Laos is where Creasy and Guido move from their earlier mercenary work into a covert American campaign in Southeast Asia. Their service there begins with training Meo tribesmen on the Plain of Jars and expands into missions against supply lines across borders; by late 1971, after heavy losses and repeated operations, the two men decide to take a break from the work.

A Base for CIA Operations

As the Americans found the Vietnam War harder than expected, the Central Intelligence Agency recruited and trained private armies in South Vietnam and neighboring Laos. It sought instructors for Laos, where Creasy’s experience in French Vietnam and the men’s former Legion service made them useful recruits. Laos thus enters the story not as a conventional posting, but as part of a regional effort to supplement American military strength through locally trained forces.

Creasy and Guido arrived nominally as loading supervisors for Air America, a charter company presented as a freight service operating around Southeast Asia. In practice, Air America transported equipment, food, and other supplies for the Central Intelligence Agency’s private armies. The contrast between the company’s public transport role and its covert logistical function establishes the concealed infrastructure supporting the campaign in Laos.

Training and Escalation

For eighteen months, Creasy and Guido trained Meo tribesmen on the Plain of Jars. Their work as instructors placed them inside the effort to build local forces, but the worsening American position brought a change in their assignment. The Central Intelligence Agency formed intrusion units—mercenary groups sent into North Vietnam and Cambodia to disrupt Vietcong supply lines—and transferred the two men into one of them.

The unit was designated P.U.X.U.S.P.40, an acronym expanded in the text as a forty-man penetration unit made up of non-American personnel. The computer classification also treated the unit as expendable, a judgment borne out by its losses: by late 1971, thirty of its original forty members had been lost. The movement from training on the Plain of Jars to cross-border operations gives Laos a pivotal place in the escalation of Creasy and Guido’s work, even as the most dangerous missions carried them beyond the country.

Departure and Significance

Creasy and Guido had completed twelve covert missions and accumulated several wounds apiece when they chose to take a long, perhaps permanent, break. The unit had also accumulated a great deal of money, which the account attributes to the computer’s generosity. Their decision closes the Laos phase of their service: a period that began in instruction and developed into repeated covert operations, with the unit’s casualty count making its expendability more than an abstract designation.

Laos therefore functions as both a training ground and the point of entry into a wider clandestine war. Its importance in the narrative lies in the sequence it enables—recruitment, instruction, reassignment, and eventual withdrawal—rather than in a detailed account of Lao society or geography beyond the Plain of Jars and the presence of the Meo trainees.