(3 of 9)
The U.S. is deeply committed in Laos, where it has spent $310 million in the past six years. This is $26 for every Laotian every year, or almost half the per capita income. A "retired" West Point brigadier, Andrew Jackson Boyle, directs the entire U.S. supply and training operation from headquarters in Vientiane—where the suburbia-like U.S. colony has taken on a stripped-for-action look since the evacuation of 200 dependents to Bangkok seven months ago. West Point's "retired" Major Eleazar Parmly does his best to help the government drive along Astrid Highway. In the hill country, Central Intelligence Agency operatives roam, dickering for the support of tribal chieftains.
Time & Temper. But the Laotian terrain and temperament are both frustrating. Military men view with distaste the prospect of fighting a sputtery war that could be fed endlessly across the long borders with the Communist world.
The development men find the Laotian people charming, but by Western standards, bone lazy. In other backward lands, it is popular to write this quality off to malnutrition, liver flukes and intestinal parasites, but in Laos (where these afflictions also abound) lethargy extends to the highest rank of princelings, raised on French cuisine. The favorite phrase in Laos is bo pen nyan, a vaguely negative phrase that means anything from "too bad" to "it doesn't matter." Peasants listen with interest when U.S. experts explain scientific agriculture. But when they learn that the aim is to double production rather than to halve the work, they give the new notions a cold shoulder.
Old Lan Xang. A branch of the Thai peoples, the Lao were driven out of southern China by Kublai Khan in the 13th century and fled south to the valleys of the Mekong behind a legendary king, Khun Borom, who rode "a white elephant with beautiful black lips and eyelids." There was, a century later, a brief foray at empire. King Fah Ngum, born with a set of 33 pointed teeth, grabbed all of present-day Laos and part of Thailand by elephant charge and labeled it all Lan Xang Horn Khao, "Land of the Million Elephants and the W'hite Parasol." He installed the golden Prabang Buddha that the present King guards today.
But it was not in the indolent Laotian manner to create a unified nation. The Lao stuck to the lush valleys, where the living was easy, and lorded it over the darker, aboriginal inhabitants who are still known in Laos today as Kha (slaves). To the hills came a fierce assortment of immigrants: Black Thai and White Thai, Yao and Youne and Meo. Adept with the poisoned dart, the crossbow and the animal pit, the 80-odd hill tribes dislike the valley-dwelling Lao and number about half the country's 2,000,000 population.