Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam | 
 enlarge | Author: Mark Moyar
Creator: Harry G. Summers
Publisher: Bison Books
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 109738
Media: Paperback
Edition: Bison Books Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 496
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 1
ISBN: 0803216025
Dewey Decimal Number: 959.70438
EAN: 9780803216020
ASIN: 0803216025
Publication Date: December 10, 2007
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Product Description
This study explodes prevailing myths about the Phoenix Program, the CIA's top-secret effort to destroy the Viet Cong by neutralizing its “civilian” leaders. Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with American, South Vietnamese, and North Vietnamese sources, Mark Moyar examines the attempts to eradicate the Viet Cong infrastructure and analyzes their effectiveness. He addresses misconceptions about these efforts and provides an accurate, complete picture of the allies’ decapitation of the Viet Cong shadow government. Combining social and political history with a study of military operations, Moyar offers a fresh interpretation of the crucial role the shadow government played in the Viet Cong's ascent. Detailed accounts of intelligence operations provide an insider’s view of their development and reveal what really happened in the safe havens of the Viet Cong. Filled with new information, Moyar’s study sets the record straight about one of the last secrets of the Vietnam War and offers poignant lessons for dealing with future Third World insurgencies. This Bison Books edition includes a new preface and chapter by the author.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Grain of Salt November 2, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This expanded edition of Moyar's work from the University of Nebraska arrived at the time that the U.S. Army finally discovered itself in another counterinsurgency war (three years sfter that war had already begun). The text, however, is not an improvement on the original. Although a healthy balance to previous works on the Phoenix program (especially that of Douglas Valentine)it should not be taken as the definitive history, which will have to wait for the opening of the Vietnamese archives.
Moyar makes careful use of his footnotes, especially when they support his positions and tends to forget them when they do not. This tome is one of the least documented works on the Vietnam Conflict that I am aware of (among those writers that bothered with footnotes). The author also tends to like to make sweeping unsupported statements to maintain his thesis, contradicts his own supporting facts (often on the same page), and spends lots of time debunking other historians whose works on the counterinsurgency activities (or lack of them) in Vietnam contradict his own. One example of selective editing was Robert Komer's famous quote that Phoenix was "a poorly managed and largely ineffectual affair," does not appear anywhere in the text. This is pretty slack, considering that the CIA ran the program under the aegis of Komer's CORDS).
The old bugaboos of Vietnam also tend to raise their hoary old heads - the politicians and the anti-war protesters were responsible for the loss of Vietnam, not the generals, not the strategy, and most certainly not their enemy. The only fact that appeared in the text that was "new" to this reviewer was that one of the participants in the program laid the blame for any psychological problems faced by returning veterans solely at the door of the anti-war protesters. Interesting.
For basic information on Phoenix, its predecessors, the personalities involved (Vietnamese and American), its operations, etc... this is as good a work as we have gotten so far, but take it with a large dose of salt.
 A critical text on the Phoenix Project December 13, 2007
11 out of 14 found this review helpful
I'm extremely glad to see that this important book has finally been republished and become available to a wider audience. I wrote my thesis in history on Phoenix, and Moyar's work was an invaluable resource, once I was finally able to get my hands on it. It is sadly relatively unique among works on Phoenix in being well-documented, well-written, and free from a pathological agenda. I highly recommend Moyar's work to anyone interested in counter-insurgency generally and especially counter-insurgency in Vietnam, and I would simultaneously encourage anyone interested in Phoenix to buy Moyar's work first, and to get other works he cites. The Phoenix story has become a legend, and like all legends the re-tellings become burdened with half-truths, assumptions, and a good collection of lies. Moyar's work is rigorously historical, and helps remind us what, exactly, actually happened.
the truth corrected. October 15, 2007
6 out of 10 found this review helpful
Excellent book. Honest,well written and very informative on the REAL
Vietnam war. Thank you Mark. Job well done.
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