Early Years and Military Beginnings
Trưởng was born in 1929 to a wealthy family in the Mekong Delta province of Kiến Hòa (now Bến Tre Province). At the time, Vietnam was part of French Indochina. After graduating from Mỹ Tho College, a French colonial-run school in the Mekong Delta provincial town of Mỹ Tho, Trưởng attended the reserve officer school at Thủ Đức in Saigon, and was commissioned as an infantry officer in the Vietnamese National Army in 1954. Upon graduation from Thủ Đức, Trưởng went immediately on to airborne school at the Command and Staff School of the Vietnamese National Military Academy at Đà Lạt. He served in the elite airborne brigade the next 12 years. His first posting was as commander of 1st Company, 5th Airborne Battalion.
See also: Battle of Saigon (1955)After graduating from Đà Lạt, he soon saw action in a 1955 operation to eliminate the Bình Xuyên river pirates who were vying with President Diệm's government for control of Saigon and the surrounding area. In recognition of his performance against the Bình Xuyên, Trưởng was promoted to first lieutenant. When the Republic of Vietnam was created in 1955, the VNA became the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).
Read more about this topic: Ngo Quang Truong
Famous quotes containing the words early, years, military and/or beginnings:
“He had long before indulged most unfavourable sentiments of our fellow-subjects in America. For, as early as 1769,... he had said of them, “Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.””
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.”
—Louis Aragon (1897–1982)
“War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valour, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“These beginnings of commerce on a lake in the wilderness are very interesting,—these larger white birds that come to keep company with the gulls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)