Word: laotians
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...date was May 15, 1961, the day following the signing of a cease-fire agreement in Laos. The place was a field in the middle of the jungle north Vientiane, the Laotian capital. In the helicopter were three Americans and a squad of Laotian right-wing soldiers. Before the day ended, the soldiers had fled, and the Americans were captives of the Communist Pathet...
Thus began 15 months of captivity for Grant Wolfkill, a veteran NBC cameraman, and his American companions, all of them caught up in the savage little Laotian jungle war, then as now largely unaffected by the official ceasefire...
They were kept for months in the total blackness of a dank cell in a Laotian mountain prison, their lacerated bare legs locked each night in crude wooden stocks, helpless to do anything more than curse when rats ran across their bodies, even more helpless to care for themselves when dysentery and bladder infections racked their bodies. Sanity hung by such threads as U.S. Special Forces Orville Roger Ballenger's calm recital each night of the 23rd Psalm, the creation of a deck of playing cards with tissue paper smuggled past the guards. Above all, they were sustained...
...those who believe in the need for good men to resist the excesses of bad, this is a satisfying book. For those who see the Communists in Southeast Asia as simple, guileless and misled peasants, the descriptions of Laotian guards spitting into a cup of cold rice before giving it to the prisoners or shrieking with laughter when one of them looses a burst of machine-gun fire above the heads of the squatting, dysentery-stricken Americans should be enlightening. So, in a different manner, should be the details of the chill and efficient command role played in Laos...
Encouraging as it all seems, no one pretends that the fate of Laos lies entirely in Laotian hands. Escalation of the war in South Viet Nam has forced Peking and Hanoi to put Laos on the back burner, and as long as the war goes on, nothing the Laotians do can amount to much more than a political holding action. "Events in South Viet Nam will decide everything," says Premier Souvanna. Adds Finance Minister Sisouk: "For the Americans to pull out of Southeast Asia would not only be a tragedy but a disaster...