Word: laotians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...team of American recovery specialists was permitted to enter Laos for a two-week examination of the crash site of an AC-130 Spectre gunship. The area was being scoured for the remains of 13 U.S. crewmen still listed as missing in action. The joint mission, which included Laotian soldiers and government officials as well as U.S. specialists, worked at its task in a dense patch of jungle 25 miles northeast of the city of Pakse. The search is a continuation of the U.S. Government's long-term effort to discover the fate of 2,483 Americans unaccounted...
...sand littered with the half-recognizable detritus of the shattered gunship: broken wheel struts, a bent propeller blade, rusted armor plating, scraps of the fuselage. Resembling patches of smudged snow, remnants of the plane's once white fiber-glass insulating material are scattered everywhere. Earlier, crews of olive-clad Laotian soldiers and Americans in T shirts and grimy Levi's had cut a working area roughly the size of a baseball diamond, first by clearing the dense undergrowth and then by dropping to their hands and knees in shoulder-to-shoulder skirmish lines for a preliminary search of the area...
...concession may be intended to deflect further U.S. criticism of its attacks on Khmer resistance camps in neighboring Kampuchea. Laos' accommodating attitude may be in response to recent U.S. overtures, including an American shipment in December of 5,000 tons of rice to alleviate the effects of a poor Laotian harvest. But no major breakthrough of the M.I.A. problem in Laos or Viet Nam seems near. "The timing has made everyone open their eyes," says one U.S. official in Bangkok. "But nothing has happened that hasn't been in the works for a long time...
After two days on the road, with an overnight stop in the town of Son La, the bus rolls onto the hot, flat plain at Dien Bien Phu, 18 miles from the Laotian border. It is difficult to imagine the battlefield as it appeared 30 years ago. The French chose Dien Bien Phu because its strategic location seemed to make it the ideal place to cut Viet Minh supply lines and thus to harass Giap's troops into submission. Protected by mountains on all sides, it seemed impregnable. Against heavy odds, Ho's Viet Minh army laid siege...
DIED. Souvanna Phouma, 82, courtly former Prime Minister of Laos, whose neutralist regime was toppled by the Communist Pathet Lao in 1975; in Vientiane. Nephew of the last Laotian King under French colonial rule. Prince Souvanna became the independent nation's Prime Minister in 1956; he later failed to stem the Pathet Lao, led by his half brother Prince Souphanouvong...