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CNN's Tailwind Tale: Inside Vietnam's Last Great Myth, by Jerry Lembcke. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. 215 pp. $24.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-7425-2328-4.
In 1998, CNN broadcast an 18-minute story, "Valley of Death," that described Operation Tailwind, a 1970 Green Beret mission into Laos that involved using the lethal nerve gas sarin in an attempt to kill U.S. defectors. (CNN collaborated with Time magazine on this story, and Time also published its own version.) The story soon unraveled: Critics charged that, while there had been an Operation Tailwind, there was no evidence that it involved either nerve gas or an effort to kill defectors; and CNN fired the story's producers three weeks after the broadcast.
These events attracted brief attention (a LEXIS-NEXIS search indicates that the New York Times mentioned Operation Tailwind in 14 pieces published during the summer of 1998). While these events might seem to offer insufficient material to support a book, Jerry Lembcke, a sociologist and author of the...