A BRIGHT SHINING LIE
John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
Neil Sheehan
New York: Random House, 1988
775 pp., maps and photographs; $24.95
"We salute one of the authentic heroes of a grim and unpopular war, who gave all of himself to the cause he served, finally even his life." So eulogized Ambassador Robert Komer at John Paul Vann's funeral on June 16, 1972, at Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington, D.C.
In the audience were Maj. Gen. Edward Lansdale and Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, both formerly of the CIA; newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop; Army Gen. William DePuy; and three Army pallbearers--Army Chief of Staff Gen. William Westmoreland, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Bruce Palmer, and Army Chief of Military Operations Gen. Richard Stilwell. But also in attendance were Sen. Edward Kennedy, an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, and Daniel Ellsberg, the "turncoat knight," then awaiting trial for theft of the Pentagon papers.
Later, at a private ceremony at the White House, Vann's son would receive his father's posthumous medal from the president of the United States. "Soldier of peace and patriot of two nations," read the citation, "the name of John Paul Vann will be honored as long as free men remember the struggle to preserve the independence of South Vietnam."
Unfortunately, that remembrance was not a very long time. Now only a small percentage of American youth can even find Vietnam on a world map. Now, only sixteen years later, it is necessary to ask: Who was John Paul Vann, and what made him one of the legendary figures of the Vietnam War?
One of the purposes of former UPI and New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie is to answer that question, for at one level the book is a biography of the life and times of John Paul Vann. But the book is also much more than that, for at another level it is a carefully reasoned critical analysis of the Vietnam War itself.
And it is a very critical analysis indeed--so critical that some will surely dismiss it as an antiwar diatribe, using the title as evidence of the author's bias. But they would be wrong on both counts. Sheehan is no peacenik, and the title is taken from the words of Vann himself. When Vann remarked to an Army historian in July 1963, "We had also, to all the visitors who came over there, been one of the bright, shining lies," he was talking about how the MACV (U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam) was deliberately covering up ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) battlefield incompetence. But as the war progressed, the words were to take on a far broader meaning.
Nor is the book a journalistic antimilitary screed. For one thing--current wisdom notwithstanding--most of the war correspondents during the Vietnam War were not antimilitary. "The American reporters shared the advisors’ sense of commitment to this war", writes Sheehan of the attitudes prevailing when he began resorting from Vietnam in 1962. "Our ideological prism and cultural biases were in no way different. We regarded the conflict as our war too. We believed in what our government said
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