Twelve rules for a soldier among villagers, a Lao comic-strip poster

A twelve-panel Lao-language comic-strip poster distributed in Vientiane and filed with U.S. Information Agency posters, catalog date 19 June 1958. A beret-wearing soldier shakes hands with villagers, pays for a purchase, helps an elderly woman, takes a child to a clinic and carries water to a burning village (NAID 6949113).

A code of conduct in pictures

Twelve numbered panels follow one soldier in a beret through his duties to civilians. The archive's description names five scenes: shaking hands with villagers, paying for a purchase, helping an elderly woman carry goods, attending a medical clinic with a child, and carrying water to a burning village. A saluting soldier and an emblem head the sheet. The panel captions are too small to read in the scan, so the archive transcribes only the title and the bottom banner.

[Lao title, read as: Twelve Commandments of the Soldier] ສິນ ໑໒ ຂໍ້ ຂອງທະຫານ

Panels numbered ໑ to ໑໒, each with a Lao caption: [illegible]

Bottom banner: ສິນ ໑໒ ຂໍ້ ຂອງທະຫານ ທີ່ຈະຕ້ອງປະຕິບັດຢ່າງເຄັ່ງຄັດ ໃນທຸກໆໂອກາດ

The archive's machine translation of the banner, which no fluent reader has checked, is "The twelve commandments of the soldier, which must be strictly observed on every occasion."

From the record

The maker line names the U.S. Information Agency and its State Department predecessor, in the National Archives series Propaganda Posters Distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. The catalog date is 19 June 1958, and the catalog title places the sheet in Vientiane. FRAME classes the source as blurred. The audience is recorded as foreign public, the purpose as "Mobilize or secure compliance," and the theme as war and the military.

Restraint presented as a virtue

FRAME tags glittering generalities and plain folks: virtue words and everyday scenes of a soldier among villagers present the army as disciplined and helpful.

The scenes the archive describes are worth taking at face value for a moment. A soldier who pays for what he takes, helps an old woman, takes a child to a clinic and carries water to a burning village is a soldier who answers to rules. Those are exactly the rules that keep an armed force from becoming a burden on the people it lives among. A code that tells soldiers so, in public, where villagers can see the promise, gives civilians something to hold the army to.

The poster is also an advertisement. It shows the conduct and not the breaches, and the record says nothing about how soldiers in fact behaved. The banner's "strictly observed on every occasion" is a standard the sheet sets, not evidence that anyone met it. The panel captions, the actual text of the twelve rules, remain unread.

A Lao poster from the following year in the same files warns against opium smoking. The program is on the USIA posters abroad hub.