Word: tra
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...Tra's secretiveness is typical of the architects of the Communist victory. Both to protect relatives in the South from reprisals by the Saigon regime and to avoid becoming the objects of personality cults, the Vietnamese Communists have traditionally disdained publicity about their personal lives or careers. Moreover the precise relationship between the Communist government in the North and the Provisional Revolutionary Government in the South has never been totally clear, though all important decisions seem to be made in Hanoi...
...Tra, 57, appears to hold both a North Vietnamese commission as a lieutenant general and the job of Defense Minister in the P.R.G. (the Viet Cong is the fighting arm of the P.R.G.). Apparently he is of peasant origin and has no formal education; in his younger years he worked as a coolie on the railroad in his native Quang Ngai province, which is in central Viet Nam. Recruited by Ho Chi Minn, Tra was a Communist Party agitator against the French colonial government in the 1930s and 1940s...
During World War II, Tra at first led a 200-man guerrilla band near the Laotian border but rose rapidly in the ranks of the Viet Minh, the Communist-led liberation movement. In 1945, as the leader of a Viet Minh force that occupied the imperial capital of Hue, he was quartered in the former French Resident's master bedroom. After the first night, Tra complained that the bed was too soft; he wound up sleeping on the floor. In 1946 Tra became chief of staff of the Viet Minh in central Viet Nam. Not long after...
...Tra's superior in the military structure is Senior General Van Tien Dung, 57, chief of staff of the North Viet Nam People's Army since 1953. A loyal Giap disciple and master logician, Dung is the youngest member of the Politburo of the ruling Lao Dong (Workers) Party. He was born to a peasant family in Ha Dong province in the North, joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and spent about five years in a French prison before escaping to China in 1944. A year later he took command of Viet Minh forces...
...negotiator in Paris and is one of the movement's most visible and best-publicized representatives. But Western analysts believe that the real power in the P.R.G. is wielded by Phat, a former architect who was the N.L.F.'s vice chairman and chief theoretician, and the mysterious Tra...