Laos: Escalation in the Air

The U.S. last week became involved in a minor but significant air war with the Communists in Laos.

When the Red Pathet Lao overran Laos' embattled Plain of Jars last month, the U.S. replied by sending unarmed jets swooping low over Pathet Lao territory. The purpose was partly to photograph troop movements, partly to demonstrate U.S. resolve to stand firm in the Red-threatened little kingdom. But last week, after Communist gunners shot down two American planes in two days, the U.S. decided that shooting back with cameras was not enough—and in a small way Southeast Asia's crisis began to "escalate."

Hitting the Road. The recon sweeps were made by Navy jets from the U.S. 7th Fleet aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk, lying off South Viet Nam in the South China Sea. Prime target for the planes high-speed, still-photo lenses was Route 7, a ribbon of dirt snaking out of Communist North Viet Nam into Laos. Known by Laotians as Thang Nay, or the Big Road, Route 7 has long been used by North Viet Nam's Reds to truck men and guns to the Pathet Lao (up to 400 vehicles a day), in open violation of Laos' neutrality accords. To get closeups of the latest influx, the supersonic reconnaissance craft flat-hatted in at virtually treetop level, at slowpoke speeds of perhaps 450 m.p.h., and often from the same predictable angles.

The Communists fired on the jets from the start, and with practice soon found the range. One day at noon, while maneuvering his RF-8A over the vicinity of Ban Ban, a collection of 300 thatch-roofed huts on Route 7, Navy Lieut. Charles F. Klusmann, 30, of San Diego felt ground fire thumping through his craft, ejected himself seconds before the plane tumbled to earth. An American search helicopter out of Vientiane spotted the downed pilot at the edge of a clearing, but it was driven off by Communist fire that wounded the chopper's copilot. The Pathet Lao radio later announced that Klusmann had been taken prisoner.

Punitive Punch. For the first time, Washington then ordered armed jet fighters to escort the recons, but disaster nearly repeated itself. Again over Ban Ban, a Navy F-8A Crusader escort, flown by Commander Doyle W. Lynn, 37, of La Mesa, Calif., was shot down by the Reds. Lynn likewise bailed out, but after a harrowing night in the tiger-inhabited jungle, he was rescued by a U.S. helicopter.

Back in the Pentagon, flustered brass described the Red gunners as lucky, hastened to explain that jets are terribly vulnerable anyway. "Hell," said one Navy man, "a kid standing at the end of the runway with a baseball bat can knock down a jet if he gets the ball into those turbine blades." But the Reds weren't using baseballs. Western military experts guessed that the U.S. planes had been hit by Soviet-designed ZPU2s—twin, 14.5 mm., heavy machine guns mounted on an armored car and operated from a fast-turning swivel seat. U.S. officials suspected that the guns were operated by North Vietnamese crews, but the Laotian Reds may well have been trained to operate them.