Operation Honorable Dragon

Operation Honorable Dragon was an offensive of the Second Indochina War. The Central Intelligence Agency, which equipped and trained the needed troops, aimed at disruption of the North Vietnamese communist supply line, the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Launched by six battalions of Royal Lao Army military irregulars on 31 August 1970, the operation achieved only limited success. Although the planned objective was captured on 25 September, the offensive was plagued by desertions and combat refusals, including a battalion that ran from "ghosts". After the conquest of Pakse Site 26, troops of the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) harassed the Lao occupiers through mid-December 1970.

After World War II, France fought the First Indochina War to retain French Indochina. Following the French defeat at Dien Ben Phu and the subsequent 1954 Geneva Agreements a neutral Laos gained its independence. When France withdrew most of its military in conformity with the treaty, the United States filled the vacuum with purportedly civilian paramilitary instructors. A North Vietnamese-backed communist insurrection had begun as early as 1949. Invading during the opium harvest season of 1953, a North Vietnamese communist force settled in northeastern Laos adjacent to the border of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

As the Laotian Civil War flared from 1961 onward, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) carried out a paramilitary program designed to foster a guerrilla army to support the Royal Lao Government (RLG) in northern Laos. Paralleling that, the U.S. Department of Defense covertly supported the regular Royal Lao Army and other Lao armed forces through a sub rosa supply system, as the U.S. picked up the entire budget of the Kingdom of Laos. Meanwhile, the Annamese Cordillera in southern Laos became the haven for a logistics network, the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The communist war effort in South Vietnam depended on that supply route.

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