Lương Trọng Tường was an early follower of the Hòa Hảo prophet Huỳnh Phú Sổ and one of the most powerful men in An Giang Province. He had long surrounded himself with a two thousand man private army that included national army deserters. Officials in Sài Gòn sent him vain directives to disband, but hesitated to infringe on the autonomy that ensured the Hòa Hảo’s cooperation with the government. From the Hòa Hảo perspective, any concession risked even further central government control. The stalemate broke when a rival Hòa Hảo group, known locally as the Golden Crab and more formally as the Miền Tây Anti-Communist Force, assassinated Lương Trọng Tường’s deputy. Seizing the opportunity to assert control, Sài Gòn sent the national army into northwest Châu Đốc to capture these “outlaws.” After two weeks, several firefights, and hundreds of arrests, government troops surrounded the Golden Crab commander Mach at his home. He refused to surrender. The soldiers strafed the house. Inside they found Mach’s body, not among the crude tools of an outlaw, but the paraphernalia of administration: legal forms, typewriters, and seals of office. Officers at the US embassy followed events from afar. They concluded the Golden Crab had exercised “quasi-governmental jurisdiction” in the area. Sài Gòn got its outlaws–yet for a time they made the law in that small corner of Châu Đốc. That was in late 1974. It was the last fight between President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu’s Republic of Vietnam and the Hòa Hảo figures it relied on for electoral and military support in the Mekong Delta. The fall of Sài Gòn and the last of Indochina’s ordinal wars would soon overshadow this minor affair. Yet it does say something important about the character of the state and sovereignty in Vietnam, one which took form decades earlier but continued to constrain the country’s various nation builders. Sovereignty is not a fact. It is an assumption about authority that Lương Trọng Tường and Mach demonstrate could not be taken for granted in Vietnam. To understand the modern Vietnamese state and how the Golden Crab came into possession of some small piece of it, we should reexamine this state’s origins and the fragmentary nature of sovereignty in Vietnam. Though largely forgotten today, the Republic of Vietnam’s halting experiments in state building, counterinsurgency, and socio-political reform had begun during the First Indochina War under its predecessor state: the French-sponsored State of Vietnam (SVN) [Quốc Gia Việt Nam].