At last some consensus was reached. “I don’t know what they’re saying,” Verdoux told Campbell. “They’ve switched dialects on me and they’re talking too fast, but it seems like they may remember the mountains ahead.” This turned out to be the case. One of the Hmong spoke to Verdoux and explained that the border checkpoint was five kilometers down the road, at the river crossing. The officially recognized border was the tips of the mountain range, but the Vietnamese had expanded westward into Laos for convenience. The three helicopters that attacked were Vietnamese, not Laotian, according to the Hmong. Viets killed Lao people like that when they could get away with it. The Hmong said he would lead everyone alongside the road for about a kilometer. Then he would branch out to the northeast from it on one of the many paths across the rice fields. They would have to traverse the area of cultivated fields in total darkness, he said, cross the river and climb through rice fields again on the other side.
