Word: khanh
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...commissioned a second lieu tenant of infantry in 1947, sent to metropolitan France for advanced training, and after his return given command of Viet Nam's first native airborne battalion in 1950. With the French engaged in their war against the Communist Viet Minh, Khanh led his paratroopers in a jump onto the Hoabinh battlefield of North Viet Nam, scene of a French defeat that was only slightly less disastrous than Dienbienphu, carried out a valiant rearguard action covering the French retreat. Khanh finished the war, in which he was wounded (he still likes to pull up his shirt...
Pajama Party. After partition, Khanh was chosen by Diem as the first commander of South Viet Nam's fledgling air force, soloed after eleven hours' instruction (he still does some flying now and then). His first exposure to American military methods came in 1957, when he spent a study tour at the U.S. Command & General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kans. Back home again, Khanh was promoted to brigadier general at 32, later named chief of staff of the Vietnamese Joint General Staff -from which post he helped crush the abortive 1960 paratrooper revolt against Diem. Later Khanh...
...against the Viet Cong and his efforts to win over the peasants, particularly the half-savage montagnard tribesmen, whose multiple dialects Khanh learned to speak...
...Khanh evidently took no part in the anti-Diem coup, though it is clear that he knew about the plot in advance. A week before the coup took place, he began to grow his black goatee. Apparently he did not like what he saw ahead, and a beard was his enigmatic symbol of future plans. After three months of watching the bickering and lethargy of the Big Minh junta, Khanh arrived in the capital to attend an officers' meeting, quietly rallied some fellow officers, including the commander of troops surrounding Saigon, and on the night of Jan. 30 pulled...
Salems & Sea Swallows. In his new job Khanh has even less time for his handsome wife, Pham Le Tran, a North Vietnamese by birth, or his children: a six-year-old daughter and three sons, aged eleven, nine and two (a fourth son drowned in a Saigon fish pond last year). Neither does he get to pursue his favorite hobbies-the breeding of tropical fish and sea swallows. A clean-living type, Khanh rarely drinks; his only visible vice is chain-smoking. He puffs through three and four packs of Salems a day, shrugs: "I read all the reports about...