his family pooled their incomes to repay a friend who had lent them the money they needed for their boat trip to America – a journey that was paid in sheets of gold bullion costing about $9,000 per person, according to a New York Times report.

“Sixty-three thousand dollars is a cheap price to pay for freedom,” Chau said.

Tran Ngoc Chau was born in Hue, the former imperial capital, where his father was a judge. His daughter said that few birth records existed at the time, and “just for convenience” his family gave him the birth date 1 January 1924.

Chau had at least half a dozen half siblings, all of whom joined the anti-French resistance. When Vietnam split up, most went to the north, while Chau and two brothers stayed in the south. He entered a military academy and married Ho Thi Bich Nhan.

She survives him, as do seven children; many half siblings; 14 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

While at the military academy in Da Lat, the Chaus befriended Thieu, the future president, and his wife, who together settled in suburban Boston after the fall of Saigon. Despite their falling-out and Chau’s arrest, the couples resumed their friendship in the 1990s.

“They were best friends again,” Kapuscinska said, adding that their reconciliation was not unusual. “After the fall of Saigon, the north came to the south, brothers met sisters, and people became family again. It was just politics.”

She recalled that while Thieu had initiated the meeting, her father quickly agreed.

“Past is past,” he said.

Tran Ngoc Chau, born in Hue, 1923 or 1924, died 17 June 2020

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