Nguyen Tat Ung, the secretary of rural affairs. Lansdale felt he was making real progress in fostering a good relationship with Ung, whom he judged to be an “unusually capable person.” Unfortunately a week later, on September 17, 1965, he received word that Ung and several of his aides had been killed in an airplane crash. This “tragic setback” would delay his attempts to reinvigorate a rural pacification program that had become largely moribund since Ngo Dinh Diem’s downfall two years earlier.15 Ung’s replacement was General Nguyen Duc Thang, a thirty-four-year-old officer who was widely seen
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