Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
OPERATION LAM SON 719
On the outskirts of the village of Ban Dong on Route 9 sit two rusting American tanks, all
that remains of a massive invasion and series of battles that have become a mere footnote
in the history of the decade-long American military debacle in Indochina.
In 1971 President Nixon, anticipating a massive campaign by North Vietnamese troops
against South Vietnam the following year (which happened to be an election year in the
US), ordered an attack on the Ho Chi Minh Trail to cut off supplies to communist forces.
Although a congressional amendment had been passed the previous year prohibiting US
ground troops from crossing the border from Vietnam into Laos and Cambodia, the US
command saw it as an opportunity to test the strengths of Vietnamization, the policy of
turning the ground war over to the South Vietnamese.
For the operation, code-named
Lam Son 719
, it was decided that ARVN (Army of the
Republic of Vietnam) troops were to invade Laos and block the trail with the backing of
US air support. The objective was Xepon, a town straddled by the Trail, which was some
30-40km wide at this point. Nixon's national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, was later
to lament that “the operation, conceived in doubt and assailed by scepticism, proceeded in
confusion”.
In early February 1971, ARVN troops and tanks pushed across the border at Lao Bao and
followed Route 9 into Laos. Like a caterpillar trying to ford a column of red ants, the South
Vietnamese troops were soon engulfed by North Vietnamese (NVA) regulars, who were su-
perior in number. Ordered by President Thieu of South Vietnam to halt if there were more
than three thousand casualties, ARVN officers stopped halfway to Xepon and engaged the
NVA in a series of battles that lasted over a month. US air support proved ineffectual, and
by mid-March scenes of frightened ARVN troops drastically retreating were being broad-
cast around the world. In an official Lao account of the battle, a list of “units of Saigon
puppet troops wiped out on Highway 9” included four regiments of armoured cavalry des-
troyed between the Vietnam border and Ban Dong.
The Pathet Lao takeover
Souvannaphouma wanted assurances from the Americans that the North Vietnamese would
pull their troops out of Laos. But the Vietnamese had never acknowledged having troops in
Laos in the first place and the US had already committed itself to a withdrawal. The North
Vietnamese knew this left them in a position of power and decided to stay in Laos and Cam-
bodia until a new government was established in Vientiane. When the Vientiane government
and the Pathet Lao eventually signed an agreement of reconciliation, neither US nor North
Vietnamese signatures were present.
