Didn't Dems say domino theory was invalid?

NY Times:

...

Four decades after the Central Intelligence Agency hired thousands of jungle warriors to fight Communists on the western fringes of the Vietnam War, men who say they are veterans of that covert operation are isolated, hungry and periodically hunted by a Laotian Communist government still mistrustful of the men who sided with America.

“If I surrender, I will be punished,” said Xang Yang, a wiry 58-year-old still capable of crawling nimbly through thick bamboo underbrush. “They will never forgive me. I cannot live outside the jungle because I am a former American soldier.”

In a small hillside clearing about nine miles east of the Mekong River, Mr. Yang and four other veterans scratch out a primitive existence with their wives and 50 children and grandchildren. Their hidden jungle encampment is a 15-hour walk up and down low-lying mountains from the nearest paved road, across streams that are knee-deep in the dry season but can become roaring torrents when the monsoons come.

Mr. Yang said his group had been attacked by the Laotian Army twice this year. In September, soldiers killed a 5-year-old boy, whose grave is on the outskirts of the camp. In May, a predawn raid killed a woman and her 2-year-old child. The group moves camp every few weeks to avoid attack, he said.

They are often miles from any rice paddies or hamlets, but sometimes they travel at night, with their AK-47s, to get supplies from sympathetic farmers. They say they got their guns and uniforms from Laotian troops who fled a firefight in 1999.

The C.I.A. operation, from 1961 until 1975, became known as the secret war because, unlike in Vietnam, America’s military involvement in Laos was covert. Instead of sending American ground troops to prevent a Communist takeover here, the C.I.A. hired tens of thousands of mercenaries, most of whom were Hmong, a hill-dwelling ethnic minority.

Today, the number of Hmong veterans and their families who remain hidden in the jungle is somewhere in the hundreds to low thousands, estimates Amy Archibald, a spokeswoman for the United States Embassy in Vientiane, the capital.

...

So the times must be admitting that communist control Laos, like they once controlled Cambodia and still control South Vietnam. John Kerry must be proud of that.

Actually the biggest mistake the Kennedy and Johnson administration made in the war was not sending troops into Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail. Even the communist government in Hanoi admits that such an action would have defeated their efforts to conquer South Vietnam. Instead we sent in the CIA and special forces to work with some indigenous forces to harass the invasion rather than stop it with adequate forces.