Laos: The Awakening

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The silvery Cessna Wren scudded high above the Plain of Jars, and the tiny man in rumpled fatigues peered down through eyes red-rimmed with exhaustion. Below him the wind moved casually over apple-green downs, setting the jade-colored rice fields to shivering. A few pagodas, their tiled roofs torn by howitzer shells, yawned at the sun. On the barren hilltops, orange-colored lines of slit trenches spread like ringworm across the Plain of Jars, which had been fought over for three years by Communist Pathet Lao troops and neutralist forces. The tired little passenger in the Wren was neutralist General Kong Le, whom the Communists had just pushed off the Plain. But he vowed to get back on it—with American help.

Kong Le was on his way to inspect one of his outposts at the edge of the Plain. As his aircraft slewed to a halt near the village of Vang Vieng, he jumped down and stared around at the straggly cluster of palm-thatched huts and muddy walkways that would be his headquarters for the next fight, for it was here that he expected the Communists to resume the attack. Kong Le and his headquarters looked worn, scruffy, far from impressive. But he stood almost alone in Laos last week as the West’s only effective battler against Communism. With only 3,000 ill-paid, ill-trained troops supplied only infrequently by airdrops, Kong Le’s prospects seemed poor. His spirit did not. “Whether we win or lose,” he said, “I’m afraid there is not much choice except to fight until we can fight no longer.”

Behind Kong Le loomed an elaborate, half-hidden U.S. operation designed to maintain the fiction of Laotian neutrality and keep both Kong Le and Premier Souvanna Phouma’s government from falling completely to the Communists. For the first time outside South Viet Nam, the U.S. had used direct if limited military intervention in its attempt to hold Southeast Asia from the Red Chinese and North Vietnamese. From Washington to Vientiane, the operation was punctuated by denials that obviously could not be kept up much longer. After all, it was an election year, and even as Lyndon Johnson preached “the pursuit of peace,” other Government officials were taking pains to tell Washington journalists that Southeast Asia was as crucial to Western interests as Berlin. But the U.S. had made a move, and, for the moment at least, it seemed to have produced an effect.

Hawks & Doves. The neutralist government of Prince Souvanna Phouma, shaken severely by a right-wing coup last April, had been jolted further by a series of sharp Pathet Lao attacks that forced Kong Le off the Plain. If the precariously balanced Laotian coalition was to hold, outside help was needed. A month ago, unarmed U.S. jets began flying reconnaissance missions over Red territory in hopes of intimidating the Pathet Lao. When one of the slow-flying Navy recon planes was downed by Russian-made antiaircraft guns, the U.S. decided to send armed jet fighters to escort the reconnaissance craft. When one of the escorts was shot down, too, the U.S. obviously had to do something—or give up the whole game.

The aviary of official Washington was, as usual, divided between “hawks” and “doves.” Foremost among the hawks was Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who urged strong retaliatory action. Leaning heavily on the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, McNamara pointed out that in a normal combat situation the reconnaissance targets would have been clobbered by fighter strikes before the recon planes were sent out. But since the “Mickey Mouse game” of diplomacy had to be satisfied, such sound military tactics had been precluded, and two planes lost. Now, said McNamara, was the time to hit those targets.

The doves contended that any U.S. strike would jeopardize Souvanna’s neutralist position, make him appear an American stooge and thus play into Pathet Lao hands. Besides, there was the danger of “escalation.” At the same time, interservice rivalry reared its head in the discussion: the Air Force argued that it could best carry out any Laotian retaliatory mission, while the Navy, whose planes after all were the ones shot down, demanded the privilege of striking back. And the Strategic Air Command, hoping to refocus its image in an era of minuscule rather than massive retaliation, asked for a chance to show “how gentle” its big bombers could be on a delicate mission.

Turn of the Screw. President Johnson himself finally sided with the hawks. It was decided to turn the screw just slightly, by applying the smallest amount of pressure available, and then sit back to see what happened. Philippines-based Air Force jets were picked to carry out the mission. Out of Clark Air Force Base near Manila swept a flight of eight F-100s, stopping en route in already committed South Viet Nam to take the onus off the Republic of the Philippines. After refueling, the jets hit the guilty gun emplacements with rockets and machine-gun fire.

At about the same time, the small Royal Laotian Air Force was also busy. Flying out of Vientiane’s Wattay Airport and another strip near Savanna-khet in the south, stubby, old-fashioned U.S.-built T-28 trainers hung with 500-Ib. bombs, rockets and machine guns roared in on Pathet Lao bases and troops on the Plain of Jars and near the South Vietnamese border. The 25 planes had been supplied by the U.S., but were ordered into action for the first time by a reluctant Souvanna only in the current crisis. The Royal Laotian Air Force has only twelve pilots, and the other planes were reportedly piloted by U.S. civilian soldiers of fortune and by U.S.-trained Thai aviators.

Protest Before Poetry. In 36 sorties during one week, the T-28s knocked out Communist posts, wiped out a truck convoy on the fringe of the Plain of Jars, and left tanks, trucks and Pathet Lao Leader Prince Souphanouvong smoldering. When a group of Control Commission diplomats—nominally the overseers of Laotian neutrality—arrived at Souphanouvong’s headquarters at Khang Khay, they found his tidy, white-walled villa pocked by bullets and ripped by bombs, while the pink-roofed Chinese mission near by lay in ruins. One Chinese attaché had been killed in the raid, which was carried out by three Laotian Air Force T-28s—though Souphanouvong insisted U.S. jets had done the deed.

Dapper as usual in a linen suit, pearl stickpin and black rubbers to fend off the monsoon mud, Souphanouvong was in a well-tailored snit. He greeted his guests with indignant demands for an immediate full-dress conference of the 14 Geneva agreement signatories who had guaranteed Laotian neutrality two years ago. Such a meeting could only confirm the status quo for the Pathet Lao, who have grabbed a lot of territory in recent weeks, and Neutralist Souvanna at U.S. urging had refused any new Geneva-level conference unless the Pathet Lao first withdrew from the Plain of Jars. As Souphanouvong argued his case, the thump of antiaircraft guns sounded in the distance, followed by the whine of aircraft engines. Diplomats ducked nervously as Laotian T-28s laid bombs on target near by, then wheeled back toward Vientiane.

“Now America has entered the war by sending planes,” shrilled Souphanouvong’s information minister. Having made his protest, Souphanouvong returned, at least for the present, to his favorite hobby—writing poetry.

With Souvanna’s agreement, the U.S. meanwhile announced that it would continue to fly reconnaissance missions when necessary for Kong Le’s army, and would retaliate against any guns that fire at its planes. To that end, the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Constellation was cruising in the South China Sea off South Viet Nam, some 250 miles from the Plain of Jars. The question that remained in everyone’s mind was whether the U.S. would intervene with airpower only when provoked, or whether the jet strikes presaged a willingness to carry the air war in Laos further.

Not that the U.S. particularly wants to be in Laos, any more than it wants to be in the rest of what used to be Indo-China. But the vacuum left by the French collapse a decade ago forced the U.S. to assume responsibility for the area. Laos is less important strategically than its Vietnamese neighbor; the country could fall to the Communists without necessarily making the situation in South Viet Nam much worse, while the fall of South Viet Nam inevitably would also mean the fall of Laos. But if the U.S. could deny the implausible little kingdom to the Communists, it would have important effects in the area. It would not only demonstrate firmness against Chinese expansion, but it would also make some important points about neutralism, a concept so often and so loosely offered as a solution in Southeast Asia.

The U.S. has moved a long way from the time when it automatically backed the rightists in Laos and elsewhere and assumed neutralism was immoral. But the neutralists have come a long way, too, and no one embodies this fact better than Kong Le. The gritty, grinning captain of paratroopers had fought for almost a decade in jungle and mountains, while fat cats in the cities grew fatter on U.S. and Communist aid; yet never had he known whom or what he was fighting or defending. “You have to give a man something to live for,” he said, “before you can ask him to die.” To the tough paratrooper, as to most Southeast Asians, the cold war was a puzzlement. Neutrality seemed the answer, and Kong Le gladly included the Pathet Lao within his amiable embrace. But, battle by battle and defection by defection, Kong Le and Laos learned that not even a neutral could stand safely beside the Pathet Lao.

Lotus Land. Kong Le’s awakening to the realities was a painful process. Of all the people involved in the struggle between Communism and the West, none were more reluctant to enter it than the Laotians. Delighted inhabitants of a warm, green land, where all a man needed was “a small knife to peel bananas and a large one to kill pigs,” the Laotians had built their culture on singing, silk weaving and sex. Scarcely a week goes by without the celebration of a boun—the Laotian festival at which men play the khene, a many-barreled bamboo flute, while the lissome women dance the Jamvong, swinging their long, embroidered skirts while their delicate hands tell tales of love. The skirts are called sinhs, but the deeds that follow the dance are not.

The 2,000,000 Laotians earn a scant $90 a year on the average, but it scarcely bothers them. They have a taste for fried bricks of green river moss and charcoal-broiled toad stew, and the ingredients for both are abundantly available in Laos. A steep, river-rent land of limestone cliffs and rich alluvial plains, Laos can grow enough rice, bamboo, flowers and toads to keep its people happy forever. French attempts to impose European ways on Laos from 1893 to 1954 failed for the most part—in fact, Frenchmen who served in Laos usually returned as dreamy-eyed, wistful victims of the malaise Laotien.

At Vientiane’s Wattay Airport, where the Laotian air raids originate, the clocks that are supposed to tell the time in other world capitals are inevitably out of joint. A Westerner can buy a week of perfumed Elysium for the price of a pair of gold-mounted tiger-claw cuff links ($20), drive his sports car right into the Hotel Constellation bar and play endless rounds of Cameroon, a dice game nearly as complicated as Laotian politics. All these qualities of Laos—its fey charm, its naivete, its innocent lechery, its refusal to see the world as an interlocking whole—are reflected in Kong Le himself. To a large extent they keep him from being a really major leader. But he may be closer to it than anyone else in Laos.

Taste of Defeat. He was born 33 years ago in the village of Phalane in southern Laos, the son of a Lao mother and a Kha father. Of all the country’s many ethnic groups, the Kha are socially the lowliest (the word Kha means slave). Kong Le himself came out even lower—physically. He stands just 5 ft. 1 in. tall in his paratrooper’s beret, weighs 115 Ibs., and even in a nation of small people that is diminutive. “He has a runt complex,” says one American friend. Combined with his backwoods, ethnically inferior background, this provided him with all the motivation, if not the genius, to become a Southeast Asian Napoleon.

Though he studied briefly at the lycee in Savannakhet, he never graduated, joined the French army in 1952 to fight the losing battle against the Red Viet Minh. As a sergeant, he quickly learned the taste of defeat. After the French withdrawal, he transferred to the Royal Laotian Army as a paratroop lieutenant only to taste more of it. Kong Le’s was a battalion of troubleshooters. Whenever the Pathet Lao got particularly obnoxious, he and his men were sent out from Vientiane over jungle villages to float down silently and kill. Often they dropped without supplies, fought their way back on a bullet a day, gratifying their taste for toads and bamboo shoots along the route. Kong Le perfected an instinct for infantry leadership. He made the right moves, and U.S. military men credited him with a fine field officer’s instinct for combat. In 1957, the army sent him to the Philippines for Ranger training. At Camp Vicente Lim in southern Luzon, he won honors in ambush and guerrilla operations, gained bloody battle experience against the Communist Huks in the snake-haunted highlands back of Olongapo. At the same time, Kong Le kept wondering why he was fighting.

Waiting for Neutralism. Back home, Captain Kong Le was promoted to command of the 1st Parachute Battalion of the Royal Army. But the promotion did little to ease his growing dislike of conditions in Laos. The 1954 Indo-China armistice had handed the Pathet Lao two sections of the country—Sam-nueua and Phongsaly—bordering Communist China and North Viet Nam. The International Control Commission, made up of Polish, Indian and Canadian delegations, was theoretically responsible for keeping any faction from bringing in more troops and arms, but the Pathet Lao ignored the ban; Viet Minh cadres poured across the border to train Pathet Lao troops in guerrilla and conventional warfare. In 1957 the U.S. grew alarmed, began casting about for a rightist leader to counter the Communists. It found him in General Phoumi Nosavan, a tubby but talented field commander whose cousin, the late Strongman Sarit Thanarat of Thailand, was a firm supporter of the U.S.

Two years later, Phoumi led the first of five coups that have kept Laos in turmoil ever since. In April 1960 Phoumi’s slate of candidates won handily in a rigged election, but the Pathet Lao were back in business as guerrillas, and the prospect of another long, bloody civil war faced the country. Then, in August 1960, Kong Le acted.

Under cover of darkness, his 300 paratroopers moved in from Camp Chinaimo outside Vientiane, picked up some 2,700 like-minded soldiers from other units and in less than two hours held all the key points in the city. Kong Le deposed the right-wing government, although Phoumi had been his mentor in the army. Installing Prince Souvanna Phouma as Premier, Kong Le sat back hopefully and waited for neutralism to develop. But furious at what he considered a betrayal by his protege, Phoumi pulled his 60,000-man army down to southern Laos and set up his own revolutionary committee. Sporadic fighting between Phoumi’s army and the Pathet Lao broke out. The neutralists were drawn ever closer to the Pathet Lao.

Is He Setthathirath? In Kong Le, the Communists thought they had an invaluable tool. Politically unformed, the little captain was immensely popular with his troops and the Laotian people. In superstition-ridden Laos, Kong Le was believed invulnerable to gunfire. The bad, or cotton strings, he wore tied around his wrists and a stone amulet he carried in a pouch at his waist kept his 32 souls (one for each major part of the body) from fleeing. The phi or demon who guarded him was undoubtedly among the underworld’s most powerful, for Kong Le had never been wounded.

The myth of his invulnerability took on a new dimension during a festival in Vientiane, where an old woman fell into a trance on seeing Kong Le’s photograph. “Setthathirath is returned!” she screamed. Setthathirath is a legendary king of Laos who disappeared in the 16th century while on a jungle expedition. The Lao believe that when Vientiane is in great danger, this hero—like Britain’s King Arthur—will return to save them. To this day many Laotians believe Kong Le is Setthathirath. And although Kong Le embarrassedly shrugs the matter off himself, he is not so sure either.

Kong Le’s magical properties failed him late in 1960 when Phoumi’s rightists—led by a rising young colonel named Kouprasith Abhay—defeated the neutralists in the Battle of Vientiane and forced Kong Le and his men north to the Plain of Jars. There, Kong Le’s alliance with the Pathet Lao was cemented, and when the neutralist-led troika headed by Souvanna was established at another Geneva conference in July 1962, Kong Le was still firmly allied with the Communists.

Then came the betrayals. The Pathet Lao began wooing Kong Le’s men, mounting quick, vicious infantry actions against his positions on the Plain of Jars in hopes of grabbing territory. When a Pathet Lao gunman shot down Kong Le’s top deputy, the idealistic neutralist was well on his way to becoming a fervent antiCommunist. The Reds pulled out of the coalition government when a left-leaning minister was assassinated by a neutralist soldier.

Roses & Red Ants. Unfortunately, Premier Souvanna did not share Kong Le’s new-found anti-Red sentiments, refused repeated requests to counterattack against the Pathet Lao. During the days of alliance with the Pathet Lao, Kong Le’s men had been equipped with Russian tanks and guns. Now he was out of ammunition, and with U.S. military aid cut off under the terms of the latest Geneva agreement, he had to rely for supplies on jealous Rightist Phoumi, Deputy Premier in the coalition government. Kong Le got precious few supplies. His men, unpaid in nearly two years, still remained loyal, and thanks to his legendary status among the Lao, new volunteers appeared daily to fight at the side of Setthathirath.

As a result, his is a young army, its soldiers averaging about 19. “Young boys like that,” says Kong Le, “they come to me, and they want to join the fight against the Communists. But first I have to tell them that we do not have enough equipment or uniforms or money for them. Then, when there is a spot, they must be handed a rifle and sent right into combat.” Still they come to join up, largely because Kong Le has chai di—the “gentle heart,” a quality that makes for intense loyalty on the part of his men, but also leaves him a prey to politicians who want to use him.

Casual Kong Le sleeps and eats with his men in the field, never returns salutes (he just waves back). He raises roses and keeps pets. Two white hamsters had the run of his old, tin-roofed headquarters on the Plain of Jars. Many Laotians keep giant red and black ants in jam jars, feed them with bread, then suffocate them in alcohol to create a supposedly aphrodisiac tonic. But Kong Le is so fond of his ants that he never has been known to drink them.

Phing Sad Lao. He probably needs no aphrodisiacs. Married four times, his latest wife, a slim, pretty Chinese girl whom he met three years ago at the market in Xiengkhouang, occasionally sheds her sarong, leaves her sons in Vientiane and follows him on campaigns dressed in skin-tight field pants, diminutive leather combat boots and a U.S. Navy foul-weather jacket.

When the tides of war turn against him, Kong Le develops a psychosomatic sinus headache, takes to munching pills, and mournfully wishes aloud that he were in London or Paris “or anywhere that has pretty girls.” But when things are going well, and he is sitting outside his shack at sundown with a deer roasting over the fire and his men dancing the lamvong or playing the flute, he would not give up soldiering. His thoughts turn always to his troops. “My boys, they are trained only by being in wars,” Kong Le explains sadly. “We have no money or no time to train them properly. They join my army and must begin to fight then. What a difference it would make if my boys could be trained in Thailand by Americans so that they could know how to fight before they are really fighting.”

Kong Le still considers himself a neutralist, says he is fighting merely to see his country left alone by all sides. His simple hope is to reunite faction-torn Laos, and thus to remove the sadness from the opening bars of the national anthem, Phing Sad Lao:

Our Lao race had once known in Asia a great renown,

The Lao then were united and loved each other . . .

Price for Prisoners. One of Kong Le’s big difficulties is the help the Pathet Lao gets from the Viet Minh, who have an almost legendary reputation in Laos. Neutralist and rightist battalions have been known to flee the field at the mere hint of Viet Minh troops in the vicinity. The Pathet Lao take advantage of this by broadcasting orders in Vietnamese over their radios. Kong Le, himself an inveterate radio listener, believes fully half the 75,000 Pathet Lao forces that oppose him are Vietnamese. Actually, there are between 8,000 to 10,000 Viet Minh fighting with the Laotian Reds, mostly in training and administrative posts. Though the Laotian government has offered a reward, consisting of an expense-paid weekend in Bangkok, to any soldier who can produce a Viet Minh prisoner, none has shown up.

Thanks to intimidation and a skillful infiltration, the Pathet Lao control fully two-thirds of Laos, though no more than one Lao in ten is a Communist. The Reds succeed by chipping away at the authority of village headmen, by threatening murder and killing the cattle of villagers who do not contribute aid and comfort. Though loose-lipped Laotians are notoriously bad conspirators, Pathet Lao agents have turned many back-country hamlets into what the French-speaking officials call pourri, or rotten, villages. Most Laotians have no use for the Pathet Lao, which they call “the party of slaves,” find their incessant Marxist preachments boring, and countryfolk warn strangers away from villages pourris with typical Laotian indirection: “Don’t go there; the mosquitoes are biting very hard.”

On the Road. Last week Kong Le’s ragtag army was surrounded by Red mosquitoes. His position astride the Ngun River—deep and swift in the rainy season—dominated tne high ground west of the Plain of Jars. His force was bolstered by thousands of bitterly anti-Communist Meo tribesmen armed with knives, spears and homemade flintlocks, who had fled their hilly homes in the north when the Pathet Lao began slaughtering them. Anchored on both flanks by steep, jungle-grown mountains, Kong Le’s 30-mile-long defense line presents the Pathet Lao with a strong front. He is sending scores of infantrymen up the slopes of Phou Koutt, a strategically located peak near the edge of the Plain. If he could secure the knob, which has changed hands three times in the past week, he hopes he could then mount an offensive into the Plain itself. But he will do well if he merely stalls further Red advances.

With his well-worn howitzers and half a dozen Russian-built tanks left over from the good old days, Kong Le controls crucial Route 7, thus keeping two Pathet Lao armies from joining forces. If the Communist troops opposing Kong Le were to break through and join up behind him at the juncture of Routes 7 and 13, the Pathet Lao would have a clear, unopposed path to Vientiane. That would mean the end of the war in Laos.

What Will It Take? Tenuously supplied by low-flying C46 transports, Kong Le holds on. Last week he looked longingly at the spot on his crinkled battle map that indicated the primary Pathet Lao supply point: Muong Sen, just over the border in Communist North Viet Nam, on Route 7. “The supply dumps there would make fine targets for bombs,” he said wistfully, protesting, like so many other commanders in the age of limited war, against constricting “ground rules.” Since the U.S. is obviously not yet willing to hit North Vietnamese targets, Kong Le hopes at least for U.S. air strikes to cut Route 7 behind the Pathet Lao. “If the bridges on Route 7 were cut for even a little while,” he says, “the Pathet Lao could not hold their positions. That road provides everything they need—food, ammo, men, even the Viet Minh.”

Chances are that the tough, ingenious Pathet Lao would find ways to fight on anyway. But the questions remain: Can the U.S. afford to intervene further in the little Laotian war? On the other hand, having gone this far, can it afford not to intervene? By committing itself to a sustained air offensive on Kong Le’s side, the U.S. would at best be backing a long shot. Even if the disruption of the Pathet Lao supply lines permitted Kong Le to regain the Plain, it would only buy time and return the whole Laotian equation to where it was before—admittedly with the significant difference that the U.S. would have demonstrated its readiness to take a firm stand.

But there is a growing feeling in Washington that the only way to ease the chaos in Laos must come as part of an area-wide, rather than a country-by-country, solution. This would inevitably test American willingness to carry the war to North Viet Nam. Just in case that becomes necessary, five U.S. Navy cargo ships steamed toward Thailand last week loaded with tanks, trucks, armored personnel carriers and ammunition. The troops to use them could always be airlifted in.

As Kong Le mused about the long-range prospects in his thatch-roofed headquarters at Vang Vieng, guns boomed hollowly beyond the blue volcanic peaks around him. What will it take to win his war? “More soldiers,” he said, “more money to pay them with, specially that, more artillery, more rifles and machine guns and mortars, more land mines—everything, should the U.S. be willing to provide that again.” He shrugged. “I suppose that depends on what the U.S. wants to do in Southeast Asia. And only the U.S. can answer that question.”