The picture is not encouraging in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, either.

In Laos, Henri Mouhot took a picture in 1858 of Laotian women depicting virgins with clothed breasts and married women who revealed whole breasts in public, because the breast functioning as breastfeeding was considered to be desexed.

It was only after we had responded, with what I fear were similar cliches, that she went into action by questioning our desire for friendship and understanding with a challenge about aggressive and warlike actions by the U.S. Government in Cuba and Laos.

This was my second day in Vientiane, the administrative capital of Laos, and my thoughts were none too brave.

Yet Laos was now one of the most explosive headaches of statesmen around the globe.

Before the airplanes came, he said, travel in Laos was just about impossible.

We were told that to the Pathet Lao, a kidnaped American was worth at least $750, a fortune in Laos.

The Republicans some weeks ago served notice through Senator Thruston B. Morton ( R ) of Kentucky, chairman of the Republican National Committee, that the Kennedy administration would be held responsible if the outcome in Laos was a coalition government susceptible of Communist domination.

SEATO was steamed up and prepared contingency plans for coping with the military losses in Laos.

There was the further complication that the administration had very early concluded that Laos was ill suited to be an ally, unlike its more determined neighbors, Thailand and South Viet Nam.

Their joint statement was welcomed by the Western delegations who will attend tomorrow the nineteenth plenary session of the fourteen-nation conference on the future of Laos.

The Laos government plea for help was made by Foreign Minister Tiao Sopsaisana.

Initially the White House reaction was that the bitter exchanges with Moscow over Cuba and the conflict in Laos had dampened prospects for a meeting.

After Cuba and Laos, it was argued, Mr. Khrushchev will interpret the President's consent to the meeting as further evidence of Western weakness -- perhaps even panic -- and is certain to try to exploit the advantage he now believes he holds.

But by week's end the Laotian cry of invasion was read as an exaggeration ( see foreign news ), and the U.S. was agreeing with its cautious British and French allies that a neutralist -- rather than a pro-Western -- government might be best for Laos.

Political, economic and military experts were all agreed that chaotic, mountainous little Laos was the last place in the world to fight a war -- and they were probably right.

But why was Laos the new Southeast Asian battleground??

Russian tanks and artillery parading through the streets of Havana, Russian intrigue in the Congo, and Russian arms drops in Laos ( using the same Ilyushin transports that were used to carry Communist agents to the Congo ) made it plain once more that the cold war was all of a piece in space and time.

This was succeeded by Chenla, which controlled large parts of modern Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, through General Stilwell, privately made it clear that they preferred that the French not reacquire French Indochina ( modern day Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos ) after the war was over.

Vietnam was divided in two states while Cambodia and Laos were made independent.

The name was changed almost immediately to the Indochinese Communist Party ( ICP ), ostensibly to include revolutionaries from Cambodia and Laos.

Although the Mekong was established as a border by French colonial forces, travel from one side to the other has been significantly limited only since the establishment of the Lao People's Democratic Republic ( LPDR, or Laos ) in 1975.

Laos ' population was estimated at about 6, 48 million in July 2011, dispersed unevenly across the country.

The road to a guaranteed-neutral, coup-proof Laos is today almost as difficult as warfare on that nation's terrain.

Until the Cuban fiasco and the Communist military victories in Laos, almost any observer would have said that President Kennedy had blended a program that respected, generally, the opinions voiced both by Mr. Nixon and the professors.

The Viet Minh / North Vietnamese, in spite of the agreement, never really withdrew from the border areas of Laos and the Pathet Lao continued to operate almost as a branch organization of the Viet Minh.

The name was changed almost immediately to the ICP, ostensibly to include revolutionaries from Cambodia and Laos.

It was still fairly common in the Mekong River delta until the 1920s but is now almost depleted, with a small remnant population breeding in Cambodia, southern Laos and possibly in Vietnam.

The subspecies P. e. siamensis, which occupied the vast monsoon forests from Thailand to Hainan was extinct in Thailand, very few in number in Laos and Cambodia, and almost extinct in Vietnam.

Changma Vaj is written in its own script, the Chakma script, also known as Ojhopath. Chakma language is written in an alphabet which allowing for its cursive form, is almost identical with the Khmer and the Lanna ( Chiangmai ) characters, which was formerly in use in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and southern parts of Burma.

Evidence now suggests that they are the descendants of those who crossed over the Taiwan Strait almost 7, 000 years ago from regions that are now inside southern China, northern Laos or Vietnam.

U. S. involvement was considered necessary because the DRV had effectively conquered a large part of the country and was equally obfuscating its role in Laos.

While the war in Indochina was being fought between the Vietnamese and the French, Thailand ( disliking both equally ) stayed aloof, but once it became a war between the U. S. and the Vietnamese Communists, Thailand committed itself strongly to the U. S. side, concluding a secret agreement with the U. S. in 1961, sending troops to Vietnam and Laos, and allowing the U. S. to open airbases in the east of the country to conduct its bombing war against North Vietnam.

Both Mr. K's have so far continued to speak softly and carry big sticks over Laos.

At his press conference Mr. Kennedy said, `` All we want in Laos is peace not war a truly neutral government not a cold war pawn ''.

Since Laos is of no more purely military value to Moscow itself than it is to Washington, this approach might be expected to head off Mr. Khrushchev for the moment.

But because of the peculiar nature of the military situation in Laos, the Soviet leader must be tempted to let things ride -- a course that would appear to cost him little on the spot, but would bog Washington in a tactical mess.

As wars go, Laos is an extremely little one.

Fortunately both the Republicans and America's chief Western allies now are joined behind the neutral Laos aim of the President.

Actually it would be more accurate to say that the leader of the alliance now has swung fully behind the British policy of seeking to achieve a neutral Laos via the international bargaining table.

The State Department tacitly rejected the neutral Laos idea after the Geneva conference of 1954, and last year Washington backed the rightist coup that ousted neutral Premier Souvanna Phouma.

However, by comparing the TV snatches, two different radio station re-runs, and the censored Los Angeles Times version, I found that the radio stations had edited out questions ( ABC removed the one regarding Laos ) or even a paragraph out of the middle of the President's answer.

It must be recognized as a slow-acting tool designed to prevent political and military crises such as those recently confronted in Laos and Cuba.

And now, in March, all Laos suffered a state of siege.

Practically all the people of Laos, he explained -- about two million of them -- are rice farmers, and the means and motives of modern war are as strange to them as clocks and steel plows.

To many a Frenchman -- they came 95 years ago, colonized, and stayed until Laos became independent in 1953 -- the land had been even more delightfully tranquil than Tahiti.

We were there at a moment when the situation in Laos threatened to ignite another war among the world's giants.

To find out, we traveled throughout that part of Laos still nominally controlled, in the daytime at least, by the Royal Lao Army: from Attopeu, the City of Buffalo Dung in the southeast, to Muong Sing, the City of Lions in the northwest, close to Communist China ( map, page 250 ).

Together they had probably done more than any other men to help push Laos toward the 20th century -- constructively.

The Kennedy administration moves haltingly toward a Geneva conference on Laos just as serious debate over its foreign policy erupts for the first time.

There is little optimism here that the Communists will be any more docile at the conference table than they were in military actions on the ground in Laos.

The United States, State Department officials explain, now is mainly interested in setting up an international inspection system which will prevent Laos from being used as a base for Communist attacks on neighboring Thailand and South Viet Nam.