In August, less than two months after Lieutenant Colonel Wilkes’ arrival, President Diem appointed a new officer to head his Marine Corps. This time Bui Pho Chi, the captain who had commanded the 1st Landing Battalion during the sect uprising, was selected for the assignment. Chi’s appointment was only temporary, however, for in October Diem ordered Major Le Nhu Hung to assume command of the Marine Corps. Major Hung, who became the VNMC’s fourth Senior Officer, was to hold the position for four years. An attempt to abolish the Vietnamese Marine Corps coincided with the series of changes in its leadership and the departure of Lieutenant Colonel Croizat. During the summer months, the Vietnamese Minister of Defense proposed that the VNMC be made a branch of South Vietnam’s Army. Fortunately, the recent combat record of the 1st Landing Battalion outweighed the minister’s influence and the effort to disestablish the Vietnamese Marine Corps was thwarted. Another noteworthy incident in the record of the early relations between the U.S. and Vietnamese Marines occurred when the Marine noncommissioned officer billet within the MAAG was upgraded to an officer position. This adjustment, which anticipated the creation of the 2d Landing Battalion, had the effect of making a U.S. Marine officer available to advise individual VNMC battalions on a permanent basis. Thus originated a plan whereby a U.S. Marine officer would advise each Vietnamese Marine battalion--a concept abandoned only temporarily between 1959 and 1962. The Vietnamese Marine Corps continued as a two-battalion regiment under the command of Major Le Nhu Hung from mid-1956 through 1959. During this period Lieutenant Colonel Wilkes and his successor, Lieutenant Colonel Frank R. Wilkinson, Jr., a Marine who had served as an aide to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, instituted a variety of programs intended to provide the Vietnamese Marines with a common base of experience and training.[2-I] Perhaps the most important of these was one implemented in 1958 whereby Vietnamese Marine officers began attending basic and intermediate level schools at Marine Corps Schools, Quantico. Other formal schools for noncommissioned officers were established by the Vietnamese Marine Corps in South Vietnam. In an effort to build _esprit de corps_ among the lower ranking Vietnamese Marines, the U.S. advisors encouraged voluntary enlistments. They also persuaded their Vietnamese counterparts to adopt a corps-wide marksmanship training program similar to the one then in use by the U.S. Marine Corps. [2-I] See Appendix A for complete listings of VNMC Commandants and Senior Marine Advisors to the VNMC during the 1954–1964 period.