6 - Relaxing and Rebuilding (October 1950 to March 1958)

Summary

When the enemy is close to your troops and each side does not know the combat efficiency of the other, you must guard against the inclination to fight the enemy who may lure your troops from the jungle before you are prepared.

Letwetthondra, Vyuuacakki

As Ne Win entered his 41st year, he might well have felt that he had done his share of creating and defending Myanmar as an independent state. During the previous decade, he had been part of six organizations and re-organizations of Myanmar's first army since 1885. He had climbed up and been lowered down the chain of command of armies led by Japanese, Burmese, British, and again Burmese officers. Always playing a leading role, whatever his rank, he rose to the pinnacle of military power and had political power within his grasp, but had refused to keep it. Seen by many as the “virtual dictator” of those parts of the country where the government's writ ran,1 rather than grab for power, he eased back and for the next eight years reverted to a man many people remember from his life in Yangon during and after his stint at Yangon University, a rather shiftless, easygoing playboy, intent on rather selfish and hedonistic pursuits, with little ambition and less energy for the details of government.

During the next eight years, he married, for the third time, the woman with whom he is most remembered in Myanmar and who bore him three children who were closest to him. To the extent that Ne Win had a normal domestic life, it was during this period. He travelled the world for business and pleasure, playing golf in Scotland, lunching with prime ministers and heads of state, taking what were in effect extensive holidays abroad, as well as visiting foreign military bases and holding high-level strategic and political discussions with governments of every political stripe, capitalist republics, Communist one-party regimes, and the mixed bag that came to be known as the Third World, of which Myanmar was a part. He clearly mellowed during these years and the intensity which had driven him in the 1940s, and especially during the height of the civil war, was gone, for a man taking a more measured view of matters, even a degree of detachment.