Word: mekong
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Across the Mekong. Though the SEATO battle plan was written months ago, recent events in neighboring Laos have given it pressing immediacy. Thailand today is particularly vulnerable to what U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Todd Young calls "aggression by seepage." Some 45,000 North Vietnamese, many of whom settled in Thailand during IndoChina's war against France, have been heavily infiltrated by Communist agents. Among the mountain tribes of the north, there is no sense of nationality and no loyalty to the central government in Bangkok. What is more, some 9,000,000 Thais of Lao stock live in the isolated...
...oppressive, corrupt local administrators. For all his high hopes for the program, aloof, autocratic President Diem seldom stirs far from his yellow palace in Saigon to visit the hinterland and generate enthusiasm for his cause. Sneaky Petes. The area of the government's greatest frustration is the Mekong River Delta, where 55% of South Viet Nam's population is centered and 75% of its rice is grown. The peasants there have resisted the hamlet program-and have often been forcibly resettled in fortified villages-because they resent having to walk miles to their paddies. In a successful attack...
...meeting with top U.S. aides in Bangkok, Admiral Harry D. Felt, commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, discussed contingency plans in the event that the Pathet Lao moves off the Plain of Jars into the Mekong River valley. The U.S. is not committed to put troops into Laos, and the military is not enthusiastic about the prospect of fighting there, for the lack of airfields, railroads and good roads would make it tough to sustain operations. But if the Pathet Lao showed an inclination to sweep all the way south, the U.S. forces in Thailand might well have...
...Reds, North Viet Nam's Ho Chi Minh trail (see map), the supply route which cuts through the Laotian thickets to Communist Viet Cong guerrillas in South Viet Nam, would open up, permitting the Reds to pour arms and men into that embattled land. Control of Laos' Mekong River valley would also give the Communists a highway for subversion of neighboring Cambodia and Thailand, which in turn would increase Red pressure on Burma and Malaya...
...grab was a fait accompli. There were those in the U.S. who thought the only long-range answer to the Laos problem was outright partition. Already a de facto partition of Laos existed: the northern part of the country was firmly controlled by the Communists, and the rice-rich Mekong River valley was in the hands of the rightists...