Talk:Do Cao Tri
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[edit] The Death of a Fighting General
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,904774,00.html Monday, Mar. 08, 1971
I found this article online and wanted to incorporat more of the facts to General Do Cao Tri that gives a assessment of his leadership and the insirpiration he had with his soldiers in the fight for a South Vietnam not influenced by Communism.
TROUBLED by the slow pace of ARVN's thrust into Laos, South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu made a painful decision early last week. He would have to put a new man in charge. At 7 one morning, he summoned Lieut. General Do Cao Tri, 41, his nation's most decorated and best-known soldier, to the presidential palace in Saigon. Then he told Tri that the job was his. The two men briefly discussed precisely how and when Tri would take over command of Lam Son 719 from I Corps commander Lieut. General Hoang Xuan Lam. After the talk, Tri boarded his helicopter to see how his troops were faring in their other outcountry incursion, a drive through Communist sanctuaries in southeastern Cambodia. Barely 2½ hours later, the body of Do Cao Tri was pulled from the wreckage of his craft in Tay Ninh province.
The crash took the lives of ten men, including several of Tri's aides and Newsweek Correspondent François Sully (see THE PRESS). According to an official government account, there was a mechanical failure that set off an explosion aboard the craft while it was 100 feet in the air. Predictably, Saigon's busy gossip mills ground out another version: Tri was the victim of an elaborate conspiracy—the standard and not always inaccurate explanation for anything that happens in South Viet Nam. He was shot down, so the story went, by personal or political enemies. U.S. intelligence officers suspect that Tri's helicopter was actually downed by Communist antiair craft fire; the government circulated its story of mechanical failure, they say, to deprive the enemy of the satisfaction of having killed one of South Viet Nam's foremost military heroes.
Tri was often rated as ARVN's best fighting general, and his feats of personal bravery became legend. During last May's campaign in Cambodia, Tri frequently swooped down in his chopper to take personal command of a unit in trouble. On one occasion, after the man standing next to him was killed by an enemy shell, the plucky general leaped aboard an armored personnel carrier and urged it toward the source of the gunfire, shouting, "Forward, forward!"
Tri's standard battlefield uniform was a camouflage jungle suit, a baseball cap with three stars and a baton that, he joked, was always on hand "to spank the Viet Cong." He relished the spotlight and was candid enough to admit it. "I like being a hero," he said with disarming frankness during last year's Cambodian invasion. Less well known was the fact that the "Patton of Parrot's Beak," as he came to be nicknamed, was also a skillful administrator who had commanded three of South Viet Nam's four military districts and at times was considered to head the fourth. He backed Vietnamization long before it became a stated policy.
Born into a wealthy landowning family in Tay Ninh province. Tri choppered daily between the battlefield and his sumptuous villa, complete with swimming pool, on the river at Bien Hoa. There, Tri reveled in the role of host, bon vivant and raconteur. He was something of a zoo keeper as well, with ducks, pigeons, a deer, an ox and a pig roaming the grounds. Tri was devoted to his wife and six children; he taught economy to the younger ones by using their allowances to buy animal feed for the pig, then letting them split the profit when the pig was sold. But his style of living was so lavish that suspicions of corruption were continually raised against him, and in 1965, during a government investigation of his wealth, he attempted suicide. One of the sponsors of the inquiry was Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, then head of the air force. The two men became bitter enemies, and though they often saw each other at official functions after Tri resumed military command in 1967, they never shook hands.
Tri often said that he was happiest when he was with his soldiers in the field. Last week, while a soldier held a bunch of roses bound with a ribbon that read DADDY—WE LOVE HIM SO MUCH, Tri's casket was lowered into a grave in Bien Hoa's military cemetery. Fastened to the coffin's lid were his dress hat, his gloves, his sword and his baton.Bnguyen 05:40, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
[edit] The Patton of the Parrot's Beak
Monday, Jun. 08, 1970
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,909314,00.html?promoid=googlep
This guy is crazy," says an American who has known Lieut. General Do Cao Tri for several years. "Even when he wasn't a general he always got right into the fight." In ARVN's bad old days, his combativeness made him an exception. Now that the army is beginning to shape up, he is a symbol of its feisty new spirit. As commander of ARVN's Operation Total Victory, which has involved some of the deepest South Vietnamese air and armor thrusts into the Parrot's Beak and beyond, Tri has waded farther than ever into the shooting. A newsman who joined him on one recent foray was astonished when Tri ordered his helicopter to land virtually in the midst of a skirmish, then ignored vicious Communist rocket and machine-gun fire to walk to a tank and order the reluctant driver to attack. "Go fast, man!" Tri shouted. "Go fast!"
At 40, standing 5 ft. 4 in., Tri cuts a figure that is every bit as dashing as his style of command. In addition to his trademark camouflage jungle suit, Tri's combat regalia usually include a black three-starred baseball cap, a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .38 in a shoulder holster, a leather-covered briar pipe, and a swagger stick carried under the arm. "I use it to spank the Viet Cong," Tri says with a wide grin. -
He revels in his daredevil image, but he is also an obviously bright officer whose unusual nerve has produced some extraordinary exploits both on and off the field. The grandson of a Vietnamese mandarin and son of a wealthy landowner, Tri joined the French army in 1947 and received part of his cadet training in Hanoi. Since he won his first command as a young airborne officer, he has survived three assassination attempts, resulting in his conviction that he is a baraka—a French barracks term for one who enjoys immunity from death on the battlefield.
Many of Tri's early battles were political. He began making a name for himself in the mid-1950s, when he was a young lieutenant colonel commanding a paratroop unit in Saigon. When word came that three top generals were being detained in the presidential palace by one of the factions backing the late President Ngo Dinh Diem, Tri telephoned a brash ultimatum: "Free the generals in one half-hour or I will destroy the palace and everything inside it." One of the rescued generals was Nguyen Van Vy, now South Viet Nam's Defense Minister.
"I love the fight," Tri says. Pursuing the fight on a typical day last week, Tri covered more than 250 miles by helicopter, ranging from his III Corps headquarters at Bien Hoa to the huge Cambodian rubber plantation at Chup. For Tri, the day ended at 6:30 p.m., when he returned to his spacious family villa at Bien Hoa, 15 miles from Saigon, to relax with his wife, his six children and his swimming pool. Next morning at 7:30, he boarded a waiting helicopter with all the aplomb of a commuter headed for another day at the office—except that Tri's office these days is a large swath of disputed Cambodian territory and his day is spent in what he calls "a hunting game between my forces and the Communists."Bnguyen 09:23, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
