Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America's Clandestine War in Laos [Paperback]

Roger Warner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1998

THE CIA IN ITS GLORY DAYS and the mad confidence that led to disaster in Vietnam are the subjects of Roger Warner's prizewinning history, Shooting at the Moon: The CIA's War in Laos (first published as Back Fire, Simon & Schuster, 1995). For a few years in the early 1960s the CIA seemed to be running a perfect covert war in Laos - quiet, inexpensive, just enough arms to help Meo tribesmen defend their home territory from the Communist Pathet Lao. Then the big American war next door in Vietnam spilled across the border. How the perfect covert war ballooned into sorrow and disaster is the story Roger Warner tell in Shooting at the Moon, awarded the Cornelius Ryan Award for 1995's Best Book on Foreign Affairs by the Overseas Press Club.

Warner describes his characters with a novelist's touch - soldiers and diplomats busy with war-making; CIA field officers from bareknuckle warriors to the quiet men pulling strings in the shadows; and above all the Meo as they realized they had been led down the garden path.

This is a book about war, about secrecy, and its illusions, about the cruel sacrifice of small countries for the convenience of large ones. Nothing better has been written about the CIA in the years when it thought a handful of Americans in sunglasses could do anything with planeloads of arms and money to burn.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Shooting at the Moon, Roger Warner chronicles a covert operation that used Hmong villagers as guerrilla fighters against the North during the Vietnamese War. Thought to be an expendable resource by Central Intelligence Agency strategists, the Hmong died by the thousands fighting the North Vietnamese. Those who survived were abandoned to their fate when the United States pulled out of the war. Warner's history is the moving and tragic story of how America's "secret war" devastated its own allies in Southeast Asia.

Review

. . . [D]rawing on extensive interviews with former C.I.A. officers and others involved in Laos, Roger Warner, the co-author of Haing Ngor: A Cambodian Odyssey, attempts in Shooting at the Moon to fill in the missing pieces and tell the full story of the secret war and the Americans who conducted it. What he found makes an engrossing--and profoundly saddening--book. . . . Mr. Warner's history . . . is convincing and gripping, impossible to read without a strong sense of anger, sorrow and shame. -- The New York Times Book Review, Arnold R. Isaacs

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Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: Steerforth; 1st. paperback ed edition (June 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883642361
• ISBN-13: 978-1883642365
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #352,605 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #24 in Books > History > Asia > Laos

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Examination of Conscience, April 25, 2000

By 

Richard L. Meehan (Stanford University, California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America's Clandestine War in Laos (Paperback)

Meticulously researched and written in a style reminiscent of and often as moving as Dinesan's "Out of Africa", Warner's book tells the sad story of how our national hubris crushed and corrupted the intense love affair many of us had for Southeast Asia and particularly Laos in the 1960s. I've just read the book for the second time after yet another visit to Laos; Warner's book confirms my long held belief that this humble land may outdo us all in its capacity for living and letting live. Lasting scholarship, a joy to read.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shooting at the Moon is on the Mark!, August 7, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America's Clandestine War in Laos (Paperback)

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Failed Strategies, February 3, 2001

By 

jkhooah (Euless, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America's Clandestine War in Laos (Paperback)

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"!