Retired General Surayud Chulanont, 63, was tipped by Thai media as the interim leader who will replace ousted Thaksin Shinawatra and seek to unify the country as it heads to elections the generals have promised a year from now.
A one-time Buddhist monk widely seen as a man of integrity, Surayud would bring to the job the qualities the generals are looking for - a spit-and-polish military background tempered with democratic credentials.
The grandson of a coup leader and son of a communist insurgent, Surayud has built a reputation as a military reformer who has said a soldier's place is in the barracks and who has personally stayed aloof of politics.
General Surayud has said he learnt a crucial lesson from the bloody turmoil that followed Thailand's last coup 15 years ago, when troops opened fire on students and killed more than 50 of them on May 17, 1992.
"It convinced me that the army should never be involved in politics," he later told the news magazine Time.
Even though soldiers under Surayud's command were seen taking part in the violence, the then-special forces commander said he did not give the order to shoot, a claim that has never been publicly disputed.
Surayud later told a biographer: "When I think of 'Bloody May,' I feel regret. It's a scar for the army."
In 1998 Surayud was named army chief, tasked with cleaning up a force then notorious for smuggling, political meddling and committing human rights abuses with impunity.
The general - who had trained at the US Army's Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and commanded troops in the sensitive Cambodia and Myanmar border regions - lectured recruits to respect the constitution and the rule of law, listen to the people and not take the "short-cut" of staging a coup.
He was praised for restoring the people's trust in the army, a change borne out after the most recent coup when thousands of Thais warmly greeted the tank units that rolled into Bangkok.
Surayud, born on August 28, 1943 as the youngest of three children, has said that in restoring honor to the military he followed the lessons he had learnt from his father, even though he had only met him a few times in his life.
While Surayud was a young student at a Bangkok cadet school, his father Lieutenant Payom Chulanont, disaffected with an army he believed had lost its way, left the family to join communist guerrillas in the Thai northeast.
Later, when Surayud himself led military forces against the insurgents in the 1960s, he was haunted by the vision that one day he may kill his own father, according to his biography "The Iron Path - From Communist Son to Army Commander."
Father and son never met on the battlefield, but they saw each other one last time in 1981 as the old man lay dying, exiled in China. They took a photo together, which Surayud never showed to anyone outside his family.
Surayud had asked then-premier General Prem Tinsulanonda for the special favor of allowing him to travel to Beijing to see his dying father.
His ties to Prem would again be crucial when Surayud retired after a 38-year military career in 2003, having clashed with Thaksin, who had sidelined him to the less influential post of supreme commander.
Surayud joined the Buddhist monkhood for three months before he was asked to join the Privy Council, the inner circle of palace advisors to the revered King Bhumipol Aduljadeh, that was headed by Prem.
The career soldier Surayud, a twice-married father of three, chose the palace position, seen as above daily politics, rather than give in to the overtures of several political parties asking him to come on board.
"I am not suitable for politics," Surayud said at the time, according to his official biography. "I know it well, so I don't want to get involved in politics. I just want to be a full civilian."
© 2006 Agence France-Presse
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