Hotel Constellation: Notes from America's Secret War in Laos - Paperback

by David L. Haase (Author)

It's 1970. War rages in Viet-Nam, while intense, sometimes violent protests against it rage at home. Impelled to test his courage against that of his WWII hero father, college student David L. Haase arranges to study at the Buddhist University in Saigon. Detained on arrival and quickly deported from Viet-Nam, he searches for a way to get back in.Instead, he stumbles into the secret CIA war next door in Laos. For the next two years, he witnesses the unraveling of the American politico-military strategy, the decimation of a primitive hill tribe people, and the destruction of a tiny jungle kingdom, all of which he laboriously transcribes in limp, lined school notebooks each day. Those handwritten notes became this memoir of a young innocent abroad growing older and cynical.

Author Biography

David L. Haase is a former journalist who got his start as a free-lancer covering the war in Viet-Nam. He helped produce the Watergate hearings on public TV; won awards for uncovering corruption in state prisons and for documenting the failure of a public education system; traveled the campaign trail with presidential candidates and spoke about freedom of the press in Eastern European countries as communism fell. In the mid-1990s, he wrote a pioneering column about the new Internet technology before blogs were ever created. Newly retired, he's turned his reporter's eye to fiction, scifi and supernatural adventure stories. But first, he had to write his story, of growing up in a combat zone, being fed a diet of official lies and witnessing death in multiple varieties.