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The Chicken Vendor. The French were just then opening up their first officer class for the newly created Vietnamese army. Thieu enlisted and graduated at 26 with a second lieutenant's commission and orders to take command of an infantry platoon in the Delta. It was Viet Minh country, and the platoon got a hostile reception. For two weeks, the peasants would not even sell it any food. Then one day the Viet Minh mortared Thieu's little camp. After the bombardment, an old man suddenly appeared with eggs and chickens to sell. "I knew why he had come," says Thieu. "I said, 'Don't believe I am stupid, father. You came to check the accuracy of your mortar fire. I could kill you, but I won't!' " Instead he bought the chickens.
Thieu was neither stupid nor sentimental in the field. In 1954, promoted to major, he found himself leading an attack on the Viet Minh in his own village, Ninh Chu. The Communists retreated into Thieu's old home, confident that he would not fire on his own house. Says Thieu with grim satisfaction: "I shot in my own house." The only cause for criticism the young officer ever gave his superiors was an innate caution that made him less aggressive than they sometimes would have preferred—a reluctance to commit his troops to battle unless he felt absolutely sure he could win. It was a trait Thieu was to carry into politics.
Meanwhile, he moved steadily up the army ladder. In 1956, and again in 1960, he was sent to the U.S. for specialized military training. He put in four years as commandant of the National Military Academy at Dalat, a period that to this day continues to provide him with a reservoir of support among many middle-grade officers who look up to him as their teacher. His entree into politics came in December, 1962, when Diem assigned him to the command of the 5th, or Anti-Coup, Division, strategically positioned just north of Saigon. Thieu was put there because Diem did not trust the previous commander, Nguyen Due Thang, now Thieu's Minister for Revolutionary Development and one of the ablest Vietnamese officials around.
Diem's trust in Thieu was misplaced. Only eleven months later, the young colonel led one of the 5th Division's regiments in the coup against Diem. In the wake of Diem's overthrow, Thieu won his general's stars and the secretary-generalship of the junta that took over.
Love at First Snapshot. Canny, cautious and quiet through all the intrigue of the seven governments that came and went until he and Ky took power in June 1965, Thieu stayed close to the shifting center of control. Though he was chief of state in the military government that ruled Viet Nam until last week, and thus was nominally No. 1, Thieu was overshadowed by the flamboyant Nguyen Cao Ky, who as Premier visibly ran things. Thieu seemed a man more private than public.
His private life was distinguished by something still rare in Asia: a marriage not of convenience but of love. As a young officer he had been attracted by a snapshot carried by a colleague of a pretty Delta girl; he sought her out, fell in love, and in 1951 married her. Nguyen Thi Mai Anh was a Catholic, Thieu a Confucian Buddhist, but for her he promised to convert to Catholicism. He finally did in 1958—just in time, his detractors say, to help his army career under the Catholic Diems.