Friday, Aug. 24, 1962

Fortunate Five

After 14 nations signed the Geneva accord establishing Laotian neutrality last month. Red Prince Souphanouvong promised to release the U.S. prisoners held by his Communist Pathet Lao. Last week five gaunt and bearded men stumbled off a twin-engined Soviet plane at Vientiane's Wattay airport. They had been imprisoned for 15 months or more -- and looked it.

Major Lawrence Bailey, 38, who had been assistant U.S. military attache in the Laotian capital before his capture in March 1961, was still weak from injuries suffered when he bailed out of a plane that crashed with seven other U.S. servicemen in a mountainous eastern province of Laos. Unable to walk without assistance, and barely able to talk, Bailey said that he had been locked alone in a "blackcell" for the past eleven months, was subjected to "continuous questioning." The only other U.S. serviceman released by the Pathet Lao was Sergeant Orville Ballenger, 28, a member of a U.S. Army team assigned to the Royal Laotian Army, who was captured with three other soldiers in April 1961 and had been kept in solitary imprisonment ever since. Luckiest of the prisoners, by their own accounts, were Edward N. Shore Jr. and John P. Mc-Morrow, civilian pilots for the Air America charter service (which ferried supplies for the previous Laotian regime), and NBC Cameraman Grant Wolfkill, who was a passenger in their helicopter when it crashed 40 miles north of the capital. Unlike the others, the three shared a cell, and had been relatively well treated since last April, when they were transferred from the custody of savage Meo tribesmen to a camp run by the Viet Minh Communist troops from North Viet Nam.

"The Meos were the worst," said robust Grant Wolfkill. "They ran around like wild men, always looking for an excuse to kill us." When they got bored, the tribesmen would fire machine-gun bursts into the cell; the trio were kept in heavy wooden stocks "like Salem witches." Their steady diet: rice and salt. By contrast, cracked Wolfkill, the Viet Minh "did more or less abide by the International Convention for war prisoners--we were at least allowed to go to the toilet." Despite their hardships, the five who came back were fortunate. American officials in Laos have been unable to learn the whereabouts of eleven other U.S. soldiers and civilians, who are listed as missing but may not even be alive.

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