The last type of successful American is what-we-want-to-be-like-when-we-grow-up-and-join-the-Peace-Corps.

Laos has no Peace Corps, but it has the International Voluntary Service, and the Red Cross, and missionaries.

This American is not ugly; he alone takes the trouble to learn the Lao language and culture, to discard his racist and culturally biased preconceptions and expectations. The work he does is very often merciful and humanitarian, although in Laos he does not function in an emergency comparable to India's or Pakistan's.

However, this American is usually an unwitting tool of America's colonial goals, of its official modernization effort. He goes about his work with no conception of its implications for Lao nationalism. Even when he has no part of it, he cannot undo the damage done by the American war effort nor can he even rectify the image of the American oppressor. And what if he could? He only serves to divert the enthusiasm of the people from their only realistic source of security.

LAOS is a small, poor, non-unified fiction of a country with few prospects for "development," few resources. It is in the nature of international politics that its powerful neighbors should seek to conquer it, or at least to bring it within their spheres of influence, either through bribery or by force.

The 1962 Geneva Accord between the great powers which declared Laos to be neutral flew in the face of this political reality. It set up the International Control Commission, made up of Polish, Canadian, and Indian representatives, under a mandate to regulate Laotian neutrality, to police foreign intervention.

Yet the fact that the ICC has always been pitifully under-financed and under-staffed, and the fact that its reports and recommendations often go unheeded are evidence that the sponsoring powers have no intention of giving up their reasonable options to colonize Laos.

Colonization. . . . It is said that North Vietnamese forces never left Laos after the end of the Civil War in 1962. . . . Even if one believes the official U.S. claims that there are not now, never have been, and never will be, U.S. troops in Laos, one has to admit that the presence of American advisers in every department of the Laotian government, in every Royal province, seems to accomplish the same thing.

So the Laotian generals at the moment look to the United States for protection, seek to include their country in the American sphere. They are lining their pockets and laughing at America's pretensions of high moral purpose. Doubtles they would as readily look to North Vietnam or to China as patrons if it were not too late, if they were not sure of being dispossessed by a nationalist communist regime. Ho Chi Minh might have found "mon general's" five Mercedes a trifle excessive.

But the United States is 18,000 miles away. It is probable that we are unable to win the war, and that the Lao generals will wish that they had followed the lead of the Pathet Lao's Souphanouvong, and chosen a protector closer to home, because defending an "outpost" 18,000 miles distant does not have the immediacy of defending one just across your borders.

Of course, another obstacle to winning the war, to culminating our colonization of Laos, is that unlike most colonialists we are competing with a rival who has an immense psychological advantage. A comparable situation . . . the United States would not be too pleased if the Soviet Union attempted to bring Canada into its sphere of influence, but we could rest assured that we would have an edge in the competition-300 years of a common cultural heritage with Canada.

Trapped in the Western cultural pattern, and inevitably racist, few Americans are ever able to develop the respect for the Lao-or Asian, for that matter-character and culture which is necessary for cooperation. The American yoke will never fit Laos as comfortably as the Chinese or Vietnamese.

[I am returning to Vientiane after a week in the royal capital of Luang Prabang, even four years ago constantly threatened by Pathet Lao guerrillas. If I am anxious to get back to Vientiane, where the main amusement is Walt Disney movies dubbed in Thai, rest assured that Luang Prabang must have been dead. It is the rainy season. The only way to get to Vientiane, since there are no passable roads, is to fly-in a DC-3. The only way to get to the airport is to cross the river-on a ferry, since there are no bridges in Laos.

The ferry is not leaving on time because a truck has gotten stuck in the mud of the riverbank after driving half-way off. We wait . . . and wait . . . and wait . . . while no one does anything to budge the truck so the ferry can leave. If it doesn't leave pretty soon, we will miss the plane to Vientiane, and who knows when there will be another one to get us back to "civilization?" Doesn't anyone realize the urgency of the situation?

Apparently not . . . I explain my concern to my Lao friends, who look at me rather blankly-politely-and at each other questionably. It gets closer and closer to the time when the plane is scheduled to leave. . . . Finally one of my friends realizes why I am upset, and explains: