This general is an unusual case, though. Some months after my conversation a major government-military crisis developed when an over-eager Air Force general tried to divert planes from the opium trade to fighting the war. He lost. Let the B-52's and Air America do the fighting. It was the Americans' idea in the first place.

Let the B-52's do the fighting . . . . Can a plane and a peasant have a fair fight? Who's gonna be the ref? Who coaches the B-52? A cocktail party, a drunken American military attach: "Well, you know, we read the reports on enemy activity, about how infiltration or supplies have been observed in X village-maybe. Then we talk about it-or sometimes we don't."

"Well, what happens when you don't talk about it? Does that mean you don't believe the reports? So you don't do anything?" [Remember, I was only sixteen.]

"No, well, it means that one of the big men has decided already. We don't need to talk, about it-he's turned his hand over, like so . . . ."

"You mean, like so? Well, what does that mean?"

"Yeah, like so. . . . It means we go in and wipe 'em out."

Don't get the wrong idea from this story-not all Americans in Laos-back then there were 1200 in Vientiane alone, out of a population of 30.000-are alcoholics who talk too much. There are quite a few, though-those who learn too late that they can't live with the crimes they are committing, and those who are trying and failing hopelessly to do something decent.

These failures . . . the Foreign Service offers them security, and Laos offers them high hardship pay. . . . They are usually almost alone in their offices or agencies in perceiving the true evil of the American presence, but they count on somehow being able to do their little liberal humanitarian thing.

They fail when the disparity between their perception and that of their superiors becomes too glaring, when they are called upon to become accessories to crimes of colonialism and war, when the CIA induced redbaiting within the American community becomes unbearable, when through various bureaucratic ruses and maneuvers they are denied their low-grade security and advancements.

. . . They stop being able to laugh at the comedy of American hypocrisy.

OF COURSE, a lot of the American colonials are successes. They cope; they make it all possible. The most prevalent type, the backbone of the American effort, is the technician/bureaucrat, the member of the Silent Majority who "does his job," who believes what he reads in the papers and in the company hand-out much as he would "Stateside."

This "Home, Home on the Delta" type predominates in USAID, but neither the Embassy nor USIA could survive without him. He is not bothered by contradictions between today's and tomorrow's official rationalizations for American actions, nor does he bother to construct claborate and doomed-to-fail personal justifications for his guilty participation, as does the liberal mentioned above, nor is he disturbed by such phenomena as the ubiquitous anonymous presence of CIA agents-"ghosts." When asked to justify the American presence in Laos, this cog is likely to respond with something like this: "Do you realize that before we came here, Laos had no paved roads at all? Now it has one, and we built it !"

The fact that that one paved road stops seven kilometers from Vientiane when it reaches the American compound- which looks like nowhere so much as Ventura, California-does not seem to bother this man.

Another type of well-adjusted American must be very familiar to the long-suffering Indochinese. When the French governors and advisers moved out of their mansions on the banks of the Mekong fifteen years ago, this species of American moved in. Not for him the tract houses and all-electric kitchens of the American rank-and-file; if he had wanted that life style, he could have stayed Stateside.

No-America's ambassadors and high-level bureaucrats deserve better than that, and they get it, as the French did before them. Native servants, limousines, Swiss boarding schools for their children to compensate for the cultural deprivation of growing up amidst "backwardness, ignorance, and filth." Too bad that Laos-once calculated to be one of the world's two least developed countries-is a pretty poor heap to be at the top of.