The Little General Without A War  
Once He Was Our Man in Laos; Now We Just Want Him to Go 
Away  

By Pamela Constable / Washington Post Staff Writer  

Sunday, July 12, 1998; Page F01  

   FRESNO, Calif.—The home is small and plain, identical to 
many others in this flat, dusty farming city. Beside the 
front door sits a carefully tended lily plant and a mound 
of scuffed shoes. Like a supplicant entering a temple, you 
too remove your footwear,to await an audience with the 
General.
   Inside it is dark. You notice a single shabby couch. 
Three bare walls.
   But the fourth wall resembles a shrine, festooned with 
candles, paper flowers and photos of groups of soldiers. At 
the center is a framed copy of a 1964 Time magazine; the 
cover depicts a wiry, grinning soldier in a red beret, 
posed against lush jungle foliage.
   Squatting barefoot on a worn rug are a dozen sunburned, 
middle-aged refugees from Laos -- mostly tenant farmers who 
grow eggplant, peppers and melons on small plots outside 
town. They are hushed, expectant. When a van arrives 
outside, an excited murmur courses around the room. He is 
coming! A tiny figure appears at the door. He is bald man 
in his sixties, with deep furrows around his eyes and a 
toothy grin. The same face as the man on Time's cover. He 
wears a crisp green combat vest. His forearms are still 
brawny. Wrapped around both wrists are tattered white 
strings. Magical strings, his followers believe. Some of 
the squatting men wear them, too.
   As the little man grunts a greeting, each Laotian bows 
down, hands pressed together, and touches his forehead to 
the rug -- a sign of respect for the beloved General.
   On the great stage of history, players come and go, 
their stature often determined by chance collisions of 
circumstance and opportunity.
   Once upon a time, Gen. Kong Le was an actor of crucial 
importance, an ally in the American fight against communism 
in Indochina.
   Today, he is a stateless nomad trying to stay one step 
ahead of deportation by U.S. immigration authorities. He 
has become a bureaucratic annoyance and a minor diplomatic 
embarrassment. In official Washington, he enjoys no more 
respect than any other illegal alien -- say, an 
undocumented dishwasher in a Georgetown bistro.
   But back in the summer of 1960, when he was a dashing 
26-year-old paratrooper, trained by American and French 
advisers, Kong Le made international headlines by seizing 
Vientiane, the Laotian capital, with 800 troops. He 
declared a new, politically neutral government. A profile 
in the New York Times described him as a revolutionary 
hero.
   In this sideshow to the Vietnam conflict, Kong Le was 
suddenly seen as the plucky, 4-foot-11 defender of a 
crucial, tottering domino. Time, in its cover story of June 
26, 1964, said: "He stood almost alone in Laos last week as 
the West's only effective battler against Communism." The 
Pentagon invited him on a month-long visit, and The 
Washington Post carried a large photo of him reviewing 
troops at Fort Myer.
   These days, the only significant news about Laos 
involves a discredited newscast about nerve gas, reviving 
dim memories and causing some career consternation. (As CNN 
correspondent Peter Arnett said in self-defense last week: 
"Laos was a black hole during the war. A lot went on there 
that we didn't know about.") And today few people remember 
the name of Kong Le; he slipped off the stage of history 
more than 30 years ago, fleeing into obscure exile from a 
political maelstrom involving the CIA, various Laotian 
princes and the Pathet Lao, a communist insurgency backed 
by the North Vietnamese.
   In 1975, shortly after the fall of Saigon, the 
communists took over Laos. They remain firmly in power. But 
for the General and his followers, the war rages on. They 
imagine their return to glory and plot sweet revenge 
against the Pathet Lao.
   Kong Le himself owns no property, holds no actual rank 
and has no job -- hasn't worked in decades. He sleeps in 
the spare rooms of his supporters in Laotian enclaves 
around the country, from California to Arkansas to 
Virginia, surviving on their generous financial 
contributions.
   His story reflects the dreams and divisions of a 
scattered, nearly invisible immigrant community -- which 
happens to be Laotian but could easily be Ethiopian or 
Kurdish, Salvadoran or Cuban -- where people toil for years 
at menial jobs in America, but live their real lives in the 
past, and fantasize that it can become the future.
   "We are going to go back and fight the communists until 
we win!" In a cramped living room in Arlington, the General 
is holding court before a circle of mesmerized Laotian 
admirers, sitting bunched together on the rug. Last month 
it was farmers in Fresno, where 20,000 Lao live. This month 
it is the Washington area, where an additional 10,000 live.
   Today, 50 people have gathered to hear him speak. They 
are not the educated elite of the capital area's refugee 
society. They are factory workers and janitors and 
technicians, some of whom drove all night from 
Massachusetts and North Carolina for the occasion.
   "Some Lao come here and want to settle down to a 
comfortable life, but not us," Kong Le is saying. "Some 
people have sent money or gone back to support the 
communists. But we are ready to fight. . . .
   When the moment is ready, we will go back and fight, and 
we will win.
   The people of Laos are getting angry, and this is from 
their hearts." The room erupts in applause.
   Kong Le's speeches, delivered in Lao (and translated on 
the spot by his right-hand man, a sharp young lawyer named 
Tony Saisomorn), ramble from patriotic harangues to 
fatherly advice. One moment he is excoriating the Pathet 
Lao, the next he is expounding on the benefits of Lao 
herbal medicine, specifically a kind of tree bark that 
guarantees long life when ground up and boiled with rice.
   In many ways, Kong Le seems more like a Buddhist monk 
than a military commander. His bald head bobs for emphasis, 
his voice is a gutteral singsong, his wrists are wrapped 
with dozens of baci strings for good luck. They are a large 
part of a legend that the General has cultivated for nearly 
four decades.
   When he took power in 1960, Kong Le vowed to make Laos a 
little Switzerland: neutral, united and peaceful. Instead, 
his forces were driven from the capital after four months 
of chaotic political and military maneuvering that The 
Washington Post described as having "more plots and 
counter-plots than a 5-act Verdi opera." Despite his 
elusive grasp on power, Kong Le proved a popular leader and 
a shrewd survivor; he first accepted Soviet support, then 
swerved toward the Americans, during five years of 
seesawing battles. As U.S. covert military operations 
expanded inside Laos, American officials touted Kong Le's 
utopian quest for "neutrality" as the best bulwark against 
North Vietnamese encroachment.
   Time magazine's report depicted Kong Le as a hero of 
mythic proportions: a guerrilla fighter who slept in the 
jungle with his men, shielded from bullets by the magical 
Buddhist baci wristlets and a powerful guardian spirit 
called a phi. Some Laotians were said to believe he was the 
reincarnation of Setthathirath, a legendary Lao king who 
vanished into the jungle four centuries ago.
   But it turns out that the General was never even a 
general at all. His last official rank in the Royal Lao 
Army was captain. It was afterward, during his years as a 
jungle fighter, that he acquired the honorary title.
   "My men gave me that name," he says today, with a grunt 
and a giggle.
   Kong Le's military prowess also failed to match his 
press notices.
   While he was stealing the show, the Pathet Lao were 
advancing implacably on the ground. In late 1966, exhausted 
by successive military defeats, political plots and 
international pressure, he flew into exile, leaving Laos to 
another decade of fighting.
   He wound up in France, but by 1988 his constant 
political activities -- including a mission to China to 
train freedom fighters -- had grown tiresome for his 
government hosts. So Kong Le decided to try his luck in the 
United States. More than 250,000 Laotian refugees had 
resettled here, including some of his old paratrooper 
forces. The General was older now, but still fit and 
vigorous. He still had friends in the American military; he 
still had his guardian phi. And he still had true 
believers.
   Kong Le's devotees include men like Phouthone 
Savathvongxay, 63, a tenant farmer in Fresno who joined his 
guerrilla forces in 1963, living on frogs and leaves in the 
jungle until 1975, when the Pathet Lao took over. He was 
caught and sent to a communist "seminar camp," where he was 
forced to do hard labor and given a little rice to eat. 
Eventually he escaped to Thailand and came to the United 
States in 1989.
   And men like Ly Khoxayo, 58, a medical warehouse worker 
from Lowell, Mass., who drove to Virginia last month for a 
brief meeting with his leader. Khoxayo also escaped from a 
Pathet Lao prison camp, swam the Mekong River to safety 
while pulling his wife and children on an inner tube, and 
was resettled in the United States