Word: laotians
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Until last week the village of Xieng Kho, a huddle of thatch-roofed huts standing on spindly stilts deep in the Samneua jungle, had seemingly had little to fear. Xieng Kho's garrison, dug in on a hillside above the village, consisted of 70 regulars of the royal Laotian army, 100 home guards and 25 counter-guerrillas who are called maquis by French-educated Laotians. For 25 miles along the western bank of the Nam Ma river, there were similar garrisons under the control of battalion headquarters at Muong Het. eight miles from the Vietnamese frontier. And they were...
Pattern of Flight. In 2½ hours it was all over. Their captain killed, the surviving Laotian troops broke for the safety of the jungle. Three days later, 46 of the original 195 defenders of Xieng Kho straggled into the provincial capital of Samneua, 25 miles distant as the crow flies...
...repeated all along the river. A single-engine Beaver plane loaded with grenades, small arms and munitions, which was squared off to land at the weedy Muong Het airstrip, was met by machine-gun fire, barely got back to report that Muong Het had also fallen. An entire royal Laotian battalion of some 700 men, plus 400 home guards, had been cut to pieces...
...outposts crumpled, 39-year-old Brigadier General Amkha Soukhavong, the Laotian army's regional commander, sat on the porch of his headquarters in Samneua City, peeling litchi nuts and staring morosely at the mildewed Roman Catholic church across the street. For French-trained General Amkha, who still holds the rank of captain in the French army, it was a nightmare war. What news of the front he could get came from runners, a handful of Red prisoners and an endless stream of refugees :women with babies, men burdened with mattresses and sewing machines, a ten-year-old boy toting...
Urgent Appeal. When the news of the defeat finally reached Vientiane, something like panic seized the otiose Laotian government. Crown Prince Savang Vat-hana, 52, was speedily invested as Regent of Laos, taking over from his 74-year-old father, King Sisavong Vong, who abdicated because he felt the country needed a younger and more energetic chief of state. At the risk of exposing the southern provinces of Laos to attacks from Communist guerrillas operating out of northern Thailand, a fresh battalion of loyal troops was airlifted to threatened Samneua. And late in the week Laotian Foreign Minister Khampan Panya...