Word: laotians
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Images & Amulets. In the Royal Laotian Army, the soldiers were small, laughing men. floppy as rag dolls in their outsized American fatigues, wearing socks of rice about their chests. In five weeks, they had advanced exactly eight miles along Astrid Highway, a dirt scar grandly named to commemorate the visit years ago by a Belgian queen. They swam in mountain streams, stole pigs, got drunk on rice whisky, and occasionally fired their U.S.-supplied 105-mm. howitzers in the general direction of the enemy. (They disliked the idea of shooting at anybody with a rifle, since it is not permissible...
General Phoumi Nosavan, the one Laotian resolved to keep Communists out of the government at all costs, believes that the prince means what he says. Prince Souvanna Phouma doesn't believe him-on the ground that Souphanouvong is his half brother and therefore couldn't possibly be proCommunist...
...deeply committed in Laos, where it has spent $310 million in the past six years. This is $26 for every Laotian every year, or almost half the per capita income. A "retired" West Point brigadier, Andrew Jackson Boyle, directs the entire U.S. supply and training operation from headquarters in Vientiane-where the suburbia-like U.S. colony has taken on a stripped-for-action look since the evacuation of 200 dependents to Bangkok seven months ago. West Point's "retired" Major Eleazar Parmly does his best to help the government drive along Astrid Highway. In the hill country, Central Intelligence...
Time & Temper. But the Laotian terrain and temperament are both frustrating. Military men view with distaste the prospect of fighting a sputtery war that could be fed endlessly across the long borders with the Communist world...
...development men find the Laotian people charming, but by Western standards, bone lazy. In other backward lands, it is popular to write this quality off to malnutrition, liver flukes and intestinal parasites, but in Laos (where these afflictions also abound) lethargy extends to the highest rank of princelings, raised on French cuisine. The favorite phrase in Laos is bo pen nyan, a vaguely negative phrase that means anything from "too bad" to "it doesn't matter." Peasants listen with interest when U.S. experts explain scientific agriculture. But when they learn that the aim is to double production rather than...