Word: laos
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...meeting with top U.S. aides in Bangkok, Admiral Harry D. Felt, commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, discussed contingency plans in the event that the Pathet Lao moves off the Plain of Jars into the Mekong River valley. The U.S. is not committed to put troops into Laos, and the military is not enthusiastic about the prospect of fighting there, for the lack of airfields, railroads and good roads would make it tough to sustain operations. But if the Pathet Lao showed an inclination to sweep all the way south, the U.S. forces in Thailand might well have...
...flying visit to the Plain of Jars, Neutralist Premier Souvanna Phouma managed to arrange a shaky cease-fire between the Pathet Lao and Kong Le's neutralists. Though sporadic artillery duels still pockmarked the plain, there were no outright Red attacks, and the neutralists lost no new territory. But hostilities threatened to erupt from another quarter. Around the perimeter of the plain, right-wing General Phoumi Nosavan was reinforcing his positions, and in the foothills behind the Pathet Lao lines, tough, well-armed Meo tribesmen, who have no love for the Reds, posed a dangerous threat to Communist supply...
...crisis cool of its own accord. If they moved off the plain, they would surely march right into a civil war with Phoumi's rightist forces, thus inviting U.S. intervention, which they wished to avoid at all costs. Despite protests by both Souvanna and the U.S., the Pathet Lao's territorial grab was a fait accompli. There were those in the U.S. who thought the only long-range answer to the Laos problem was outright partition. Already a de facto partition of Laos existed: the northern part of the country was firmly controlled by the Communists...
...plain is named for the scores of large, stone burial urns dotting the area, in which the ancestral ashes of the Laotian people were once deposited. Both the Pathet Lao and the neutralists avoid fighting near the jars, for Laotian tradition holds that the penalty for disturbing them is a violent and fiery retribution from the spirits within...
Russia hesitated to intercede, for fear of alienating the Communists in Laos and North Viet Nam. Soviet intervention at this stage might turn them increasingly toward Red China, Russia's rival, for support in their revolution. But Nikita Khrushchev was also under pressure from a different quarter. In Washington, President Kennedv made it clear that he ex pected Moscow to put a stop to Pathet Lao pressure and live up to the Geneva agreement. "We will, I think, have a chance to see in the next few days whether we are going to have a destruction of that accord...