For a while, the small town of Keng Kok in southern Laos seemed relatively safe from war. There was a fluid "front line" ten or 12 miles away, patrolled by troops of the North Vietnamese Army's 29th Regiment. They were reckoned to pose no threat to a town with only a market, a hospital and barely 5,000 inhabitants. In the early morning hours of Oct. 28, Keng Kok's immunity suddenly came to an explosive end. Two North Vietnamese companies, aided by local Pathet Lao allies, slipped into the town. Two missionaries trying to escape in their pickup truck were stopped at an NVA roadblock; they were eventually marched away to an unknown fate. When Royal Laotian Army troops managed to retake the town four days later, they found the charred bodies of two other missionaries, both of them women, tied to posts in their burned-out house. Nearby, the body of a young Lao who had evidently tried to help the women was found stretched out on the ground, shot through the chest.
Keng Kok was not a random, eleventh-hour casualty in a fading war. Shortly before the attack, Hanoi had ordered North Vietnamese units in Laos, and the pro-Communist Pathet Lao guerrillas who fight alongside them, to be ready, in the event of a quick ceasefire, to seize a number of towns and cities still in government hands. Evidently the 29th jumped the gun; the early cease-fire that Hanoi had been planning on did not materialize, and the actual strike order was never given. Even so, Laotians worry that when "peace" does officially come to Viet Nam their country may face another and more agonizing stage of the war.
Path to Peace. Of all Indochina's savaged battlegrounds, dream-like Laos should have the easiest path to peace. Unlike Viet Nam, the country is not riven by irreconcilable rivalry between northerners and southerners, between Catholics, Buddhists and Communists or even—in a country with the acreage of Britain and the population of Brooklyn—between the landed and the landless. "If we could speak as one Laotian to another," Interior Minister Pheng Phongsavan told TIME's Peter Simms in Vientiane last week, "we could solve our problems without any great difficulty." That has not been possible, Phongsavan complains, because "the Pathet Lao are always looking over their shoulders to get their instructions from Hanoi."
After two months of fitful negotiations in Vientiane, there has been scant progress in the talks between the Pathet Lao and the U.S.-backed but nominally "neutralist" government of Premier Prince Souvanna Phouma. Souvanna wants the pro-Communist rebels to join in the tripartite government that was set up by the Geneva accords of 1962. The Pathet Lao demand a two-thirds share in the government, and they have a large but unacknowledged North Vietnamese military presence to back their claim. What is fundamentally at issue is whether Laos will emerge as a reasonably independent buffer state that might help to bring some stability to Indochina, or as an out-and-out fiefdom of Hanoi.