Word: laos
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Fleeing Neutralists. The week began with a desperate flight to the plain by Neutralist Premier Souvanna Phouma, who hoped it still might be possible to arrange a cease-fire between the Communist Pathet Lao and Neutralist Army Chief Kong Le. Things seemed cheery enough as the opposing leaders embraced and their troops exchanged cigarettes. But. as one neutralist put it, "we exchange cigarettes during the day and bullets at night." All too true. Hardly had Souvanna departed when the truce abruptly collapsed...
...knows who fired first, but all of a sudden the Pathet Lao was shooting, and the neutralists were running. On the dusty Plaine des Jarres airstrip, mothers breastfed dirty babies, and children sagged under the weight of parachute packs crammed with household belongings as they patiently waited for planes to evacuate them to the Laotian capital of Vientiane, 120 miles away. In his ramshackle, tin-roofed headquarters, guarded night and day by a patrolling platoon of tanks, Kong Le worked round the clock drawing up a battle plan, although weakened by a liver ailment and a serious sinus condition...
...troops would join forces with a right-wing army just southwest of the Plaine des Jarres and launch a joint counterattack against the Reds that would surely precipitate civil war. Desperately he appealed to Britain and Russia, overseers of the Geneva agreement, for quick intervention to stop the Pathet Lao's flagrant violations of the ceasefire...
...Foreign Lackeys." Trouble began when the Pathet Lao, supported by the Viet Minh, opened fire on a group of Kong Le's soldiers fishing in their off-duty hours near the town of Khang Khay. Then the Reds advanced on the neutralist stronghold at Xiengkhouang, and launched a mortar barrage that forced Kong Le's forces out of the town. With full-scale civil war threatening to break out on the Plaine des Jarres, Kong Le evacuated the wives and children of his men to the Laotian capital of Vientiane, 120 miles away. As the bedraggled neutralist forces...
...treacherous Red attacks completed the political transformation of Kong Le, who once was the darling of Moscow and Peking. Two and a half years ago, Kong Le had joined forces with the Pathet Lao on the Plaine des Jarres and with them demanded the withdrawal of all the Western troops in Laos. But consistently neutralist, Kong Le today is as bitterly opposed to Viet Minh intervention in Laos as he had been to the presence of U.S. military advisers last October. Fortnight ago he raged that the Viet Minh were "foreign lackeys" who hoped to make Laos their base...