LAOS: Spreading the Word

• Share

Now and then a rifle crack broke the stillness of the hills, but the Communist insurgents were finding the simpler weapons of rumor, exaggeration and bluff sufficient to keep their campaign going. Operating in little bands of 5 to 25 men, they sent heralds ahead to frighten villages with stories of Communist hordes about to descend, of real or imaginary atrocities committed near by, of the fall of a government fort. Sometimes they rowed back and forth across a river to give the impression of large numbers. Sometimes they herded villages of people before them to make an attack seem bigger.

The tactics of psychological warfare were working fine last week among the primitive and superstitious northern tribesmen of Laos, in the provinces of Phongsaly and Samneua on the border of Communist North Viet Nam. It was these northern areas, occupied by the Communists until 1957, that the insurgents seemed most determined to conquer. Often, villages were occupied without a fight. In some, families packed hastily and paddled away in dugout canoes, leaving their villages half empty as the terrorists approached. Last week the banks of the Mekong at the royal capital of Luangpra-bang were dotted with bamboo huts built by newly arrived refugees from threatened areas; at week's end Communist bands were stirring up incidents in the vicinity of the royal capital itself.

No Helicopters. It was an odd kind of war, with little bloodshed. Several army outposts abandoned their stations before a terrorist hove in sight. Company and platoon units, with no radio contact with higher headquarters, were out of touch for days at a time. Often Laos' creaky, eight-plane air force could not get supplies to isolated garrisons, and more than one slightly wounded trooper died at a monsoon-soaked outpost for the lack of a road or airstrip to get him out to a doctor; in all Laos there is not one helicopter. In Samneua—the province in greatest danger of Communist takeover, where an 800-square-mile area is now controlled by Communist rebels—a surrounded paratroop company could not be reinforced by troops waiting to jump in and help; they had no parachutes at hand.

Army officers were cheered by word last week that the U.S. will soon airlift supplies—such items as tents. Jeeps, small arms and radio sets—to aid them. But the main difficulty of staunchly anti-Communist Premier Phoui Sananikone lies in the fact that the poor, discontented, primitive half of Laos' 2,000,000 people have never developed loyalty to the central government.

Unhappy Mountaineers. These mountaineers—the Black Thai, the primitive Kha, the opium-growing Meo—have long disliked being ruled by the Lao of the south. A few among the wild hill people fight on the side of the Communist Pathet Lao; many more have a passive indifference toward the government.

Little Laos gets more U.S. aid per capita than almost any other nation but virtually nothing of the $250 million sent by the U.S. has ever gone to benefit the remote sections of the country now being overrun by Communist rebels.