Word: laotians
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...last rightist territorial strongholds in Laos collapsed when Communists marched into Savannakhet and Pakse, the State Department bowed to the inevitable. It ordered the evacuation of nearly all Americans from the tiny landlocked kingdom, ending two decades of intense-and at times dominant-U.S. involvement in Laotian affairs. The order also removed the last significant elements of Washington's once enormous military, diplomatic and economic influence in Indochina...
...American exodus climaxes a month-long anti-U.S. campaign led by Laotian students and youth, tacitly backed by the government's police and almost certainly organized by the Communist-led Pathet Lao. U.S. involvement in Laos had dwindled to a shadow of what it was in the early 1970s, when several thousand American diplomats, military advisers, economic and agricultural experts and intelligence agents literally ran the country and directed the fight by the rightists against the Communists. Still, as last week began, the U.S. community numbered a sizable 1,000 or so. Of these, 340 were government employees...
...anti-American campaign hit its high point shortly after midnight one day last week when several dozen long-haired Laotian students scaled the 9-ft. wire fence surrounding the sprawling USAID compound in Vientiane, Laos' administrative capital. After several hundred reinforcements were bused in the next morning, the students kept two U.S. Marines and one U.S. civilian locked inside the main buildings. They also ransacked the compound, liberating cases of American beer from the commissary...
...veteran observers of the sleepy, landlocked kingdom were surprised. "I thought they were going to draw it out," admitted a U.S. official. "But because of what happened in Cambodia and South Viet Nam, they saw no need to wait." Nonetheless, the end of the quarter-century war was typically Laotian. Another U.S. official described it as "a genteel sort of collapse," demonstrating once again that Laos prefers to move at a more leisurely pace than its neighbors...
...food shops. The U.S., however, is a natural target for the left. In the last two decades, Washington has propped up rightist and recently-neutralist governments with more than $3 billion worth of military and economic aid. As a result of the demonstrations, all U.S. personnel based in the Laotian provinces were recalled to Vientiane. Washington insists, however, that it has no intention of closing the embassy. As long as the coalition continues, the U.S. hopes to maintain a presence in the country. According to some U.S. officials, the Pathet Lao have been saying that they want American aid (currently...