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Lotus Land. Kong Le's awakening to the realities was a painful process. Of all the people involved in the struggle between Communism and the West, none were more reluctant to enter it than the Laotians. Delighted inhabitants of a warm, green land, where all a man needed was "a small knife to peel bananas and a large one to kill pigs," the Laotians had built their culture on singing, silk weaving and sex. Scarcely a week goes by without the celebration of a boun—the Laotian festival at which men play the khene, a many-barreled bamboo flute, while the lissome women dance the Jamvong, swinging their long, embroidered skirts while their delicate hands tell tales of love. The skirts are called sinhs, but the deeds that follow the dance are not.
The 2,000,000 Laotians earn a scant $90 a year on the average, but it scarcely bothers them. They have a taste for fried bricks of green river moss and charcoal-broiled toad stew, and the ingredients for both are abundantly available in Laos. A steep, river-rent land of limestone cliffs and rich alluvial plains, Laos can grow enough rice, bamboo, flowers and toads to keep its people happy forever. French attempts to impose European ways on Laos from 1893 to 1954 failed for the most part—in fact, Frenchmen who served in Laos usually returned as dreamy-eyed, wistful victims of the malaise Laotien.
At Vientiane's Wattay Airport, where the Laotian air raids originate, the clocks that are supposed to tell the time in other world capitals are inevitably out of joint. A Westerner can buy a week of perfumed Elysium for the price of a pair of gold-mounted tiger-claw cuff links ($20), drive his sports car right into the Hotel Constellation bar and play endless rounds of Cameroon, a dice game nearly as complicated as Laotian politics. All these qualities of Laos—its fey charm, its naivete, its innocent lechery, its refusal to see the world as an interlocking whole—are reflected in Kong Le himself. To a large extent they keep him from being a really major leader. But he may be closer to it than anyone else in Laos.
Taste of Defeat. He was born 33 years ago in the village of Phalane in southern Laos, the son of a Lao mother and a Kha father. Of all the country's many ethnic groups, the Kha are socially the lowliest (the word Kha means slave). Kong Le himself came out even lower—physically. He stands just 5 ft. 1 in. tall in his paratrooper's beret, weighs 115 Ibs., and even in a nation of small people that is diminutive. "He has a runt complex," says one American friend. Combined with his backwoods, ethnically inferior background, this provided him with all the motivation, if not the genius, to become a Southeast Asian Napoleon.