Unattractive Choice

Marching north to do battle with the Communists, Royal Laotian soldiers tossed hand grenades in the Nam Song River and jumped in afterward to scoop up the stunned banana fish that floated to the surface. They swam, roasted pigs and fish over open fires, and drank plenty of Mekong rice whisky, paid for by their commanding officer and flown in every day by Sikorsky helicopters manned by U.S. civilian pilots.

Barrage-Happy. Their objective was the town of Vang Vieng, 65 miles north of the administrative capital of Vientiane (see map). Their favorite tactic was long-range assault by 105-mm. howitzers--Laotian soldiers, as good Buddhists, can seldom bring themselves to fire at any enemy they can actually see. Last week, after taking 29 days to travel the 65 miles, and warming up with a few shots at villages along the way, the army hove to outside Vang Vieng, 880 strong. They laid down their usual barrage, the Communist defenders fled, and the attackers moved in almost without incident (though one lieutenant shot himself in the foot).

To the east the army fared much worse. There, Rebel Captain Kong Le shot down one of the government's AT6 trainers (whereupon the U.S. sent in two more, raising the royal air force to a total of five planes). Kong Le also had artillery, supplied him by Russian airlift. He advanced on the village of Ta Vieng on the Nam Nhiep River. The government troops prudently retreated, carrying out what the officer in charge called his "coiled-spring tactic." Kong Le took the village and moved on south toward Pak-sane, slowly bulldozing a road ahead of him as he went. If he made it across the rugged terrain, Kong Le could cut the country in two.

Gaining. The spectacle of one pro-Communist captain with a nucleus of only 300 paratroopers standing off a 29,000-man army nurtured and trained by the U.S. was bad enough. But Western diplomats in Laos feared that Kong Le was actually gaining strength, picking up new recruits in the villages as well as seasoned units of the pro-Communist Pathet Lao guerrilla movement. The government of Premier Boun Oum was even talking of moving south out of Vientiane, which was won from Kong Le just last month.

In Cambodia, relaxing in the "Villa of the Mango Trees" lent him by the Cambodian royal family, former Premier Prince Souvanna Phouma blamed his country's troubles on one man: J. ("Jeff") Graham Parsons, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs and former Ambassador to Laos. "The ignominious architect of a disastrous United States policy," fumed Souvanna. "He understood nothing about Asia and nothing about Laos." According to Souvanna, Parsons "angered" the Russians into intervening by trying to make a militantly anti-Communist state out of Laos. (The prince had no regrets about his own crucial decision to ask for Russian help as a last-ditch effort to save his own regime.)

About all that the new U.S. Administration could initially offer on Laos was a new look by new men. It will support the plan to reconvene the old three-nation (Canada-India-Poland) Control Commission to stop the fighting-- a proposal formally presented to Russia by Britain last week. It was a wan hope.* For the new Administration, as for the old, Laos offered the unattractive choice between a difficult peace and an impossible war.

* Just how wan was demonstrated last week in Viet Nam, where a parallel control commission, set up at the end of the Indo-China war, still operates. The U.S. presented evidence of a huge arms buildup in North Viet Nam, but the Polish member voted against an on-the-spot inspection, and the Indian chairman agreed.

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