Bill Young shoots himself

[TheCorinthian]

Yep. There is a good training video on that at War College! His radio calls were classic!

 

"I think that guy is SHOOTING at me!!!"

[chuckwoww]

That was the idiot planners who decided air power could win wars all buy itself.

 

 

I think the idea was to do several things at once. Bomb the crap out of the supply lines, throw Agent Orange into the mix and try to kill lots of Viet Cong on the ground in more traditional ways.

 

[Guest HonoluluJimmy]

Surprised to not see this posted before, or did I just miss it.

 

William Young is dead! CIA killer shoots himself in Chiang Mai

 

William Young, the CIA agent who is credited with allegedly discovering Long Cheng in northern Laos, a remote valley which became a top secret CIA air base in 1965 - and soon after the busiest airport in the world - shot himself in Chiang Mai, Thailand a few days ago.

 

During the making of the feature documentary The Most Secret Place on Earth - The CIA´s Covert War in Laos, director Marc Eberle and myself tried several times to interview Mr. Young, to no avail. Apparently he felt that he´d been burnt in a previous interview and no longer trusted journalists. He was found at home with a revolver in one hand and a crucifix in the other.

 

Young came from a long line of zealous US patriots. His grandfather did untold damage in British occupied Burma by converting legions of hill tribe (ethnic minority) people to Christianity, while his father Harold, another missionary, also worked for the CIA and engaged in spy missions into China (The US tried to invade China by using hill tribe proxies and CIA case officers several times in the 1950s and were roundly whipped by Mao´s communist forces). It was father Harold who secured young William the job with the agency.

 

When Bill Young allegedly found Long Cheng for the CIA, Laos was officially neutral and for the following decade, the US bombed, killed and maimed tens of thousands of civilians in this small landlocked Southeast Asian nation, while lying to the US public about American involvement in Southeast Asia. Long Cheng was never marked on any map, despite reaching a population of some 40.000 people by the late 1960s - all paid for with American tax money while the American public and Congress were kept in the dark.

 

The use of proxies to fight (largely phantom) regiments of communists has since turned into standard covert US military practice and is still used today in America´s foreign wars. Laos became the template for many of the countless war crimes the US has committed around the world since the 1960s. And William Young pioneered this strategy with customary secret agent flair - he is quoted as saying that Long Cheng had everything a serviceman could ask for to fight a war…brothels, casinos, bars and a church.

 

Young will be honored by the ethnic minorities he “dedicated†his life to, most notably the Lahu, many of whom live in northern Thailand. His detractors will see him as yet another murderous pawn in the cold war US killing game which set Southeast Asia on fire in the 1960s and 1970s and cost the lives of more than four million people. Including, eventually, Mr Young´s. Long before his retirement in Chiang Mai, the agency fell out with William Young over its policies and he was let go.

 

No doubt, many voices will try and whitewash a killer´s career and call Mr. Young an American hero and cold war fighter, similar to Tony Poe, another Lao operative who paid his hill tribe soldiers cold hard cash for bringing in enemy ears, of which he made necklaces. Like Tony Poe, who died some years ago in a San Francisco nursing home, and who became the template for Marlon Brando´s Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, Mr. Young should rather be remembered as yet another misguided opportunist, who went into the killing business for America and was eventually dumped for his efforts.

 

Today, the US allegedly employs similar killers in Afghanistan and case officers still recruit locals to do targeted assassinations of people America does not like. As in Laos, the US is allegedly involved in the drug trade in Afghanistan (Part of the CIA’s Lao war effort was financed with heroin. As a consequence more than a third of US servicemen in Vietnam became junkies and by the end of US engagement in Southeast Asia, 70% of the world’s heroin came fro the region. Today, 90% of the world’s heroin comes from Afghanistan) will fail politically and militarily in Afghanistan, but perhaps it does not matter…the war machine grinds on, the arms manufacturers are happy and American parents will be left with both sorrow and pride, when their young boys die in the line of duty for their country - brothels, bars and churches forever!

 

This week, Edward Loxton writes in The First Post that Young´s last ambition was to have a Hollywood film made on his exploits. The fact that the movie never got made, allegedly contributed to his decision to commit suicide. Now that is an American reason to kill oneself.

 

But it’s not over till it’s over. Today, William Young’s second cousin, Markus Young, allegedly runs a Christian orphanage in Mae Sai on the Thai Burmese border for children of the Wa, an ethnic community credited with producing vast amounts of metha-amphetamines, which are imported into Thailand. Interesting to note how US military aggression and missionary activities tend to go hand in hand. Western imperialism has always been driven forward by fanatical Christians and is likely to be spearheaded by Christian missionaries cum intelligence operatives in the future as well.

 

Now why did Thomas Fuller in his misguided, patchy and somewhat misleading NY Times obit fail to mention any of this, I wonder? No wonder the paper has already posted a correction.

 

For a feature length account of the US Secret War in Laos, watch The Most Secret Place on Earth - The CIA´s Covert War in Laos by Marc Eberle. Screenplay by Tom Vater/Marc Eberle.

 

Link

 

Now the above IS conjecture............

Never a war in Laos or Cambo... Now where did all those parachutes come from... Planted my Ho Chi Min

[Flashermac]

The VC were pretty well thinned out, especially during Tet 1968. According to reports, many VC units after Tet only existed because they were built up using NVA regulars. VC units were supposed to include an NVA strength numbering from 20% up to as high as 80%. I've also read reports of VC veterans being quite pissed off after "liberation", since the North pushed them aside and ruled the South as a conquered province. Few of the spoils went to the VC.

 

The bombing campaigns were sporadic and were meant to force Hanoi to the negotiation table. I've got a Newsweek interview somewhere with Vo Nguyen Giap, commander of the NV forces. The interviewer asked him point blank if during the bombing campaigns Hanoi had ever considered giving up the struggle. Giap replied that they had thought of quitting several times, but that the anti-war movement in America always gave them the courage to hold out. Giap said that and it is down in black and white. I told that to a colleague who was an old war protestor, when he started ranting on about how the VN War "would still be going on if the demonstrators hadn't ended it". His face turned scarlet and he demanded to know who this guy was and what the fark did he know anyway. When I told him Giap had commanded the North Vietnamese forces and should know what he was talking about, I thought my colleague was going to swing at me. Instead, he stomped away in a huff and refused to talk to me for several weeks. Somehow I survived his silence.

 

 

[chuckwoww]

Thinning the units out would be a good strategy. Made them harder to bomb.

[Hugh_Hoy]

Reads like it was authored by a guy who used Young's death to try to disparage the U.S./CIA. Shameful.

 

HH

[Flashermac]

Joke if you will, but a B-52 unloading blockbuster bombs was no laughing matter. The bombs were dropped on the NVA, especially along the HCM Trail on the Lao border. (It was more like a paved highway than a trail.) The USAF wouldn't bomb within 5 kilometers of friendlies, since the concussion was so severe. A friend told me of his recon finding what was left of an NVA company that had been in a drop zone. The men were lying dead on the ground, not a mark on them, but blood trickling from their ears. He said it scared the daylights out of him.

 

We would see the contrails as the B-52s flew overhead. Then we would see the flashes from the Arc Light as the bombers unloaded in the mountains just west of us (where the HCM Trail was). The ground would rumble and roll under our feet as if in an earthquake. One day an NVA major came in to surrender to us. He said his battalion was almost wiped out and he had had enough of the war. The guy looked totally exhausted and probably suffering from shell shock. No wonder.

 

There were not many civilians in the area where the bombs were dropped, but God help those who were.

 

 

[Flashermac]

Reads like it was authored by a guy who used Young's death to try to disparage the U.S./CIA. Shameful.

 

HH

 

 

The guy is hardly unbiased, but the days of unbiased reporting seem to belong to the past. Everyone nowadays likes to write editorials. Nothing wrong with that, as long as the readers understand it is opinion as much as fact.

 

[chuckwoww]

I'm not saying the bombing wasn't spectacular. Just ultimately counterproductive.

[Flashermac]

 

Saturation bombing didn't do much in WWII either. I've read arguments that the saturation bombing of Germany's cities and towns did not shorten the war by a single day. The Blitz of London only made the English more determined to fight on. Why should the Germans have been any different?