Tran Ngoc Chau (1 January 1924-17 June 2020) was a South Vietnamese politician and an ARVN Lieutenant-Colonel during the Vietnam War.
Biography[]
Tran Ngoc Chau was born in Hue, French Indochina in 1924, and he came from a family of Buddhist-Confucian government officials. He was trained as a Buddhist monk as a youth and was also educated at a French school, but he and his siblings became nationalists and joined the Viet Minh in 1944. By 1949, however, Tran had turned against communism, and, in 1954, he joined the ARVN military of South Vietnam after the end of the First Indochina War. He became Mayor of Da Nang and a province chief in the Mekong Delta, and he supported the provision of security to civilian populations during the Vietnam War. In 1967, he resigned from the ARVN and joined the National Assembly, but he failed to convince his old friend Nguyen Van Thieu to lead efforts to make peace with North Vietnam, and he was imprisoned for treason in 1970 for speaking to his communist brother. He was only freed after the Fall of Saigon in 1975, and he was then sent to a communist re-education camp and released in 1978. A year later, he left for America, and he settled in the San Fernando Valley of California and became a US citizen in 1984. He later published his memoirs and was frequently interviewed about his experiences. He died of COVID-19 in Los Angeles in 2020.