Neutralist Laotian Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma ordered the Royal Lao Army to lay down their arms and cease further resistance as the Pathet Lao took Savannakhet.
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Ostensibly exploring the practice of law before the internet. Heck, before good highways for that matter.
Neutralist Laotian Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma ordered the Royal Lao Army to lay down their arms and cease further resistance as the Pathet Lao took Savannakhet.
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The US and Laos reached an agreement which included that all Americans were to leave Laos,by June 30, 1975.
The nation was not yet fully controlled by the Pathet Lao.
Falling like dominoes.
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Most American employees of the U.S Embassy in Laos were ordered to evacuate.
The U.S. has an embassy in Laos presently. In fact, the countries never severed diplomatic relations and normalized them in 1992.
The Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975 was signed into law by President Ford. The act provided for resettlement of South Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees into the United States. In 1975 it would be amended to include include refugees from Laos.
A military government was appointed to govern Lebanon.
Former President of the Teamsters Union Dave Beck was pardoned by President Ford.
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Thousands of Hmong soldiers and officers and their families who had assisted the CIA during the Laotian Civil War, reported to the Long Chieng airbase in Laos for air evacuation. Only two cargo planes were assigned the duty, but they managed to take out 2,500 Hmong.
This brings back up the discussion here earlier of Ma Yang, a Hmong was deported by the U.S. to Laos even though she only speaks English and has lived in the US since she was eight months old. As far as I know, nothing has yet been done to address her plight.
Today is Hmong American Day in the United States, which is set on this day in recognition of the evacuation and ultimately that a population of the Hmong Diaspora relocated to the U.S. The largest population of Hmong live in China, which is actually where the ethnic group originates, with Vietnam having the second largest population.
Dalton Trumbo was presented an Academy Award for his 1956 script for The Brave Ones, which had been earlier awarded under a pseudonym due to Trumbo then being blacklisted.
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A celebration organized by anti war figure and songwriter Phil Ochs marked the end of the Vietnam War, which of course by necessary implication marked the South Vietnamese defeat. The event in Central park included performances by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Paul Simon.
The ironies are thick, as the poster above portrays. Rather than smiling Vietnamese women, there were thousands of South Vietnamese going into an uncertain future that included "reeducation", although this time the Communists in Vietnam did not commit mass murders. The Khmer Rouge and Pathet Lao, however, were about to.
A partial solar eclipse was visible in Greenland, Europe, north Africa and north Asia.
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Kaho Xane Pathet Lao, the official newspaper of the Lao People's Party, (the Communist Party) announced: that the nation's Hmong people "must be exterminated down to the root of the tribe" because their soldiers had assisted the United States in fighting the Communists.
Two days later the genocide would begin.
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The Social Security Administration announced for the very first time that it's retirement and disability program was in debt; and that its $46 billion reserve would be drained by 1983. Notably, President Nixon had extended Medicare, which originally did not apply to everyone, to everyone 62 years of age or older during his Administration.
Television broadcasting began in South Africa.
Royal Lao General Vang Pao, a Hmong highlander, was ordered by the Prime Minister of Laos to cease resistance to the Pathet Lao.
He resigned instead.
It's almost like the Domino Theory was correct.
Before serving in in the Royal Lao Army, he has served with the French starting during World War Two. He immigrated to the United States where he died in 2011.
101 former RVNAF aircraft at U-Tapao Royal Thai Navy Airfield were loaded aboard the USS Midway which evacuated 27 A-37s, 3 CH-47s, 25 F-5Es and 45 UH-1Hs.
A further 41 aircraft were flown to the U.S. 54 aircraft were transferred to the Thai Government, these comprised: 1 A-37, 17 C-47s, 1 F-5B, 12 O-1s, 14 U-17s and 9 UH-1Hs.
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A conviction for Marijuana trafficking in 2020 has lead to one Ma Yang, a 37 year old mother of five, being deported to Laos.
It's hard not to note that while marijuana trafficking is illegal, hardly any state in the US cares about growing, selling, and using it now.
She came here from Thailand in 1988 when she wasn't even a year old. She's Hmong. Raised in the US, she doesn't speak an Indochinese language. Her arrest and conviction involved twenty-five other people (probably all Hmong, I'd guess) and she plead guilty and served thirty months in jail.
She shouldn't have done that, but then, the pressure to be involved, which doesn't excuse it, may have been pretty high. Apparently everyone involved lived in the same building.
In jail her green card was revoked and she signed a deportation order, believing, naively that she wouldn't be deported as her folks were from Laos, which doesn't cooperate with the US on such matters.
Well, they did here. She's been in Laos since March, where she doesn't speak the language, and can't get insulin or blood pressure medicine. Getting a job isn't going to be easy.
What's the lesson here?
Well, some would say if you can't do the time, don't do the crime, although she did the time.
Some might say she got bad legal advice. Maybe.
Some would say that this is really inhumane. Given her condition, she's likely to suffer for her crime with death, in short order.
The last U.S. military advisors in Laos, only three in number, left the country.
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It what was a sign of things to come, the Laotian government agreed to allow the Pathet Lao to become part of a coalition government.
Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was held at gunpoint by his grandson, Iskinder Desta, deputy commander of the Ethiopian Navy. Ultimately, the coup attempt would be abandoned when Desta's mother, Princess Tenague, backed him off of it. A towering figure of Ethiopia in the 20th Century, this too was a sign of things to come. Things would not work out well, in the end, for Desta either.
US B-52s struck Laotian locations to interdict North Vietnamese supply lines to South Vietnam in spite of the official end of the war in South Vietnam, as the peace accords did not extend to Laos.
From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than 2,500,000 tons of bombs, or 260,000,000 bombs, making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. The Laotian bombing campaign ended on March 29, 1973 following the Agreement on the Restoration of Peace and Reconciliation in Laos between the central government and the Pathet Lao.
Laos, the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia, remains subject to a Communist government today and is effectively one of the most isolated countries in the world.
Signs that the US Army was becoming ungovernable in the field occurred with two platoons of the 1st Cavalry Rgt of the Americal Division refused to advance to the Laotian border to recover damaged equipment. The unit had lost men in an NVA rocket attack.
Their company commander was relieved of duty and and the men resumed their regular duties. Gen. John G. Hill declined to discipline them. It was the second time during the late war period in which troops fo the Americal Division had refused to obey orders.
Well known during the period, and for quite some time afterwards, but seemingly forgotten now, by this point in the Vietnam War some units of the U.S. Army was becoming highly undisciplined and some units were becoming defiant to orders. It impacted the leadership of the Army as there was a fear that this would spread and reduce the Army to the point of uselessness. Given this, there was an increasing desire inside the Army's leadership to get out of Vietnam before the situation became worse. It would take the Army years to recover from the war.
On this day in 1971 NASDAQ began operating as the world's first electronic stock exchange.
On the same day, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam launched operation Lam Son 715. The operation featured ARVN forces entering Laos, on their own, to take on North Vietnamese forces there.
The operation would not prove to be a success, demonstrating that deficiencies in the South Vietnamese military and security were such that it was incapable of such large scale operations on its own. The North Vietnamese were able to anticipate South Vietnamese actions, due to loose security. Additionally, the South Vietnamese, contrary to their latter day reputation, were over aggressive in going into Laos and failed to appreciate the level of support that they routinely relied upon from the US military.
Maybe the theory was, therefore, correct. At least it seemed rational to believe it was, as we noted:
Indeed, I was less clear on the challenges faced in my earlier post than I have been in this one (which I researched on this topic a bit more). During the early 1960s, when the Kennedy Administration was faced with trying to decide how much, and how, to support South Vietnam, it faced a situation in which nearly every country in the region had been challenged by a Communist insurgency and some had been successful while others had only been recently defeated by hard effort.
This went on, and looked at the war in the context of a Cold War campaign. You can judge for yourself whether I was right or wrong, or partially right or wrong on that, but I'm going to divert from quoting that post here to go on to the main point here. That is, was the Domino Theory correct?