On the steel-mesh runway of Wattay Airport in Vientiane, a group of athletic-looking Americans in bright sports shirts and baseball caps busily loaded machine-gun belts and rockets aboard the four new T-6 "training" planes of the Royal Laotian Army. Not far away, behind a desk littered with documents stamped "secret," was their shirt-sleeved boss—former Brigadier General John Arnold Heintges, 48. The general tells his visitors: "Call me mister."
No Stars. Heintges directs a U.S. outfit that amounts to a military advisory group in Laos. But it must operate in mufti. Reason: the 1954 Geneva agreement that ended the war in Indo-China.
That agreement...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
