Defense: Mr. Pacific

(See Cover)

Rifle fire crackled on the road from Vientiane to Luangprabang as pro-Western Laotian forces made desultory trouble for pro-Communist rebels. Soviet transports droned out of North Viet Nam parachuting supplies to the rebels, and Communists in the air or on the ground shot up an unarmed U.S. observation plane that was taking pictures of the airdrop.

Civil war in the steamy Laotian corner of Southeast Asia last week, confined at first to brief scraps and total confusion, now blossomed into the prospect of a fullblown crisis. From Premier Prince Boun Oum came a terse communique: five heavily armed battalions of Communist North Vietnamese soldiers had crossed the border into northeast Laos and had attacked the town of Nonget. It was, cried Boun Oum, nothing less than a case of "flagrant aggression"—another Communist stab along the Asian front, the cold war's broadest and busiest.

Last week in Washington President Eisenhower summoned an emergency White House meeting, followed promptly by an announcement that the U.S. would take "the most serious view" of any Communist intervention in Laos.

Halfway around the world, midway between the red mud of Vientiane and the white marble of Washington, in an ugly mustard-colored building squatting above the U.S. Naval Station at Pearl Harbor, the Laotian skirmishes became new red dots on a vast, well-dotted map of the Pacific frontier. In a windowless basement room that once served as a hospital morgue, Admiral Harry Donald Felt, U.S. Commander in Chief Pacific (CINCPAC), met with his staff for their briefing. Officers of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines mulled over the latest intelligence reports. Then the little man with the four stars and the weight of half a world on his shoulders issued orders that soon spanned the Pacific.

Free World Heir. As CINCPAC, Admiral Felt heads the largest military command in the world, capably fills a job that demands a readiness for the violent arts of war and the gentle arts of diplomacy.

His joint force includes 81,000 soldiers of the U.S. Army, two U.S. air forces (Fifth and Thirteenth) of 61,000 men and 1,000 aircraft, two fleets (the First and Seventh) of 400 ships, 1,800 aircraft and 231,000 men. He is responsible for 85 million square miles of the earth's surface.

The geographical boundaries of his command (see map, overleaf) roam south and west from the Burma-East Pakistan border to the South Pole, north along the coastline to Asia to the North Pole, and east to the continental edge of the U.S.