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Title: Shooting at the Moon : The Story of America's Clandestine War in Laos by ROGER WARNER ISBN: 1-883642-36-1 Publisher: Steerforth Pub. Date: 01 June, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.3 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Shooting at the Moon is on the Mark!
Comment: Shooting at the Moon is the great image Roger Warner employs to shed light on the USA strategy in Laos and perhaps for all of Southeast Asia. With literary aplomb, Warner brings to life many of the key figures in the CIA 's covert attempt to level the playing field in Laos as the overt war raged in Vietnam. The incredible shift from a small operation to a technically air dependent approach in the context of global political strategy, set up the Hmong people, our allies, for inevitable genocide. Warner succeeds in placing the reader inside Laos in its last days of glory as "The Land of a Million Elephants and a Parasol." In the end, shooting at the moon eclipses the sincere efforts of a handful of people to stave off the darks days in Laos following the communist takeover.
Rating: 4
Summary: Failed Strategies
Comment: Warner accurately captures the bizarre twists and turns of the U.S. surrogate warfare efforts in Laos. My experience as a direct participant during the 1972-75 time frame gives me the advantage of being able to attest to some of Warner's chronicle. The historical record also provides us information on the failed strategies used by the American State Department in their desire to control events in Laos. Although the North Vietnamese considered all of Southeast Asia as their theater of operations, the American effort, in contrast, became one of disjointed and , at times, bumbling entities running into each other without effective command and control. This does not in any way diminish the heroic efforts of honest men trying too carry out tactical operations while complying with unreasonable controls of the American government bureaucracy. The legacy of these failed strategies can be seen with the difficult acclimation of the Hmong into American society. Warner's spares us the micro detail and intense emotionalism of other books on the same surrogate warfare. This makes "Shooting at the Moon" a good compelling read. With the above bureaucratic absurdities in mind, Warner was right on when he said that "it was the Americans who were shooting at the moon"!
Rating: 5
Summary: This Title Also Known as "Back Fire"
Comment: Roger Warner has published the only comprehensive, unbiased account of the strange but tragic "sideshow" war in Laos, the mountainous, landlocked neighbour of Vietnam that was consumed in the same domino-theory meltdown as the two Vietnams and Cambodia, but which was assiduously kept out of the media's scrutiny for most of the 1960s. The sporadic war between the American-sponsored tribesmen and the communist Pathet Lao was wholly financed, on the American side, through the CIA, with unofficial air support from the USAF (traveling incognito) and private CIA front airline. Warner tells the story from several angles, including the zealous mid-western missionaries who traveled to Laos in the early 1960s to help improve agriculture, the often equally idealistic CIA field operatives who trained the tribesmen and the less saintly backroom boys in Washington who made sure Congress kept giving the money. He reserves special praise for the brave freelance journalists who helped expose the secret bombing, albeit all too late: by the end of the conflict there were parts of the Plain of Jars (a prominent Laotian land feature near the North Vietnamese border) that resembled a lunar surface.
For reasons obscure this title has a different paperback name ("Shooting at the Moon") than hardback ("Back Fire").
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Title: Covert Ops: The Cia's Secret War in Laos by James E. Jr. Parker ISBN: 0312963408 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1997 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Last Man Out: A Personal Account of the Vietnam War by Jr. James E. Parker ISBN: 0804119414 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 02 May, 2000 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Shadow War: The Cia's Secret War in Laos by Kenneth Conboy, James Morrison ISBN: 0873648250 Publisher: Paladin Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 1995 List Price(USD): $54.95 |
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Title: Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992 by Jane Hamilton-Merritt ISBN: 0253207568 Publisher: Indiana University Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 1999 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: A Short History of Laos: The Land in Between (A Short History of Asia series) by Grant Evans, Milton, Ph.D. Osborne ISBN: 1864489979 Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited (Australia) Pub. Date: 01 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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