This article originally appeared in the January 18, 1972 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
“The main thing I want to tell the American people is that the Lao soldier does not want to fight,” the lean, intense Lao Army captain said, “it is the Americans who are making us fight. My men and I are tired of this war, tired of the conditions of our life. We prefer peace with the Pathet Lao to fighting this war on and on for the Americans.”
It was on Sunday night, Jan. 17, 1971 that we were speaking with him. Our meeting was unique, the first and only time in four years in Laos that we had a chance to speak freely with a Lao Army officer from the front lines.
The press in Laos is cooped up in the towns. They go to the front but infrequently, spend most of their time with generals and colonels from rear base camps when they do, and few speak any Lao.
The troops rarely come from the front to the towns, and are confined to the camps when they do. They are expressly forbidden to speak with western newsmen, even in the unlikely event that they have an opportunity to do so without a higher ranking officer or official hovering nearby.
We had had, of course, dozens of fleeting encounters with Asian soldiers over the years.
There had been the lad of 14 at Pakse airport whom we asked how long he expected to remain a soldier. “Until I die,” he had responded without a smile. A fellow International Voluntary Service (I.V.S.) volunteer, John Van Tine, had told us of seeing peasant youths being taken off in chains from his village to serve in the Army. A young Lao soldier who had been defending the Plain of Jars airfield the night it fell in February, 1970 had almost broken down as he explained how the Americans had surrounded the position with barbed wire so they couldn’t escape and how his friends had been shot in the back trying to flee through the one small opening their U.S. advisors had left.
But it was only after an American friend clandestinely arranged for us to meet with a Lao captain whom he had known for over five years on Jan. 17, 1971 that we really had a chance to sit down and talk freely for hours with a man from the front.
It is only one man’s story. But there are a million and a half Asian youths who are presently members of U.S.-supported armies in Indochina. Hundreds of thousands who are right now sitting on cold, isolated mountaintops, who are bivouacked in rainy, wind-swept fields, or who are slogging through treacherous forests, would tell a similar tale were there only someone to listen:
“I am a company commander. I am now out at the front, in a foreward position on a mountaintop. My company is one of several making up a battalion guarding a mountain outpost. We have been there a year.
“Around 1960 I was living in Vientiane. I heard much propaganda about the bad things the Pathet Lao were doing. It made me very angry, and so I volunteered to join the rightist Army. Since I was a student and could speak French well, I joined as an officer.
“How I regret my decision! I see now that they lied to me. But it is too late now. I can’t get out.
“Do I hate the Pathet Lao? Why should I? They are Lao people, like me. You know, when I was at Mam Bac back in 1968 I used to meet with them secretly at night out in the forest. We would talk together and eat together. We have nothing to fight about. My soldiers respect and admire the Pathet Lao. Their soldiers don’t make any money, you know, but they really fight, and they’re not afraid to die.
“What is our life like? Miserable! My soldiers are just posted to an outpost on a mountain, far from their villages. Then they just sit there, for months and years. Almost none of them have ever come to Vientiane.
“My men are very unhappy. The biggest problem in day-to-day terms is that we just don’t get enough to eat. We just get 500 grams of rice a day. Many times we do net get our peppers or fish sauce. My men often have to go out into the forest to pick leaves and berries to try and make a thin kind of soup. Yes, we get enough rice. But do you think you can live on just rice?
“We also don’t have enough clothing. Some of my men haven’t had new uniforms for years. And blankets. It’s cold up there in the mountains. But many men don’t have any blankets. Do you know what they hope for? They hope the Americans will bomb at night with flares, because then the next day they can pick up the parachutes so they’ll have something warm to sleep in.