LAOS: Over the River

In the steamy Laos capital of Vientiane early last week, Defense Secretary Phoumi Nosavan ‘bubbled with optimism over his army’s successes in combating Communist guerrilla attacks on the northern Laotian provinces of Phongsaly and Samneua. “In a month it will all be over,” he predicted, adding only as an afterthought, “unless there is an attack from North Viet Nam.”

But time plays tricks in primitive Laos, where communications are so poor that reports from the provinces are often as deceptive as stars that are burned out and dead by the time their light finally reaches the earth. Fact was that 29 hours before Phoumi spoke an estimated 4,000 fresh Communist troops, including North Vietnamese regulars, had come sweeping out of Viet Nam across the Nam Ma river into Samneua province. With their attack the situation in Laos changed from merely ugly to critical.

Red & Green. Everywhere the Communist assault came as a stunning surprise. Until last week the village of Xieng Kho, a huddle of thatch-roofed huts standing on spindly stilts deep in the Samneua jungle, had seemingly had little to fear. Xieng Kho’s garrison, dug in on a hillside above the village, consisted of 70 regulars of the royal Laotian army, 100 home guards and 25 counter-guerrillas who are called maquis by French-educated Laotians. For 25 miles along the western bank of the Nam Ma river, there were similar garrisons under the control of battalion headquarters at Muong Het. eight miles from the Vietnamese frontier. And they were backed up by six other battalions which had been rushed to the defense of Samneua province.

The first flicker of uneasiness was aroused in the defenders of Xieng Kho when a night reconnaissance patrol went out and did not return. Toward dawn the next day, a sentry spotted some shadowy figures and fired warning shots. As he did so, a red flare blossomed in the night, and from three sides mortar shells rained down on the village and its entrenchments. As the troops scrambled to their positions, they were raked by heavy fire from machine guns and 57 mm. recoilless rifles.

Finally, after a 15-minute pounding, a green flare lit the sky, and the barrage ceased. Communist infantrymen in force dashed 50 yds. closer to the beleaguered village, hit the dirt when a second red flare reopened the mortar barrage. With alternate barrages and infantry rushes, the attackers steadily closed in, got so near the entrenchments that the defenders could hear orders shouted in the Vietnamese, Thai and Kha dialects. Some of the enemy wore the olive drab uniforms of the North Viet Nam army; others the traditional ebony clothing that gives the name of Black Thai to the dissident border tribes.

Pattern of Flight. In 2½ hours it was all over. Their captain killed, the surviving Laotian troops broke for the safety of the jungle. Three days later, 46 of the original 195 defenders of Xieng Kho straggled into the provincial capital of Samneua, 25 miles distant as the crow flies.

The pattern of flight at Xieng Kho was repeated all along the river. A single-engine Beaver plane loaded with grenades, small arms and munitions, which was squared off to land at the weedy Muong Het airstrip, was met by machine-gun fire, barely got back to report that Muong Het had also fallen. An entire royal Laotian battalion of some 700 men, plus 400 home guards, had been cut to pieces.

As his outposts crumpled, 39-year-old Brigadier General Amkha Soukhavong, the Laotian army’s regional commander, sat on the porch of his headquarters in Samneua City, peeling litchi nuts and staring morosely at the mildewed Roman Catholic church across the street. For French-trained General Amkha, who still holds the rank of captain in the French army, it was a nightmare war. What news of the front he could get came from runners, a handful of Red prisoners and an endless stream of refugees :women with babies, men burdened with mattresses and sewing machines, a ten-year-old boy toting a submachine gun that his father, an ex-home guard, had told him to return to the government. To reach the area of a reported fight only 20 miles away in the jungle took Amkha’s troops nearly three days’ march. The wounded died where they fell, or were borne by litter, dugout canoe or oxcart only to reach the hospital with fatally gangrenous wounds. Matter-of-factly, General Amkha observed that he had been asking for U.S. helicopters for the past two years, had received none.

Urgent Appeal. When the news of the defeat finally reached Vientiane, something like panic seized the otiose Laotian government. Crown Prince Savang Vat-hana, 52, was speedily invested as Regent of Laos, taking over from his 74-year-old father, King Sisavong Vong, who abdicated because he felt the country needed a younger and more energetic chief of state. At the risk of exposing the southern provinces of Laos to attacks from Communist guerrillas operating out of northern Thailand, a fresh battalion of loyal troops was airlifted to threatened Samneua. And late in the week Laotian Foreign Minister Khampan Panya took a step that his government had desperately hoped to avoid, directed an urgent appeal to the U.N. Cabled Khampan: “In face of this fagrant aggression, for which [North] Viet Nam must bear the entire responsibility . . . the Royal Laotian Government requests the prompt dispatch of a [U.N.] emergency force.”

No Wire, No Trenches. At week’s end thousands of Communist invaders were being ferried across the Nam Ma river on rafts and rubber boats powered by out board motors, and Red patrols pushed within seven miles of Samneua City, telling villagers that it was futile for them to flee to the provincial capital since it would be in Communist hands in a matter of days. General Amkha seemed to agree. To cheer up his downcast aides, he cracked: “I am more afraid of Tokyo taxicabs than of the Communists.” But his seven battalions, numbering more than 4,000 men, were dispersed in the surrounding countryside, and he apparently had no intention of making a do-or-die stand in the city. “No barbed wire, no trenches,” he said. “With those you lock yourself in. We will retreat if attacked and then attack the enemy from the rear. This is not a war of fronts —we must be flexible.” Then, all optimism gone from his voice, he added, “They will attack in ten days at most . . . We will do what we can.”