The Erawan War Volume 2 The Cia Paramilitary Campaign In Laos 19691974 Ken Conboy by Ken Conboy 9781915113597, 1915113598 instant download after payment.

Volume 2 of The Erawan War picks up exactly where Volume 1 left off, and the reader is, of course, encouraged to read that volume first. In brief however, after the Kingdom of Laos devolved into a three-way civil war during the second half of 1960, the US Central Intelligence Agency in early 1961 initiated a paramilitary program to bolster the hand of the rightist Royal Lao Government (RLG). This  quickly  became  a  multi-faceted  operation,  to  include  the creation of armed hilltribe units known as Special Guerrilla Units (SGUs) as well as intelligence-gathering teams that would monitor the Ho Chi Minh Trail. As the communist threat to the RLG escalated over the course of the 1960s, so too did the size and scope of the CIA’s paramilitary effort. The SGUs, which were initially battalion-sized, were grouped into regiments by 1967. This volume picks up the program in mid-1969, when the CIA’s guerrilla regiments were being pitted against North Vietnamese infantry divisions in major operations that were increasingly conventional in nature.