Word: laotians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...peace. Unlike Viet Nam, the country is not riven by irreconcilable rivalry between northerners and southerners, between Catholics, Buddhists and Communists or even-in a country with the acreage of Britain and the population of Brooklyn-between the landed and the landless. "If we could speak as one Laotian to another," Interior Minister Pheng Phongsavan told TIME's Peter Simms in Vientiane last week, "we could solve our problems without any great difficulty." That has not been possible, Phongsavan complains, because "the Pathet Lao are always looking over their shoulders to get their instructions from Hanoi...
...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 of victory...
...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's forces in Laos are more than a match for the 80,000 Royal Laotian Army troops, Thai mercenaries and CIA-supported Meo tribesmen who oppose them...
...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...
...dearth of traffic, from expensive Mercedes, to ex-army Jeeps, to whole schools of motor scooters. It takes a little while to discover that something is not quite the same as in most cities. Then one gradually notices that the driver of the black Mercedes is a beautiful Laotian girl wearing the traditional skirt of glossy silk, heavily embroidered in gold, and that the driver in the Jeep behind her, wearing a pair of smart Levi's, is also a girl. Then one realizes that there are far more women drivers than one would normally see-except, that...