Report from the Thailand Front

...And Communist cadre have persuaded some of the tribesmen to go to Laos for military training by promising to show them how to use new farming equipment...

...Thus, the northeast appears far more advanced than remote areas of other Asian countries...

...For example, tribal leaders were promised that they could continue growing opium poppies, one of the staple crops, despite government attempts at enforcing a law banning opium...

...It was not until several years ago that the government really became aware of the Communists' inroads in the northeast...

...Communist cadres were fanning through the mountains and rice paddies, building hideouts beyond the surveillance of the lowest provincial police...

...At the same time, the Communists, although they have provoked fewer incidents in the past few months, appear not to have lost any strength...

...Merchants sell Western products even in secondary centers, miles from main highways...

...There are no battalions of guerrillas filling foxholes nestled in the next treeline...

...Some observers believe it will be impossible to reduce the number of Communist terrorists as long as they can retreat to jungle strongholds...

...Eighty per cent of the U. S. war planes flying over North Vietnam take off from here...

...The attack was miniscule by Vietnam standards —one Thai guard and two terrorists killed, two or three planes damaged...

...Grinning American airmen perform dance-floor calisthenics with little Thai-Lao girls certified to have passed their vd tests sometime in the past seven days...

...You drive casually into the countryside, lush green during the current monsoon but usually dirty brown and yellow, without a thought of Communist terrorists...

...Their job, he said, was to provide security for the village, not to look for guerrilla bands that might outnumber them...

...Thais and Americans acknowledge that Communist China and North Vietnam could infiltrate many more men and arms across the Mekong if they wished...

...And it was only early this year, after government soldiers went into the north in search of former Chinese Nationalist troops engaged in the opium trade, that they also stumbled upon Communist terrorists...

...Fresh dirt roads, engineered from oxcart tracks, now link a number of villages with towns and markets...

...In recent months the government has generally stopped shelling and bombing Communist hideouts in the north, relying instead on small-unit patrols and civilian aid...

...Americans hope that this year's elections, Thailand's first in a decade, will help to identify the north and northeast more closely with the central government...

...On the night of July 26, from the hamlets and rice paddies just north of the base, some 50 guerrillas (or a dozen or a hundred, depending on whose estimate you believe) stormed through the barbed wire...

...While the Americans were building air bases and highways...

...The Communists profit in addition from the government's mistakes —the dictatorial attitude of some Bangkok officials, the harshness of Army officers, above all the lack of rapport between up-country peasants and pure-blooded Thais from the central plains...

...The North Vietnamese, scattered over several provinces, live in fear of government intimidation and hardly dare express their views...

...The village chief, a gnarled Yao tribesman, added that he was still afraid Communist terrorists would walk in at night, begging for food and threatening reprisals...

...Our plan is to try to drain the water out of the pond to catch the fish," explained a Thai general, playing on Mao Tse-tung's celebrated quotation...

...The base at Nak-hom Phanom, on the Mekong River at the extreme northeast corner of the country, launches most of the American planes that bomb and strafe the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos...

...The Communists do not store shipments of Chinese AK-47 rifles and 122-millimeter rockets for attacks on Bangkok...

...Only a barbed wire fence protects the base with its flimsy wooden barracks, from the enemy...

...Another factor favoring the Communists is that the government, for all its road-building and aid programs, has not substantially raised the region's basic standard of living...

...At the very least, the Communists would probably want the local terrorists to continue their "war of liberation," backed by arms and advisers, just as the Vietcong fought in South Vietnam for years before the massive entry of both American and North Vietnamese troops...

...Win, lose or compromise in Vietnam, the United States, so far with the cooperation of Thai authorities, is turning the country into a permanent line of defense against Communist advances...

...They also picked up a bundle of documents and propaganda material, including lessons the guerrillas had diligently scrawled in American-made notebooks...

...Many had been educated at the elite Chulalongkorn University, and their assignment to some district or provincial capital was a sidestep in a career that would probably end in an office hundreds of miles away...

...Officials estimate that a thousand youths, some of them from North Vietnamese families that migrated to the northeastern provinces during Vietnam's war against the French, have gone to North Vietnam for training...

...At a village in the north, the sergeant at a mud-walled compound said the villagers had seen some 40 guerrillas in the nearby jungle...

...At one village I visited in the northeast, government police officials told me they had just ambushed a Communist patrol of 15 men and three women...

...So far the Communists have supplied only a few AK-47s, the automatic infantry rifle that has been so effective in South Vietnam, and virtually no rockets and mortars...

...At Chieng Rai, capital of the northernmost province, government officials showed me a captured pamphlet that was typical of Communist propaganda efforts...

...The question is, what will the Communists choose to do...

...The effectiveness of the program, however, depends as much on the seriousness of the Communist effort in Thailand as on the Thais' attempts to combat them...

...If the guerrillas should choose to attack, though, it seemed unlikely the sergeant and his men could provide much defense from their flimsy fortress at the edge of the rice paddies...

...Above the din of the combo, you can hear the sound of F-4 jets roaring off on nightly runs over the southern panhandle of North Vietnam...

...The government, by both increasing its military operations and expanding its civilian aid programs, has frustrated some of the Communists' plans...

...Often the appeal of the Communists, particularly among the northern hill tribesmen, is more basic...

...American analysts believe that the Thais recognize the long-range advantages of a soft approach toward up-country peasants and tribesmen...

...Perhaps the most flagrant example of poor government relations with the peasantry was the decision to shell, strafe and bomb suspected Communist base areas in the mountainous northern jungles...

...North Vietnamese troops do not regularly infiltrate from Laos, the buffer state across the Mekong from Thailand's northeast frontier...

...During my travels through the north and northeast my guide from the Thai foreign ministry always carried a pistol for protection, not against Communists, but against hungry peasants who frequently rob travelers and American servicemen in the larger towns...

...It was their first real contact with the enemy in weeks...

...The Communists also railed against government regulations on woodcutting, a practice that agricultural experts pointed out would eventually ruin much of the soil during monsoon seasons...

...Others, proponents of the "domino theory," view northeast Thailand as the next step in the Communists' drive for domination of all Southeast Asia...

...It is somehow hard to associate Udorn, a raucous, dusty provincial capital grown rich off the air base, with the Vietnam war...

...Still, Thailand forms the most important front across Southeast Asia...

...Following their by now characteristic pattern in Southeast Asia, the Communists operate invisibly, and frequently with notable success, in the midst of this rapid American and allied military escalation...

...The Communist Suppression Operations Command in Bangkok, responsible for counter-insurgency efforts throughout the country, has organized a program that calls for local and national troops, supported by peasant intelligence, to fan out from villages in the middle of a dozen Communist-terrorized areas...

...Indeed, the situation in Thailand is hardly comparable even to Vietnam's halcyon era of the late 1950s...

...The government, following the questionable example of a similar strategy in Vietnam, moved several thousand mountain people to crowded refugee villages where they had to carve out new lives on unfamiliar soil...

...When we get rid of all your oppressors, you will get free tractors and free electricity...

...But local peasants still cannot vote for provincial governors, the most powerful officials beyond Bangkok...

...Few soldiers or military vehicles are on the streets...

...Thailand, has had its first brush with what should really be called "the Southeast Asian"—not just the Vietnam—war...

...The mobile group [the term for a Communist propaganda team] welcomes the people and begs to solve their problem," said the pamphlet...

...Only 4,000 guerrillas, according to latest estimates, roam the northern or northeastern provinces, and they rarely operate in groups of over 100...

...Names such as "Gazebo" and "Monaliza" glare across the tin-roofed nightclubs...

...Communist cadre, however, hold secret meetings with them to recruit some of the more dedicated for training as guerrilla leaders...

...But he admitted the dozen or so troops assigned to the compound rarely patrolled beyond the village perimeter...

...It also reminded Americans at home of "the other war" that has simmered along in Thailand while the big war in Vietnam made the headlines and cost most of the men and money...

...Virtually every official I spoke to was from Bangkok...

...The government, supported by American money and advisers, has reacted with a policy ranging from enlightened village-level programs to callous military reprisals...

...At one of these villages, the peasants, accustomed to growing poppies all of their lives, complained they could never adjust to cultivating rice paddies despite haphazard guidance from government officials...

...Eight-engine B-52s set out from Utapao, on the Gulf of Siam, on missions stretching across the Mekong River delta to the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam...

...Understandably, the struggle here pales beside Vietnam...

...The North Vietnamese, moreover, have not begun to send in their own hardened troops beyond the advisory level...

...Thais and Americans, by broadening military and civilian aid programs, still have the chance to solidify this front and prove that those who predict "another Vietnam" in north and northeast Thailand are mistaken...

...They regularly gather entire villages together for meetings at which they spread propaganda and recruit young men...

...But it suggested, more dramatically than any word-of-mouth propaganda or broadcasts, that the Communist terrorists in Thailand might shift their focus from remote hamlets and villages to important towns and bases...

...The Communists make a point of avoiding contact, except—as in Vietnam—when they seize the initiative in a skillfully planned raid on some police station or government official's home...

...Some observers believe North Vietnam, whatever the outcome, might prefer to concentrate on repairing its own damage and consolidating its position in Laos and the South...

...One reason for the poverty of the northeastern peasants is the drought that periodically ruins their rice crops...

...The government troops, armed with an assortment of World War I Springfield rifles and World War II carbines, tried to block the Communists' escape route but only killed two of the enemy in a 30-minute battle...

...Will the Communists—North Vietnamese, Chinese and local Thai terrorists—intensify their war after the combatants have reached a settlement in Vietnam...

...Whatever finally happens, the conflict on the Thai front of the greater Southeast Asian war will probably simmer for years—occasionally flaring into the headlines with attacks on the military bases, then receding to remote villages and becoming barely visible even to the soldiers assigned to the region...

...Government police and soldiers have begun to patrol the countryside, but they still are reluctant to move very far beyond their permanent posts...

...But Udorn, like hundreds of other towns and villages in northern and northeast Donald Kirk reports from Southeast Asia for the Washington Star...

...Police officers, despite their failure to capture or kill most of the enemy, were still proud of their day's work...

...One of the Communists' most powerful assets in the region is the presence of some 40,000 North Vietnamese, most of whom apparently remain loyal to Ho Chi Minh although they fled their country more than 20 years ago...

...American Army engineers and private companies are constantly building roads and highways for shipping supplies from the southern coast to the northern bases...

...In the northeast, dominated by peasants of Lao, not Thai tribal, ancestry, Communist propagandists have played on the theme of the American "occupation" as well as corruption in the Bangkok government...

...We will get rid of the traitors as soon as possible and bring back the country to you...