Laos

I call them ghost hunters, people searching for a long-lost someone - a parent who gave them up for adoption, an uncle who disappeared over the Himalayas, a son declared MIA near the Xe Pon River in Laos. A few times each year, I get a phone call or a letter asking for help in settling a mystery or making a connection. One time, it was the mayor of a French village seeking the Baltimore relatives of an American soldier who had been killed in its liberation in 1944. Sometimes, there's a crime involved, real or suspected - a daughter believed to have been abducted, or a son stabbed to death on his way home from a barroom, his killer still at large.

After two rounds of sunset cocktails at a quiet bar outside Chiang Mai, Thailand, my friends and I were eager to explore the placid rural vista we'd been gazing upon all evening: Below us was a rice paddy that led down to a sprawling pond, beyond which lay a stand of tall, red-flowering trees through which we could see the twinkling lights of traditional northern Thai houses. But as we got up and made for the little wooden walkway that led across the water, a waitress deftly blocked us. It might be better if we came back tomorrow, she suggested.

A rodent that scientists once branded as an entirely new variety of animal has turned out to be a really old one. Laonastes aenigmamus looked like something new when conservation biologists spotted it in a Laotian open-air food market last year. Laotians like to roast the animal, which looks like a squirrel and measures 16 inches from nose to tail. The researchers sent 15 specimens to the Natural History Museum in London, where experts compared the skulls, teeth, bones and its DNA profile with those of known rodents.

The death of 15-year-old Ratsmy Keosambath still does not seem real to her family, said her brother, Nylabonh."We're just trying to . . . make sure she is really gone," said Mr. Keosambath, 19, speaking for his parents and Ratsmy's three older sisters. "It's going to take a lot of time."Ratsmy fell through the ice on a pond at the Taneytown Rod and Gun Club Monday afternoon. She was underwater for about 20 minutes before rescuers could pull her out. She died at 3:30 a.m. yesterday at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center.

PHILADELPHIA - He was once a gang leader who hunted humans in Laotian jungles, a tattoo with the words "Face to Face" needled onto his forehead. The flesh-inked message announced Bounmy Luangamath as a hard case anxious to destroy all comers. Now, Luangamath is a captain and minister with the Salvation Army, working among Laotians in Philadelphia. Born to Buddha, he converted to Christ. Born to rural poverty and violence, Luangamath became a man of peace, preoccupied now with the 2 a.m. troubles of urban immigrant families adrift in a new place, unmoored in America.

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. -- The right hand trembles, so he has to drink his Pepsi with both hands. Controlling his vision has become maddening. And when he stands, his legs quiver as if he were going to fall to the floor.In another time, Carlos Norman Hathcock II was the ultimate terminator. As a sniper for the U.S. Marine Corps in Vietnam -- when the hands were rock steady, the eyes keen, the legs durable -- he was officially credited with killing 93 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. No sniper killed more people in the 216-year history of the Marines.

IN RECENT weeks, the likely last big wave of Lao Hmong refugees began arriving in the United States from a squalid encampment at a Buddhist temple in Thailand -- primarily bound for established enclaves in California's Central Valley, the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and Wisconsin. Their exodus to America is very welcome and long overdue and underscores the United States' incomplete relationship with Laos some 40 years after America began waging covert war there with intensive bombing to disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- For Al Shinkle, the war in Indochina has never ended. Neither has his search for missing U.S. servicemen he believes still survive in remote jungle villages in Laos.Mr. Shinkle's war is a bizarre affair, conducted from his small apartment in downtown Bangkok. For 10 years, the tall, blue-eyed Texan has run a private intelligence network known as Shinkle's Boys.They all are paid Laotian agents, loyal to the defunct monarchy, who are sent on fact-gathering missions deep into the hard-line communist country.

Where did golf begin? If you're like many, you'll answer Scotland. Or England. Either way, you will be wrong. Here's why, partly: Many cultures, as early as the 15th century, had games that required hitting a rock or ball with a stick toward a target, although not necessarily a hole in tile ground. So, add to Scotland and England these, at least -- China, Rome, France, Holland, Belgium, even Laos. Some say bored shepherds fathered most of those early versions, some of which involved hitting objects along courses that covered many miles.

If Dieter Dengler hadn't already existed, he would be exactly the sort of character who might have sprung from the fertile imagination of Werner Herzog. Shot down over Laos in 1966, the German-born U.S. fighter pilot endured months in a brutal prisoner-of-war camp before escaping and - more amazingly - surviving an ordeal that left him at the mercy of the Southeast Asian jungles. Rescue Dawn (MGM) Starring Christian Bale, Steve Zahn. Written and directed by Werner Herzog. Rated PG-13.