Word: mekong
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Communist Ho Chi Minh's order of the day was "Destroy the enemy, and achieve new feats of arms." In these terms last week the Communists launched a new major offensive in Asia. First objective: the eastern bank of the wide, fast-flowing Mekong River, fourth greatest in all Asia, and the border of Siam. Further objectives: still to unfold...
...wooded mountain spine, then invaded the "associated state" of Laos in its southern, least strongly defended sector (see map). The Communists fell by night upon a French-Laotian company near the border and cut it quickly to pieces. Then the invaders headed west through scraggy hillsides towards the Mekong, using footpath trails to bypass the French defense posts along the main highway. They need not have bothered: the French, hopelessly outnumbered, were already pulling out. The day after Christmas, the Communists entered the center of Thakhek (pop. 10,000) and gazed across the Mekong to the rich land of Siam...
Said Salan: "My decisions are made within a certain framework established in France before I took command. The framework is secret and personal." Salan described how he had stopped the Communists short of the Mekong River in Laos by creating hedgehog positions in the Plaine des Jarres and at Luang Prabang, reinforcing them by air: "The enemy had 40 divisions: I had twelve. I had to wage a cautious war of maneuver...
...town is 2½ miles from the airstrip, on a spit of land at the confluence of the Nam Khan and Mekong rivers. We reach it over a frail bamboo bridge floating on native dugout canoes. Here the jungle seems to be about to swallow the city's few houses and streets. Charming white temples and graceful stupas, elaborately decorated with legends and characters from the Ramayana relics of India, are everywhere crowded by tall green rustling palms, fragrant frangipani trees and scarlet-blossomed poincianas...
Tranquil Buddha. In a modest white palace overlooking the mile-wide Mekong sits worried 67-year-old King Sisavang Vong, afflicted with gout, but refusing all urgings that he leave his capital. Like his Thai people, the King is a fatalist. In the temples his people lay offerings and burn incense before tranquil, smiling images of Buddha, confident that whatever comes, it will inevitably change, as the mystic circle of life completes itself. It is exactly 500 years since Luang Prabang was last invaded...