Word: samneua
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...some two dozen newsmen on the spot in Laos last week, the assignment was a new lesson in frustration. As unprepared for the visitors as it was for Communist invaders, the tiny, remote and primitive Asian kingdom scarcely knew what to do with either. In Samneua province, scene of some of the fiercest skirmishing, a native cable-office employee stopped reporters on the street to inquire: "What should I do with this?" It was a cable handed him a week earlier by CBS Correspondent Peter Kalischer. The surest way to get anything resembling an accurate story was to make...
...that they did not try-in a land with little or no communications, they were merely uninformed. When one freshly arrived newsman asked Defense Minister Sounthone Pathammavong for a quick briefing on the situation, the minister shot him an injured look, plaintively asked: "Can you tell me?" In Samneua, Brigadier General Amkha Soukhavong blithely informed reporters that "only about 20% of our troops are missing"-only to be just as blithely contradicted by Lieut. General Ouane Rathikone, chief of staff: "All our men were either killed or taken prisoner...
...outposts crumpled, 39-year-old Brigadier General Amkha Soukhavong, the Laotian army's regional commander, sat on the porch of his headquarters in Samneua City, peeling litchi nuts and staring morosely at the mildewed Roman Catholic church across the street. For French-trained General Amkha, who still holds the rank of captain in the French army, it was a nightmare war. What news of the front he could get came from runners, a handful of Red prisoners and an endless stream of refugees :women with babies, men burdened with mattresses and sewing machines, a ten-year-old boy toting...
...King Sisavong Vong, who abdicated because he felt the country needed a younger and more energetic chief of state. At the risk of exposing the southern provinces of Laos to attacks from Communist guerrillas operating out of northern Thailand, a fresh battalion of loyal troops was airlifted to threatened Samneua. And late in the week Laotian Foreign Minister Khampan Panya took a step that his government had desperately hoped to avoid, directed an urgent appeal to the U.N. Cabled Khampan: "In face of this fagrant aggression, for which [North] Viet Nam must bear the entire responsibility . . . the Royal Laotian Government...
...Wire, No Trenches. At week's end thousands of Communist invaders were being ferried across the Nam Ma river on rafts and rubber boats powered by out board motors, and Red patrols pushed within seven miles of Samneua City, telling villagers that it was futile for them to flee to the provincial capital since it would be in Communist hands in a matter of days. General Amkha seemed to agree. To cheer up his downcast aides, he cracked: "I am more afraid of Tokyo taxicabs than of the Communists." But his seven battalions, numbering more than...