SHOOTING AT THE MOON / NONFICTION by Roger Wagner

The airbases fo Issan are relatively quiet now. A few arrivals a day from Bangkok, but during the Viet-Nam War these runways were scorched by US fighters and bombers flying missions over Hanoi and more secretively Laos. This supposed secret war was run out of a small complex on the Udon Thani air strip basically by 2 CIA agents vividly portrayed in SHOOTING AT THE MOON a non-fiction account of the clandestine conflict by Roger Warner also author of Haing Ngor: CAMBODIAN ODYSSEY.

Laos in the 1960s was a bucolic sideshow to Vietnam with the various factions locked in a determined stalemate. The Pathet Lao and the Lao Royalist Force Armee Royale or ‘fast army running’ as the units were known to the CIA insiders, had no intentions of fighting each other. Their leaders were related by royal blood and combat consisted of shuffling strategic positions according the the weather, until Washington decided to arm the Hmong tribespeople to stiffen the resolve of the lowland anti-communist troops.

The entire operation was run by Bill Lair who picked Vang Po to lead his tribesmen against the enemy. The Hmong were a superstitious people who fire guns during lunar eclipses to scare the celestial frog from swallowing the moon, but they could effectively harass the Pathet Lao. Unfortunately they never had the numbers to destroy those forces, especially once they were reinforced by North Vietnamese regulars protecting the threatened Ho Chi Minh Trail. Mr Lair promised the Hmong a refuge to the west should all hell break loose and SHOOTING AT THE MOON records the unfolding tragedy, as CIA higher-ups raise the ante in Laos with deadly results, most culpably station chief Theodore Shackeley and CIA Director William Colby. As one agent said, “It doesn’t matter how horrible you are, as long as you take care of your people.”

And no one took care of Laos, which was bombed more heavily than Germany in WWII,

Mr. Warner purports that this war was a success as long as it was small, a theory of soft force Pentagon planners should research for their present quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq, but those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it and usually more than once.

Only gods get away with fucking up forever.