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.