Battle for Laos - Vietnam's Proxy War, 1955-1975 (Emerson Stephen)(Paperback / softback)

By 1959 the newly independent Kingdom of Laos was being transformed into a Cold War battleground for global superpower competition, having been born out of the chaos following the French military defeat and withdrawal from Indochina in 1954. The country was soon engulfed in a rapidly evolving civil war as rival forces jockeyed for power and swelling foreign intervention further fueled the fighting. Adding even more fuel to the fire, "neutral" Laos's geographic entanglement in the intensifying war in neighboring South Vietnam deepened in the early 1960s as Hanoi's reliance on the Ho Chi Minh Trail for moving men and mat rial through the southern Laotian panhandle grew exponentially and became a priority target of American interdiction efforts.

For almost twenty years, the fighting between the Western-supported Royal Lao government and the communist-supported Pathet Lao would
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