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Though he studied briefly at the lycee in Savannakhet, he never graduated, joined the French army in 1952 to fight the losing battle against the Red Viet Minh. As a sergeant, he quickly learned the taste of defeat. After the French withdrawal, he transferred to the Royal Laotian Army as a paratroop lieutenant only to taste more of it. Kong Le's was a battalion of troubleshooters. Whenever the Pathet Lao got particularly obnoxious, he and his men were sent out from Vientiane over jungle villages to float down silently and kill. Often they dropped without supplies, fought their way back on a bullet a day, gratifying their taste for toads and bamboo shoots along the route. Kong Le perfected an instinct for infantry leadership. He made the right moves, and U.S. military men credited him with a fine field officer's instinct for combat. In 1957, the army sent him to the Philippines for Ranger training. At Camp Vicente Lim in southern Luzon, he won honors in ambush and guerrilla operations, gained bloody battle experience against the Communist Huks in the snake-haunted highlands back of Olongapo. At the same time, Kong Le kept wondering why he was fighting.
Waiting for Neutralism. Back home, Captain Kong Le was promoted to command of the 1st Parachute Battalion of the Royal Army. But the promotion did little to ease his growing dislike of conditions in Laos. The 1954 Indo-China armistice had handed the Pathet Lao two sections of the country—Sam-nueua and Phongsaly—bordering Communist China and North Viet Nam. The International Control Commission, made up of Polish, Indian and Canadian delegations, was theoretically responsible for keeping any faction from bringing in more troops and arms, but the Pathet Lao ignored the ban; Viet Minh cadres poured across the border to train Pathet Lao troops in guerrilla and conventional warfare. In 1957 the U.S. grew alarmed, began casting about for a rightist leader to counter the Communists. It found him in General Phoumi Nosavan, a tubby but talented field commander whose cousin, the late Strongman Sarit Thanarat of Thailand, was a firm supporter of the U.S.
Two years later, Phoumi led the first of five coups that have kept Laos in turmoil ever since. In April 1960 Phoumi's slate of candidates won handily in a rigged election, but the Pathet Lao were back in business as guerrillas, and the prospect of another long, bloody civil war faced the country. Then, in August 1960, Kong Le acted.
Under cover of darkness, his 300 paratroopers moved in from Camp Chinaimo outside Vientiane, picked up some 2,700 like-minded soldiers from other units and in less than two hours held all the key points in the city. Kong Le deposed the right-wing government, although Phoumi had been his mentor in the army. Installing Prince Souvanna Phouma as Premier, Kong Le sat back hopefully and waited for neutralism to develop. But furious at what he considered a betrayal by his protege, Phoumi pulled his 60,000-man army down to southern Laos and set up his own revolutionary committee. Sporadic fighting between Phoumi's army and the Pathet Lao broke out. The neutralists were drawn ever closer to the Pathet Lao.