Word: laotians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...draw on his own knowledge from a previous trip to South Viet Nam. On-the-scene reportage came from James Willwerth, who hitched a plane ride from Saigon to I Corps, where he viewed the situation at Khe Sanh and Lang Vei, a point about three miles from the Laotian border. By now the final elements were falling into place as cables arrived from Stanley Cloud, who had flown from Bangkok to Vientiane for the story from inside Laos. "Vientiane is a kind of convention center for those who wage war and intrigue in Southeast Asia," Cloud reported, "and Russians...
...land. Khe Sanh, where 6,000 Marines had endured a bloody 77-day siege in 1968, was a moonscape of shell craters flecked by twisted steel runway sheets and discarded shell casings. A few miles to the south, the Rockpile was overrun by weeds. On a bluff overlooking the Laotian border, the hulks of battered Soviet tanks still lay rusting at the Lang Vei Special Forces camp, where ten Americans and 225 South Vietnamese died in a single night of hand-to-hand combat...
...pause. At least one and perhaps two cross-border thrusts aimed at immobilizing the Ho Chi Minh Trail seemed imminent. One obvious target lay right down Route 9?Tchepone, a Communist staging area and a key control point for the Ho Chi Minh Trail 25 miles inside the Laotian panhandle. A second possibility was that ARVN troops would be helicoptered to the mountainous Bolovens Plateau, which forms the western flank of the trail. Their likely objective: Attopeu and Saravane, two Laotian river towns captured last spring by North Vietnamese troops, apparently in an effort to secure the trail's flanks...
Intelligence officers ticked off indications of a major Communist buildup, including a flood of supplies in the Laotian pipeline. According to the briefers, 90% of the materiel earmarked for South Viet Nam was being shunted into I Corps. The buildup obviously presaged trouble in the coastal cities of Hue and Danang. But MACV asserted that it also posed a "serious threat" to U.S. troop withdrawals and that a "preemptive offensive" was planned with "limited objectives." Few reporters in Saigon doubted that the jargon was a verbal screen for a direct ARVN assault on the Ho Chi Minh Trail...
There were several reasons for the vigorous Communist advance. On one level, it was a punitive jab at Souvanna Phouma. The Premier is anxious to end the Laotian fighting, which has forced an incredible number of refugees into U.S.-run camps: 700,000, or 30% of the population. But hard-liners on the right threaten real trouble if Souvanna should open serious peace talks with the Pathet Lao or if he should suffer another major defeat. "If Long Cheng or the Bolovens Plateau falls," said one Laotian general, "Souvanna is finished." The Communist advance was also a signal to Abrams...