America will confront communist expansion, with force if necessary, in every corner of the globe.  So states the Truman Doctrine, announced in 1947.  Easier said than done.  When Truman sent armies to punish north Korean aggression, Chinese divisions fought them to a standstill and shattered the myth of American invincibility.  This humiliation should have made Washington think twice about other adventures in Asia.  It didn’t.

On January 19, 1960, the day before his inauguration, John F. Kennedy met with outgoing President Eisenhower.  Kennedy wanted to ask many questions, but Eisenhower had only one item on his agenda — Laos.  He told Kennedy that if Laos fell to the communists, it would be only a matter of time before “South Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma would collapse.”  To this end, America should send its soldiers, if necessary.  As a sidebar, Eisenhower told Kennedy we should never let communists serve in Laos’ government. ¹

A light must have switched on in Kennedy’s head.  Had he heard correctly?  Eisenhower had just confessed to toppling a government.  It was Kennedy’s morning habit to gorge on the articles in The New York Times and Washington Post.  Only a few weeks earlier, Laos had been big news.  As reported on the afternoon of December 8, two C-47s had appeared over Laos’ capital, Vientiane.   Paratroopers leaped from the planes and knifed invisibly through the clouds for the count of ten, then pulled their cords.  The paratroopers flared into view and floated like dandelion puffs to the edge of the city.  The two battalions were the tip of the spear of a CIA coup.  Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma had to go.  He’d done the unforgivable — begun negotiations for a coalition government that would include communists.

By nightfall, the rebel battalions were inside the city battling government soldiers.  Both sides wore the same uniforms, supplied by America.  The defenders put on bright red neckerchiefs so they would not mistakenly shoot their own men in the haze of battle.   The idea caught on with the other side.  They put on white neckerchiefs.

The next day, Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma fled to Cambodia with most of his cabinet.  He’d asked the army chief of staff to take charge of the defense of the capital.  But, after the prime minister left, the general resigned rather than fight.  The Lao officer corps was notorious for its unsoldierly reluctance to bleed in defense of the nation.  Only by descending through the ranks could one find a bona fide warrior.  A lowly captain named Kong Le took over the defense of the capital.  He knew more renegade battalions were on their way from the south, led by the turncoat General Phoumi Nosavan.  Hitched to their trucks were American 105-Howitzers.  Kong Le had no artillery.  Then, suddenly, his chances improved.  Soviet Ilyushin-14s arrived at the national airport with a gift of heavy artillery, plus crack North Vietnamese gun crews to fire them.

There was a lull into the next week while Phoumi and his battalions marched toward the capital.   They reached Vientiane on Tuesday.  The next day the fighting began after lunch.  The renegades surrounded soldiers inside the police headquarters.  After raking the building with machine gun fire, Phoumi’s men offered white neckerchiefs to the men inside the police station.  The defenders emerged to toss their red scarfs and join the rebels.

Phoumi brought up a tank and armored cars.  Kong Le fought in retreat toward the airport.  Just before nightfall, he rallied his soldiers and pushed back into the city.  Night forced a brief truce.  At dawn, foreign correspondents peeked out of their hotels.  The city seemed deserted.  They walked the streets.  The American embassy had been shelled.  A few shops were riddled with bullet holes.  The reporters wondered if the coup was over.  They were soon back in their hotels, hunkering down.  Phoumi and Kong Le had positioned their artillery for a duel.  Phoumi blew apart the two-story army headquarters.  Kong Le shelled the correspondents’ favorite haunt, the towering Constellation Hotel with its ample liquor cabinet.  This was only the first exchange.  The artillery traded shellings around the clock.  Not until five p.m. on Friday did the cannons fall silent.  Six hundred civilians lay dead beneath the rubble.  Kong Le and his defenders hitched their gift cannons to trucks and fled the capital.

Over the weekend, the suburbs seemed on fire as countless families cremated their dead on backyard biers.  No houses caught fire from the bonfires.  Fortunate, since the water system was down.  Only the hospital, crammed with wounded who spilled into the corridors, had running water.  A portable diesel pump siphoned water to the hospital from the American ambassador’s swimming pool next door.  Amidst so much carnage caused by the intrigues of the powerful, it was a tiny glint of karmic justice. ²

Washington pinned its hopes on Phoumi to defeat the communists.  As if on cue, a North Vietnamese division plunged into Laos and headed toward Vientiane.  In the following months, Phoumi perfected his retreat, losing every battle.  “If that’s our strong man,” President Kennedy moaned to an aide, “we’re in trouble.” ³   Against the wall, Washington agreed to a Geneva Conferenceon Laos.  The talks limped into 1962.  The parties signed an agreement that all foreign troops were to leave.  The Americans dutifully departed.  But the North Vietnamese remained, hidden in the jungle.  If the Americans returned, they’d have to stay out of sight.  Accustomed to living in the shadows, the CIA got the job.  By now, the CIA like Washington had lost all faith in the Lao officer corps.  It threw its support to a Hmong officer named Vang Pao.  An agent had seen Vang Pao in battle.  He was the real thing.  The CIA gave Vang Pao weapons, and became the paymaster for his Hmong army.

It was a surprising turn of events.  Though not to the shaman Yashao.  He’d foreseen it all nearly two years earlier on the very day of Phoumi’s coup.  The vision came to him high up on an enormous mountain.  So tall its peak lived in the clouds.  So massive the crawl of its shadow was like spilled ink oozing over Khang Khai.  It is there at Khang Khai, on the evening Phoumi captured Vientiane, that our story begins.

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