The Special War

Each day a woman hangs out her wash to dry alongside one of the myriad branches of the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos. This innocent-looking domestic scene is of particular interest to U.S. reconnaissance pilots, who daily "go around the corner"--their lingo for their semisecret flights over neutral Laos--to check on the lady's wash. When no laundry is on the line, that is a signal from the sharp-eyed housekeeper that North Vietnamese troops or trucks are moving near by. Within minutes after the pilots notice that the wash is not out, U.S. planes are raining bombs down upon the Communists.

The washerwoman spy is but a tiny part of a vast, largely secret U.S., Vietnamese and Royal Laotian effort to detect, deter and destroy the primary funnel through which North Vietnamese men and materiel head for South Viet Nam. The Ho Chi Minh trail, a 200-mile "logistical wonder" according to U.S. officials, is a massive maze of roads, bridges, waterways and paths complete with primitive motels. In recent months its roads have been paved with crushed stone or topped with pressed laterite. Camouflages of bamboo and branch roof it over where the jungle canopy is balding. Bridges are often built 6 inches under water so that they will be difficult to spot from the air.

Company Strikes. Some 5,000 to 8,000 men a month go down the network of trails to fight in South Viet Nam, though of late the traffic has largely been in supplies. To keep the roads open under the daily bombing, Hanoi employs a large assortment of heavy earth-moving equipment at night, plus the labor of some 40,000 coolies. An estimated 5,000 trucks ply the trail, but bicycles and even elephants are also used. Some 25,000 North Vietnamese troops are stationed in Laos to guard the vital Red flow southward. Where traffic is heaviest, the North Vietnamese have even set up antiaircraft batteries.

In what the Communists call "the special war," the Allies in a variety of ways monitor and attack the North Vietnamese operating in Laos. The trail runs through the portion of divided Laos that is largely controlled by the Communist Pathet Lao under Hanoi's tutelage, but Royal Laotian patrols infiltrate to report on trail traffic. From South Viet Nam come reconnaissance patrols of Vietnamese, Montagnard and Nung tribesmen, or of U.S. Special Forces led by local guides. Occasionally, when a Communist troop concentration is firmly fixed, South Vietnamese units as large as a company slip across for a swift, unpublicized strike. But the main job of harassment is carried out by the Royal Laotian Air Force's 25-odd prop-driven T-28 fighter-bombers and U.S. jets out of Thailand, which bomb the heavy traffic on the trail around the clock under the euphemism of "armed reconnaissance."

Flagging Spirits. Euphemism and secrecy are required in the special war in Laos because Laos itself is a special situation. Neutralized by the Geneva Accords of 1962, to which Russia and the U.S. agreed, Laos is a tripartite nation--part royalist, part neutralist, part Communist--that by treaty is off limits to all foreign troops. But when the North Vietnamese moved in, the U.S., at the request of Prince Souvanna Phouma, provided aid and advisers in civilian clothes to the royalist-neutralist coalition fighting the Pathet Lao. American planes now daily airlift food and arms into remote areas of Laos loyal to the central government of Vientiane. The U.S. equipped the Royal Laotian Air Force, and U.S. pilots sometimes fly the planes with the tri-headed Elephant Lao markings.

After five years of sporadic skirmishing, the royalist and neutralist armies have lately begun to gather momentum in their internal struggle with the Pathet Lao, who control some 35% of the country. Pathet Lao strength has dropped from 35,000 to 30,000 in the past year. During the same period, some 3,000 defectors and refugees have fled Communist rule, bringing accounts of food shortages, forced labor, and falling Pathet Lao morale. Increasingly, the Royal Laotian Army finds its field enemy to be North Vietnamese regulars rather than the Pathet Lao.

Minding the Trail. The Allied and Laotian operations against the trail slow but cannot stop the Communist traffic into South Viet Nam. Inevitably, the U.S. has weighed more drastic measures, and in fact has drawn up a three-option contingency plan. In one version, U.S. troops would be helilifted in and out of Laos in rapid, frequent strikes against the trail. Another calls for the insertion of a sizable U.S. force, at least two divisions, into Laos to block the trail physically. The final and most far-out plan envisions a massive U.S. troops barrier drawn along the 17th parallel all the way across South Viet Nam, Laos and northern Thailand.

For the moment, none of the plans seems likely to be put to imminent use. Souvanna Phouma has made it plain that he wants no enlargement of the war in Laos beyond its present scale, fearing that the North Vietnamese would then attack non-Communist portions of Laos in earnest. Moreover, the mountainous terrain in Laos is far less favorable than that of South Viet Nam for massive use of U.S. troops. The U.S. command in Saigon feels that the large number of men required for a barrier can be better used to hit the enemy when he enters South Viet Nam.

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