Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIA's Secret Campaign to Destroy the Viet Cong
Mark Moyar, a young (born in 1971) Harvard-trained historian, unburdened by the stories drummed into the public psyche by those who built careers on the conventional wisdom, has written a remarkable book that challenges what has become the "Jane Fonda" interpretation of the Vietnam War. Based on primary documents and interviews of firsthand participants on all sides of the conflict. Moyar's book focuses on the CIA role in the now notorious Phoenix Program... [Moyar] displays an uncommon grasp of the problems of agent recruitment and handling peculiar to Vietnam, the social and practical challenges faced by the American advisors and the Vietnamese at all levels, and the blinkered reaction of those reading, watching, and criticizing at home. One is forced to wonder how Phoenix and the Birds of Prey will be received by the many contemporary commentators who for years promulgated as truth views that the book exposes as myths, if not falsehoods. Dare we hope for a broad public debate, or is it more likely that Oliver Stone will produce his own "truth" about Phoenix? --World Intelligence Review, Hayden Peake, Spring 1998Mr. Moyar does not moralize; war as he describes it is brutish and occasionally gruesome... Mr. Moyar ably demonstrates that young persons can emerge from Harvard with their senses intact, provided they keep their minds open. This is a fine war read.  --The Washington Times, Joseph Goulden, July 5, 1998Today's best young scholars tend to question the dogma of an antiwar left that has grown gray without abandoning its animus toward those who served. As one example, Mark Moyar won the 1993 prize for historical research at Harvard University by peeling away the shibboleths that have surrounded the Phoenix program, an effort directed against Vietcong leaders. Mr. Moyar's book, "Phoenix and the Birds of Prey" (Naval Institute, 1997), is a product of that research and a groundbreaking piece of revisionist history on the war. --The Wall Street Journal, James Webb, July 15, 1998As an impartial, credible observer, Mark Moyar deserves a laurel for bringing the facts of the Phoenix Program to light.  --Special Warfare, Robert B. Adolph Jr., Winter 1999He succeeds admirably. His work could be a textbook for the do's and don'ts of counterinsurgency warfare.   --Asian Thought & Society, William Nester, January-April 2000Moyar began this study as an undergraduate thesis at Harvard, and even though he is now only in his mid-twenties, this book makes him a serious scholar of the Vietnam War.  --Infantry, Joe P. Dunn, January-April 1999