A Great Place to Have a War, Joshua Kurlantzick
A Great Place to Have a War, Joshua Kurlantzick
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A Great Place to Have a War
America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA

Author: Joshua Kurlantzick

Narrator: Tim Campbell

Unabridged: 9 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/24/2017

Synopsis

In 1960, President Eisenhower was focused on Laos, a tiny Southeast Asian nation few Americans had ever heard of. Washington feared the country would fall to communism, triggering a domino effect in the rest of Southeast Asia. So in January 1961, Eisenhower approved the CIA's Operation Momentum, a plan to create a proxy army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces in Laos. While remaining largely hidden from the American public and most of Congress, Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war, which continued under Presidents Kennedy and Nixon, lasted nearly two decades, killed one-tenth of Laos's total population, left thousands of unexploded bombs in the ground, and changed the nature of the CIA forever.

Joshua Kurlantzick gives us the definitive account of the Laos war and its central characters, including the four key people who led the operation—the CIA operative who came up with the idea, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew.

About Joshua Kurlantzick

Joshua Kurlantzick is a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has been a correspondent in Southeast Asia for the Economist, a columnist for Time, the foreign editor of the New Republic, a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, and a contributing writer for Mother Jones. He has written about Asia for publications ranging from Rolling Stone to the New York Times Magazine. He is the winner of the Luce Scholarship and was selected as a finalist for the Osborn Elliot prize, both for journalism in Asia. For more information on Kurlantzick, visit CFR.org.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Brett on January 16, 2023

"In 1969 alone, according to several accounts, the United States dropped more bombs on Laos that it did on Japan during all of World War 2. By 1973, when the bombing campaign ended, America had launched over 558,000 bombing runs in Laos. A high percentage of these bombs were antipersonnel to fragmen......more

Goodreads review by Steven on February 19, 2017

The majority of Americans of my generation are aware of the Vietnam War that resulted in the death of 58,315 soldiers and a 153,303 wounded, with the loss of between 1.1 to 3.2 million Vietnamese. Further, they are aware of American bombing of Cambodia and various military incursions that helped bri......more

Goodreads review by Lori on September 22, 2016

Loved it! This is a fascinating look at the shadow war in Laos, staged by the CIA, during the Vietnam War. It's an extremely interesting history of the how that war came to be, some of the main people involved in that war, and the rise of the CIA as an organization conducting paramilitary operations......more

Goodreads review by Andrew on March 13, 2017

An interesting read detailing a chapter of the US's involvment in SE Asia that I was not all that familiar with...the CIA's secret war in Laos to threaten the North Vietnamese supply lines and thwart their attempts to overthrow the Laotian govt. Kurlantzick documents how it was the CIA's effort in......more

Goodreads review by David on November 10, 2016

Very impressive book, though very depressing. Details the rise of the CIA as a war machine during the Vietnam War, which was actually fought to a great extent in Laos. It looks at some of people involved in building the war to epic proportions, and then withdrawing, leaving the country to collapse i......more

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