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BETWEEN December 1971 and May 1972, one of the great battles of the Vietnam War took place in northern Laos when over twenty battalions of the North Vietnamese army assaulted positions held by some 10,000 Lao, Thai, and Hmong defenders. Yet few people have heard of the battle for Skyline Ridge. Press coverage of the engagement was slight, and public interest--at least in the United States--was minimal. Historians of the Vietnam War also have ignored this major battle, perhaps because it had limited impact on the outcome of the war. Still, the battle for Skyline Ridge deserves to be remembered. The culmination of efforts by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to direct a major and lengthy war in Asia, it was an impressive--if temporary--victory for the anti-Communist forces in Laos.
By 1971 the no-longer-secret war in Laos had been going on for more than a decade.(1) Prior to the Geneva Agreements of July 1962 on the neutrality of Laos, United States military personnel had taken the leading role in training and advising indigenous forces. Indeed, under the terms of the Geneva Agreements, which called for the removal of all foreign military personnel from Laos, the United States withdrew 666 individuals.(2) The Central Intelligence Agency, by contrast, had assigned only nine paramilitary specialists, assisted by 99 Thai Special Forces-type members of the Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit (PARU), to train and support Hmong tribal forces in the northern part of Laos, which constituted the Agency's main program in the country.(3)
When fighting broke out again in Laos in 1963 and 1964, officials in Washington considered reintroducing a sizable number of U.S. military personnel into the country to train and advise the Royal Lao Army. Leonard Unger, the American ambassador in Vientiane, opposed the idea. "As will be recalled," he cabled the State Department in June 1964, "experience in '61-62 with MAAG [Military Assistance and Advisory Group] was not a happy one. MAAG and White Star [Special Forces] teams did a highly commendable job under difficult circumstances, but their experience demonstrated that it is almost impossible to put any real spine into FAR [Forces Armee Royale or Royal Lao Army]."(4)
Acting upon Unger's recommendation, Washington decided to maintain the thin fiction of the Geneva Agreements--which the Communist Pathet...