Word: laos
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...answer will not begin to be apparent until Henry Kissinger and the North Vietnamese negotiators in Paris finally agree on an overall Indochina peace plan (see THE NATION). Even so, reports Simms after extensive interviews with government and Pathet Lao leaders in Vientiane, the odds seemed heavily weighted in the direction of a North Vietnamese fiefdom. Government leaders, says Simms, seemed "completely despairing" about the possibility of being left with North Vietnamese forces still entrenched on Laotian soil. The Communists, by contrast, eagerly welcomed a ceasefire. The Pathet Lao spokesman in Vientiane, Soth Pethrasy, said confidently, "We are the party...
Despite lavish if clandestine American support of pro-government forces, the Communists today control roughly four-fifths of Laos' territory and one-third of its 2,800,000 people (see map). This has been achieved not by the feckless Pathet Lao but by the North Vietnamese, who have at least 65,000 soldiers in Laos-more proportionally than they have in South Viet Nam. Furnished with tanks, long-range Soviet-made 130-mm, guns and what Western observers describe as "some of the finest and most highly motivated infantry in the world" (see story, following page), Hanoi...
...Lever. Experts agree that there is no road, airport, town or city in the country that the North Vietnamese could not capture and at least hold for a while. U.S. and Laotian officials worry that the Communists will try to make good on Pathet Lao claims of "victory" on the eve of a ceasefire, by seizing several important cities, perhaps even Vientiane or Luangprabang, the seat of the country's constitutional monarch, King Savang Vatthana...
Hanoi has never admitted the presence of its forces in Laos, where they are barred under the terms of the 1962 accords. Souvanna worries that "we have no lever to force them out," and he has some understandable doubts that Hanoi would honor a new great-power agreement requiring the withdrawal of "all foreign" troops from the country. In 1962 only 40 North Vietnamese troops marched out of Laos through the prescribed International Control Commission checkpoint-and 30 of them claimed that they had merely been building a house for Souvanna. Thousands of other NVA troops either slipped back...
...gripes? Only officers were allowed to have radios. And then there were Dai's Laotian allies, the Pathet Lao. "All they wanted in life was a wristwatch, then a motor scooter and other luxury items," he complained. "They weren't serious. The ones I saw were just fooling about. All the old hands said that the NVA did all the fighting and the Pathet Lao just sat around...