Word: pathetically
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RELENTLESSLY, almost at will, Communist North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao troops advanced last week against Laotian government forces. As they swept forward, concern mounted among U.S. officials. On Capitol Hill, critics of the U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia protested that Washington seemed to be plunging deeper into Laos just as it was pulling back from Viet Nam-though of course the U.S. commitment in Viet Nam is incomparably larger. The Administration denied the charges, but the evidence appeared to confirm them (see box following page...
...little government capital of Vientiane had expected the Plain, which has changed hands repeatedly for years, to be held in the face of a determined Communist attack. There was good reason for their pessimism. Hanoi has 50,000 troops in Laos, some 16,000 around the Plain, and the Pathet Lao have another 50,000: the government, by contrast, has a total of 63,000 regulars and another 10,000 Meo guerrillas under General Vang...
...governor of Thailand's Nong Khai province. "Come upstairs," said the governor. "I have a Lao prince you might like to meet." The governor's guest was Prince Souphanouvong, then a leader of the embryo Laotian independence movement and now titular head of the pro-Communist Pathet Lao. Souphanouvong asked Thompson for pledges of U.S. support against the French colonialists who were then re-establishing their control over Laos. Their talk was, almost certainly, the first contact between American officials and independence-minded Laotians...
After 1955, the Pathet Lao (with heavy North Vietnamese support) tightened their hold on northeast Laos. The Royal Laotian Army-trained by U.S. advisers along conventional lines-proved incapable of fighting a counterinsurgency war. By 1959, a mysterious mission known as the Programs Evaluation Office (PEO) was functioning in Vientiane. Ostensibly an arm of the U.S. aid mission, its actual function was to oversee training of the Laotian army, and it had almost total control of all U.S. aid to Laos. The money, however, failed to shore up the Vientiane government. A new Geneva accord signed in 1962 called...
Communist Canteens. The refugees were mostly old men and women and small children in ragged clothes. There were few young adults; most of them are in the hills with the Pathet Lao. The refugees' eyes bore the blank, stoic look I have seen so often in the faces of peasants dispossessed by the Indo-China War, and relics of that war were everywhere. Many refugees carried standard North Vietnamese army canteens...