Word: laos
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...area fell under the control of the Pathet Lao and a small number of North Vietnamese army troops and advisers. For the next 5 ½years U.S. airpower bore down on the Plain of Jars, ostensibly to support the efforts of CIA-backed Meo tribesmen to recapture the province. Bombers flew daily and sometimes hourly attack sorties, a total of 25,000 missions, dropping an estimated 75,000 tons of napalm, white phosphorus, antipersonnel bombs and high explosives-more than a ton for every Pathet Lao guerrilla, NVA soldier and civilian in the area. The bombing was intended to harass...
Over the years some 60% of the population of the Plain of Jars has been evacuated to refugee camps elsewhere in Laos. Branfman, a former International Volunteer Services education adviser and Lao-speaking freelance journalist, visited more than a dozen camps around the capital of Vientiane between September 1969 and February 1971, when he was abruptly expelled from Laos, he believes at the request of the CIA. Before he left, Branfman was able to interview more than 1,000 refugees. He collected folk songs and poems about the air raids, as well as 30 handwritten eyewitness accounts, 16 of which...
...year-old former monk describes the destruction of a pagoda he had helped build in 1916, and a young man testifies to how successful the bombing was in driving the population out of Pathet Lao territory: "We saw that it wouldn't end, and we fled to the side of the government of Prince Souvanna Phouma, the Prime Minister. Because the war was so severe, we had to flee from our homes, rice fields and paddies, cows and buffalo and come here in poverty...
GENERAL GIAP may be running the current North Vietnamese offensive in South Viet Nam, but he is by no means his own master in Hanoi. The most powerful figure in the North Vietnamese hierarchy is Le Duan, the shrewd, remote first secretary of Hanoi's ruling Lao Dong (Workers) Party and ranking member of its Politburo. A nervous and intense man who grew up in what is now South Viet Nam, Le Duan is generally regarded as the chief architect of Hanoi's relentless crusade to take over the South. His pre-eminence is underscored by the fact...
...center), South Vietnamese troops gave up the district town of Hoai An and the An Lao valley. In the Central Highlands, the equivalent of three North Vietnamese divisions harassed South Vietnamese forces and laid siege to seven fire bases west of the provincial capital of Kontum. Other North Vietnamese cut the main supply route, Highway 19, between Pleiku and the coastal town of Qui Nhon, and inflicted heavy losses on a South Korean division that tried to reopen the road. But the North Vietnamese were also suffering heavily in this section from American bombings; B-52 raids inflicted enormous casualties...