A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann
and America in Vietnam

by Neil Sheehan. Random House, 1989. 861 pages, $24.95.

No one has yet surpassed Michael Herr's Dispatches in capturing the fatalistic, lurid, drugged-out feel of the Vietnam war for those who fought in it. But for readers who want a book that discusses with intelligence the wider causes and effects of the war, while never losing sight of what it could do to a single human being, it would be hard to do better than to read A Bright Shining Lie.

Neil Sheehan's experience in Vietnam dates back to 1962, when he was one of only about a dozen foreign correspondents stationed there. His research is thorough, his eye for detail uncannily sharp, and in John Paul Vann he has found a central character who sums up what was best and worst about the American involvement in the war. Sheehan is willing to be angry when anger is appropriate, and to make moral judgments that have the weight of personal experience.

Vann was an ambitious lieutenant colonel when he arrived in Vietnam as a military adviser, not long before Sheehan's own arrival. For the first half of this long but absorbing book, he appears as a fearless and tireless idealist, determined to save Vietnam from Communism and from the "disease of victory" that in Sheehan's view had infected the armed forces, the CIA, State Department, and other agents of American power overseas:

By the second decade after World War II, the dominant characteristics of the senior leadership of the American armed forces had become professional arrogance, lack of imagination, and moral and intellectual insensitivity ... The elite of America had become stupefied by too much money, too many material resources, too much power, and too much success.

Unlike those officers who preferred to watch the war from a helicopter, Vann made a point of driving everywhere he could, even on the most dangerous roads, seeing everything for himself and getting to know his Vietnamese counterparts. He flattered, cajoled, and bullied his advisee, Colonel Cao, into attacking the Viet Cong, and supplied him with sophisticated weapons and intelligence. Vann's first major disillusionment came when he found that Cao was using the information to send troops to sections of the countryside where he knew there was no enemy, and to shell villages from which the Viet Cong had already left. Sheehan describes how he, another reporter, and a US general were nearly killed by howitzers in one of these fake attacks.

Sheehan devotes an entire chapter to the battle of Ap Bac, in which the deficiencies of US tactics and the determination of the enemy first became, or should have become, very clear. The minute-by-minute account of the battle gives the slow-motion effect of an accident as experienced by the victim. It records the shock caused by the realization that a band of guerrillas, armed mainly with American weapons captured from poorly defended outposts, could exploit the terrain well enough to hold off a much larger force armed with artillery, helicopters, fighter-bombers, and armored vehicles.

Vann's anger at Vietnamese and American corruption, his protests against the mindless bombing of civilians and their herding into fortified "strategic hamlets," his honesty in assessing the true strength of the enemy, and his frankness with American journalists earned him a reputation for moral courage even as they cut short his military career. But as events in the war began to justify him, Vann's influence increased until he was able to return to Vietnam as a "civilian general," with greater power to command troops than ever before.

By now, the war and its corruption had become essential to Vann. With thoroughness but restraint, Sheehan shows that Vann's professional integrity coexisted with a web of deceptions in his private life. One reason that Vann could speak more frankly than other officers was that he knew his record was hopelessly compromised. Back in the States he had faced a court-martial for statutory rape and had avoided ruin only by diligently training himself to beat a lie detector. In Vietnam, Vann hypocritically warned his friend Daniel Ellsberg against losing the respect of the Vietnamese by sleeping with their women. At the same time, Vann himself was keeping two Vietnamese women and sleeping with many others. On his desk he displayed photos of a family he saw as little as possible.

One of the basic lessons of the war, which Vann grasped early and then lost sight of, was that the war must be won by the Vietnamese or not at all.

The Viet Cong were so intermingled with the peasantry that the Saigon troops had difficulty distinguishing friend from foe. Think, Vann said, how much more difficult it would be for Americans. The Americans would soon start to see the whole rural population as the enemy. The Army and the Marine Corps would create a bloody morass into which they and the Vietnamese peasantry would sink. "We'd end up shooting at everything -- men, women, kids, and the buffaloes," Vann said.

As the war went on and hawks like Defense Secretary McNamara were deciding it was a hopeless cause, Vann was deciding that the United States would have to win the war on its own. He lent his support to the strategy of air strikes, attrition, and the "body count," not only until his prediction of a "bloody morass" was fulfilled, but until he himself became a victim of the war he somehow perversely needed. Sheehan never pushes the parallels too far, but the tangle of motivations that blinded Vann and led to his self-destruction -- motives of national pride, military tradition, even sexual insecurity -- offer an eerie counterpoint to Sheehan's lucid account of the war itself.

Published in the Harvard Post, April 21, 1989.