(7 of 9)
As a result, his is a young army, its soldiers averaging about 19. "Young boys like that," says Kong Le, "they come to me, and they want to join the fight against the Communists. But first I have to tell them that we do not have enough equipment or uniforms or money for them. Then, when there is a spot, they must be handed a rifle and sent right into combat." Still they come to join up, largely because Kong Le has chai di—the "gentle heart," a quality that makes for intense loyalty on the part of his men, but also leaves him a prey to politicians who want to use him.
Casual Kong Le sleeps and eats with his men in the field, never returns salutes (he just waves back). He raises roses and keeps pets. Two white hamsters had the run of his old, tin-roofed headquarters on the Plain of Jars. Many Laotians keep giant red and black ants in jam jars, feed them with bread, then suffocate them in alcohol to create a supposedly aphrodisiac tonic. But Kong Le is so fond of his ants that he never has been known to drink them.
Phing Sad Lao. He probably needs no aphrodisiacs. Married four times, his latest wife, a slim, pretty Chinese girl whom he met three years ago at the market in Xiengkhouang, occasionally sheds her sarong, leaves her sons in Vientiane and follows him on campaigns dressed in skin-tight field pants, diminutive leather combat boots and a U.S. Navy foul-weather jacket.
When the tides of war turn against him, Kong Le develops a psychosomatic sinus headache, takes to munching pills, and mournfully wishes aloud that he were in London or Paris "or anywhere that has pretty girls." But when things are going well, and he is sitting outside his shack at sundown with a deer roasting over the fire and his men dancing the lamvong or playing the flute, he would not give up soldiering. His thoughts turn always to his troops. "My boys, they are trained only by being in wars," Kong Le explains sadly. "We have no money or no time to train them properly. They join my army and must begin to fight then. What a difference it would make if my boys could be trained in Thailand by Americans so that they could know how to fight before they are really fighting."
Kong Le still considers himself a neutralist, says he is fighting merely to see his country left alone by all sides. His simple hope is to reunite faction-torn Laos, and thus to remove the sadness from the opening bars of the national anthem, Phing Sad Lao:
Our Lao race had once known in Asia a great renown,
The Lao then were united and loved each other . . .