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. They look after their fields and children and water buffaloes in ten or eleven thousand villages, with an average of 200 souls. Nobody can tell more closely how many villages there are. They spread over an area no larger than Oregon; yet they include peoples as different from one another as Oregonians are from Patagonians.

``What matters here is family loyalty; faith in the Buddha and staying at peace with the phis, the spirits; and to live in harmony with nature.''

Harmony in Laos? ``Precisely,'' said Mr. Frans. He spoke of the season of dryness and dust, brought by the monsoon from the northeast, in harmony with the season of rain and mud, brought by the monsoon from the southwest. The slim pirogues in harmony with the majestically meandering Mekong River. Shy, slender-waisted girls at the loom in harmony with the frangipani by the wayside. Even life in harmony with death. For so long as death was not violent, it was natural and to be welcomed, making a funeral a feast.

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. Yet Laos was now one of the most explosive headaches of statesmen around the globe. The Pathet Lao, stiffened by Communist Veterans from neighboring North Viet Nam, were supplied by Soviet aircraft. The Royal Lao Army, on the other hand, was paid and equipped with American funds. In six years, U. S. aid had amounted to more than $1.60 for each American -- a total of three hundred million dollars.