Reds in Shangri-La

BATTLE OF INDOCHINA

The water drops, the ants eat the fish. The water rises, the fish eat the ants. So it is better to love than to hate.

--Old Laotian Proverb

It was low water in Laos last week, and thousands of Communists were pouring across the northern border of the little Buddhist kingdom. The government of Laos, one of the three Associated States of Indo-China, was gasping on the mud-bank of its unpreparedness.

Six months had passed since Communist General Vo Nguyen Giap conquered the Thai country lying between Red China and Laos (see map). Instead of throwing all his forces against several hundred thousand French Union and Vietnamese troops bottled up in the Red River delta and in the airstrip at Nasan, Giap began probing the defenses of Laos with his Viet Minh commandos. In his exquisite white palace overlooking the palm-fringed Mekong River, aging (67), crew-cropped King Sisavang Vong told the French: "This is my country; this is my palace; I am too old to tremble before danger." Not until three of Giap's crack divisions appeared at Laos' borders last week did King Sisavang Vong call on his happy-go-lucky Laotians to mobilize.

Elephants. Laos, once known as Lane Xang (the Land of a Million Elephants), is the Shangri-La of Southeast Asia. It is mistily mountainous, covered with tiger-haunted jungle and elephant-inhabited rain forest, and can only be reached by air, by traversing two very bad roads, or by sailing up the mighty Mekong. Half its people are Thais, living in the lowland valleys; the other half are primitive Khas and Meos. Huge, smiling statues of Buddha dot the landscape, and saffron-robed Buddhist monks are everywhere. Wearing scarlet jackets, gold and silver beads and bracelets and flowers in their hair, the Laotian women are graceful and attractive and given to music, dancing and proverbs. At nightlong parties, they dance the Lap Ton to a harmonious, high-pitched, 17-hole flute called the Ken. It is said that French officers, after a tour of duty in Laos, remain forever afterward vaguely inattentive and quietly dissolute in manner. But last week the French had put aside love and proverbs for a hard look at Laos' defenses: under King Sisavang Vong's banner (a field of red with three white elephants under a white parasol), Laos could muster only 10,000 trained & tried soldiers and 13,000 armed but untried men, all with French officers.

Hedgehogs. To head off Giap's drive, the French had set up a hedgehog defense point at Samneua, in a narrow pass leading to Laos, 50 miles south of the Nasan hedgehog. They spent $100,000 of U.S. Mutual Security funds* to repair the Samneua airstrip. Fortnight ago, after throwing one of his divisions around Nasan, Giap's forces jumped Samneua. The French abandoned Samneua and its air strip as "indefensible," and the garrison fled south across uncharted mountains, carrying their wounded on their backs and harried all the way by the Viet Minh. Supplied by air with food and water, and with Benzedrine to keep them from falling asleep and being ambushed, the French reached Xiengkhouang (pronounced sing kwong), a market town in north Laos. But the Communists, with an estimated force of 40,000 men, kept pressing forward, with long lines of Russian-made Molotov trucks following up with supplies. Xiengkhouang's 1,500 civilians were ordered to evacuate. Chinese opium traders, pony-riding Meo tribesmen, iron miners and ranch hands streamed south.

The French planned to make a stand near Xiengkhouang, on the vast limestone Plaine des Jarres north of Vientiane, the capital of Laos. Commandeering every available plane, including civil airliners, French General Raoul Salan packed them with troops and flew them into the Plaine des Jarres at the rate of 50 aircraft a day. At Saigon, soldier clerks and interpreters were sent off to fight in Laos. At week's end there was a strong force of Foreign Legion battalions reinforcing the slim Laotian army. But Communist Giap had chosen his time well: within a few weeks the rainy season begins in Laos, and all but two of its 20 airstrips become unusable. This was why he had waited so patiently at the border, while the French--listening to the peace noises out of Moscow--had mistakenly ascribed his hesitation to possible peace overtures from the Kremlin. Now Salan was moving everything he could spare before the rains came, hoping to hold a hedgehog position in the Plaine des Jarres like that at Nasan.

As the battle shaped up, King Sisavang Vong appealed to the U.N. to recognize the invasion of Laos as an act of external aggression, rather than as another phase of the Indo-China war, as the French prefer to regard it. His aim: to head off establishment by Giap of a Communist "Free Laotian Government" headed by Prince Souphranouvong, a distant relative. Meanwhile, the old King complained of rheumatism, and thought he might pay a visit to Paris. It would be a long time before the water was high enough for the fish to eat the ants.

*Though no U.S. troops fight in Indo-China, the U.S. is now paying one-third the cost of fighting this $1.5 billion-a-year war.

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