Battled French colonial forces

Politician and soldier emerged as U.S. ally

Tran Ngoc Chau, 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, died June 17 of COVID-19 in Los Angeles. He was 96.

Chau’s life was dominated by three decades of conflict, and he spent more than two years at a communist re-education camp in the 1970s. He later fled with his family to the United States, where he wrote a memoir, Vietnam Labyrinth, and was featured in Ken Burns’ documentary The Vietnam War.

Chau, a self-described “son of the mandarin aristocracy,” had trained to become a Buddhist monk before volunteering as an intelligence courier for the resistance during the Second World War. He rose from squad leader to battalion commander for the Viet Minh, the anti-French coalition formed by Ho Chi Minh.

In 1949 Chau defected to the French-backed forces, and when the French retreated, he served as an army officer in newly created South Vietnam, training defence forces in the Mekong Delta and rising to become a lieutenant colonel. Chau served as chief of the troubled Kien Hoa province, mayor of Danang and head of South Vietnam’s counter-insurgency training program.

Chau created Hoa’s “census-grievance program” in which officials were dispatched from village to village to elicit information about the enemy and corruption, and also created counterterror teams.

He was elected to the National Assembly’s lower house in 1967, rising to become secretary general.

In an especially risky manoeuvre, Chau acted as a go-between in unofficial peace talks, secretly meeting with his brother Tran Ngoc Hien, a senior intelligence officer in the North. Chau was arrested for “activities helpful to the Communists” and was sentenced to 10 years; he served four.

After North Vietnamese troops marched into Saigon in 1975, he was put to work at a communist re-education camp.

“After two years they let us visit, and we hardly recognized him,” his daughter said. “We saw an old man, just skin and bones. We had no idea it was him.”

Chau was released in 1978 and fled with his wife and five children in 1979, buying space — at a borrowed US$9,000 per person — on a refugee boat.

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

Few birth records existed, so his family gave him the birth date Jan. 1, 1924.

When Vietnam split, he entered a military academy and married Ho Thi Bich Nhan. She survives him, as do seven children; 14 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.