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“An important work.” —John Prados, author of President’s Secret Wars

“This definitive account of the Phoenix program, the US attempt to destroy the Viet Cong through torture and summary execution, remains sobering reading for all those trying to understand the Vietnam War and the moral ambiguities of America’s Cold War victory. Though carefully documented, the book is written in an accessible style that makes it ideal for readers at all levels, from undergraduates to professional historians.” —Alfred W. McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade

From Publishers Weekly

This shocking expose of the CIA operation aimed at destroying the Vietcong infrastructure thoroughly conveys the hideousness of the Vietnam War. Photos.

Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Designed to destroy the Vietcong infrastructure and ostensibly run by the South Vietnamese government, the Phoenix Program--in fact directed by the United States--developed a variety of counterinsurgency activities including, at its worst, torture and assassination. For Valentine ( The Hotel Tacloban , LJ 9/15/84), the program epitomizes all that was wrong with the Vietnam War; its evils are still present wherever there are "ideologues obsessed with security, who seek to impose their way of thinking on everyone else." Exhaustive detail and extensive use of interviews with and writings by Phoenix participants make up the book's principal strengths; the author's own analysis is weaker. This is a good complement to Dale Andrade's less emotional Ashes to Ashes (Lexington, 1990) and such participant accounts as Orrin M. DeForest and David Chanoff's Slow Burn (S. & S., 1990).

- Kenneth W. Berger, Duke Univ. Lib., Durham, N.C.

Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"A bright light into the darkest corner of the Vietnam War, and one of the darkest in American history." -- Nicholas Proffitt, author of Gardens of Stone, from the back cover of The Phoenix Program, William Morrow edition, October 1990.

"A controversial yet thorough work, deserving of a place in larger Vietnam collections." -- Roland Green, November 1, 1990, Booklist.

"The Phoenix Program is must reading for all." -- Ralph McGehee, author of Deadly Deceits, from the back cover of The Phoenix Program, William Morrow edition, October 1990.

"This is very volatile material...in some ways it's remarkable the book ever saw print." -- Laurence Chollet, The Bergen Record, November 6, 1990.

"Valentine catalogues the horrors without ever losing sight of the need to explain how such a tragedy could happen." -- Tim Wells, The Veteran, July 1991.

"Within these pages is stuff of great importance: examples of human folly, courage, stupidity, and greed." -- Morley Safer, The New York Times Book Review, September 1990.

From the Author

Feel free to contact the author at: redspruce@mediaone.net

From the Back Cover

"This definitive account of the Phoenix Program remains sobering reading for all those trying to understand the Vietnam War and the moral ambiguities of America's Cold War victory. Though carefully documented, the book is written in an accessible style that makes it ideal for readers at all levels, from undergraduates to professional historians." Professor Alfred J. McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in The Global Drug Trade.

"An important work." John Prados, author of Presidents' Secret Wars.

About the Author

Douglas Valentine is the author of four books of historical non-fiction, one novella, and one book of poems.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers. As a result, its detractors charge that Phoenix violated that part of the Geneva Conventions guaranteeing protection to civilians in time of war. "By analogy," said Ogden Reid, a member of a congressional committee investigating Phoenix in 1971, "if the Union had had a Phoenix program during the Civil War, its targets would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the mayor of Macon, Georgia."

"Under Phoenix, or Phung Hoang as it was called by the Vietnamese, due process was totally non-existent. South Vietnamese civilians whose names appeared on blacklists could be kidnapped, tortured, detained for two years without trial, or even murdered simply on the word of an anonymous informer. At its height, Phoenix managers imposed a quota of eighteen hundred neutralizations per month on the people running the program in the field, opening up the program to abuses by corrupt security officers, policemen, politicians, and racketeers, all of whom extorted innocent civilians as well as VCI. Legendary CIA officer Lucien Conein described Phoenix as, "A very good blackmail scheme for the central government: 'If you don't do what I want, you're VC.'"

"Because Phoenix "neutralizations" were often conducted at midnight while its victims were home, sleeping in bed, Phoenix proponents describe the program as a "scalpel" designed to replace the "bludgeon" of search and destroy operations, air strikes, and artillery barrages that indiscriminately wiped out entire villages and did little to "win the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese population. Yet the scalpel cut deeper than the U.S. government admits. Indeed, Phoenix was, among other things, an instrument of counter-terror - the psychological warfare tactic in which members of the VCI were brutally murdered along with their families or neighbors as a means of terrorizing the entire population into a state of submission. Such horrendous acts were, for propaganda purposes, often made to look as if they had been committed by the enemy.

"This book questions how Americans, who consider themselves a nation ruled by laws and an ethic of fair play, could create a program like Phoenix. By scrutinizing the program and the people who participated in it, and by employing the program as a symbol of the dark side of the human psyche, the author hopes to articulate the subtle ways in which the Vietnam War changed how Americans think about themselves. This book is about terror and its role in political warfare. It will show how, as successive American governments sink deeper and deeper into the vortex of covert operations - ostensibly to combat terrorism and Communist insurgencies - the American people gradually lose touch with the democratic ideals that once defined their national self-concept. This book asks what happens when Phoenix comes home to roost."