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To close the security gap, 45 American public-safety advisers are working with the Thai national police. The border police are adding 500 men to bring the force up to 6,500, and the provincial police are being increased 15% to some 35,000 fully equipped men. A U.S. contractor is winding up construction of 140 miles of all-weather roads linking two critical border areas with the main national road system to give the police mobility. In the north, to the same end, the U.S. has built 44 short landing strips, serviced by Helio Courier and Porter STOL planes that can land on less than 200 ft. if need be.
The government has also enlisted a powerful ally in its war against the Communists: Thailand's Buddhist monks. The Thais alone in Asia have made the Buddhist church an official establishment, with the government the legal owner of the nation's 23,000 temples — one for every 1,300 Thais. Monks in the northeast are helping in community-development projects and dis tributing medicine and clothes to needy villagers. In a cool mountain valley in Moslem Yala province, the government recently resettled 300 Buddhist families, plans to bring in 5,000 more within five years as a stabilizing influence.
The Biggest Job. In what amounts to a subtle, carefully unstated exchange for U.S. help in heading off the Communists at home, the Thais have tacitly permitted the U.S. to establish sanctuary and a second front in Thailand for the war in Viet Nam. From four Thai airfields, flying the Thai flag and guarded by Thai soldiers at Takhli, Korat, Udorn and Ubon, eight squadrons of U.S. Air Force F-105s and F-4Cs fly more than 125 missions daily — 80% of all the U.S. bombing of North Viet Nam. Peasants tending their rice fields rarely look up any more as sleek RF-101 reconnaissance planes of the Thirteenth Air Force's 632nd Combat Support Group scream off and within minutes are over the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos. From Korat, the jet afterburners of F-105s and F-4Cs of the 6234th Tactical Fighter Wing light up the night sky. Some 20,000 U.S. servicemen are already stationed in Thailand, and 10,000 more, including three additional squadrons of fighter-bombers, are due by year's end.
From Nakhon Phanom and two other Thai bases, helicopters swirl off to recover pilots downed over North Viet Nam. U.S. radar sweeps the horizon from Mukdahan and Ubon, and a giant new radar and communications complex is abuilding at the northern boom city of Chiang Mai. A large new military airstrip is under construction at Khon Kaen, and two strips are being readied to handle anything up to giant B-52 bombers. Not long ago, a 130-man U.S. Army Special Forces team quietly moved from Okinawa to set up headquarters at Lop Buri. If it ever comes to widening the war, Thailand would be an excellent staging area for interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh trail.
Everywhere, U.S. bulldozers are turning up the rich Thai soil to build roads, fuel pipelines, stockpile depots, communication nets. This mushrooming complex of support facilities is designed to support a