Word: patheticness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Waiting for Neutralism. Back home, Captain Kong Le was promoted to command of the 1st Parachute Battalion of the Royal Army. But the promotion did little to ease his growing dislike of conditions in Laos. The 1954 Indo-China armistice had handed the Pathet Lao two sections of the country-Sam-nueua and Phongsaly-bordering Communist China and North Viet Nam. The International Control Commission, made up of Polish, Indian and Canadian delegations, was theoretically responsible for keeping any faction from bringing in more troops and arms, but the Pathet Lao ignored the ban; Viet Minh cadres poured across...
...years later, Phoumi led the first of five coups that have kept Laos in turmoil ever since. In April 1960 Phoumi's slate of candidates won handily in a rigged election, but the Pathet Lao were back in business as guerrillas, and the prospect of another long, bloody civil war faced the country. Then, in August 1960, Kong Le acted...
...Kong Le sat back hopefully and waited for neutralism to develop. But furious at what he considered a betrayal by his protege, Phoumi pulled his 60,000-man army down to southern Laos and set up his own revolutionary committee. Sporadic fighting between Phoumi's army and the Pathet Lao broke out. The neutralists were drawn ever closer to the Pathet...
...properties failed him late in 1960 when Phoumi's rightists-led by a rising young colonel named Kouprasith Abhay-defeated the neutralists in the Battle of Vientiane and forced Kong Le and his men north to the Plain of Jars. There, Kong Le's alliance with the Pathet Lao was cemented, and when the neutralist-led troika headed by Souvanna was established at another Geneva conference in July 1962, Kong Le was still firmly allied with the Communists...
Then came the betrayals. The Pathet Lao began wooing Kong Le's men, mounting quick, vicious infantry actions against his positions on the Plain of Jars in hopes of grabbing territory. When a Pathet Lao gunman shot down Kong Le's top deputy, the idealistic neutralist was well on his way to becoming a fervent antiCommunist. The Reds pulled out of the coalition government when a left-leaning minister was assassinated by a neutralist soldier...