A Bright Shining Lie
Luce, Don
BOOKS The search lor a final absolution A BRIGHT SHINING LIE John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam Neil Sheehan Random House, $24.95, 862 pp. Don Luce The great value of Neil Sheehan's book is...
...Vann believed that the solution was to put American officers in charge...
...put these men in power...
...What Sheehan does capture is the anger, frustration, and often utter helplessness of U.S...
...Vann beat the case by getting his wife, Mary Jane, to lie for him and by learning how to fool the lie-detector machine himself (after experimenting with drugs and tranquiliz-ers, he determined that staying awake for forty-eight hours and answering the questions in a confident manner worked best...
...For example, the commanding Viet Cong general in the area where Vann spent most of his time in Vietnam was Madame Nguyen Thi Dinh...
...Don Luce The great value of Neil Sheehan's book is that it gives an understanding of why Americans were resented by the Vietnamese and why the United States lost the war...
...They became objects for him to manipulate...
...It was clear to Vann that H was America's war...
...He was what Americans wanted-a take-charge man who feared nothing...
...John Paul Vann, the hero of A Bright Shining Lie, had a compulsive need to dominate women sexually and men pro...
...It is well-written...
...there is suspense in Vann's "shameful secret...
...Vann started an affair with her, the book tells us, because "men as sexually insecure as Vann are sometimes drawn to girls like this...
...Ironically, she is not mentioned in the book...
...Vann's "secret shame" was the statutory rape of his family's baby-sitter...
...It is so hard for so many families...
...Sheehan should have pointed out two things here: first, that many Vietnamese did deeply care and were torn apart by the destruction of the lives of their countrymen...
...Dinh in Hanoi about Vann's work and the fact that she was not mentioned in the book about him: "Oh, I understand...
...Most Americans will love this book...
...fessiprially...
...Unfortunately, Neil Sheehan has not grasped this...
...I'm bitter...
...And A Bright Shining Lie tetisus exactly what many have been wanting to hear: If Americans had .taken charge, we would have won the war...
...He and his supporters felt that if they were in charge, they could reform the Saigon army into an efficient, honest, and tactically brilliant machine...
...His description of the young Ho Chi Minh when he tried to visit Western statesmen negotiating the Treaty of Versailles is an example of this: "In the Paris of the day, he was a ridiculous figure, this twenty-eight-year-old Vietnamese with the oddly intense eyes aping a European gentleman in white tie and tails...
...Vann died in a helicopter crash in 1972...
...Rather, Vann had bullied a new pilot into flying in a tropical storm...
...It was not, as he would have wished, a wild battle in the sky...
...Vann didn't get caught again-though he did maintain two mistresses in Saigon...
...It is best as the biography of a complex man...
...A Bright Shining Lie is, in many ways, an attempt to absolve American responsibility...
...advisors in Vietnam...
...He was daring, articulate, and unorthodox...
...And we're given a hero, a Lawrence of Vietnam by the name of John Paul Vann: "In this war without heroes, this man had been the one compelling figure...
...They were not taking human life and destroying human homes...
...In 1965, Vann wrote a friend in Denver: "We're going to lose because of the moral degeneration in South Vietnam coupled with the excellent discipline of the VC...
...Conviction of rape would have destroyed Vann's career...
...Their copter crashed in a tribal graveyard...
...Yet he never understood why "our" Vietnamese never fought as well as the other side...
...But Vann concluded that most Saigon officers' 'did not feel any guilt over this butchery and sadism...
...Next time I'll make goddam sure they're old enough...
...To many Vietnamese, Vann was just another colonialist...
...He had little respect for their culture...
...In Vann's plan, the senior American advisor would be the real governor of each province...
...side are presented as inept, corrupt, arid uncaring...
...Sheehan's book would have been strengthened by including material on some of the strong Vietnamese who influenced Vann's life...
...He had come to see that they regarded the peasantry as some sort of subspecies...
...second, that the U.S...
...Vann is with us every page of the book...
...the descriptions give a real feel for Vietnam during the war...
...Neil Sheehan has chronicled his life of John Paul Vann in brilliant and compelling prose...
...They were exterminating treacherous animals and stamping out their dens...
...It is at its worst in its description of the Vietnamese, most of whom come off as weak, inept people that Vann manipulated...
...not at these ridiculous little Oriental play soldiers-but at our goddamn military geniuses and politicians for refusing to admit and act on the obvious-to take over the command of this operation lock, stock, and barrel...
...I sure as hell have," Vann replied...
...Men do not like to talk about women generals...
...By the end of that year, she was pregnant...
...Yet Sheehan's own descriptions of the Vietnamese contains this same racism...
...John Paul Vann was the hero of the American press corps in Saigon...
...Vann, Sheehan argues, tried to stop the indiscriminate killing of women, children, and livestock...
...But he was not what the Vietnamese wanted...
...Even Vietnamese men, and we have a history of famous women generals....Yes, we knew Mr...
...He used them, looked down on them, and asked them to keep fighting - no matter what the cost to them...
...She was, Sheehan writes, an overweight, fifteen-year-old, not pretty, and emotionally withdrawn and unhappy with her family life...
...Annie, the youngest, was seventeen when they met in 1966...
...Vann talked her into an abortion because he said his career would be hurt if it became known that he had fathered an illegitimate child (later he did have a daughter with Annie-while married to both her and Mary Jane...
...It must be hard for his family...
...The Vietnamese on the U.S...
...That the French had tried this with such failure did not seem to bother Vann...
...He used them as the French had...
...Sheehan writes that American attitudes after World War II were "influenced by a racism so profound that Americans usually did not realize they were applying a racist double standard in Asia...
...I asked Mrs...
...To be defeated over and over by a Vietnamese woman must have hurt Vann deeply...
...The intensity and distinctiveness of his character and the courage and drama of his life had seemed to sum up so many of the qualities Amer-icans admired in themselves as a people...
...When they received the news that the charges had been dropped, Mary Jane said that she guessed he'd learned his lesson...
Vol. 116 • February 1989 • No. 3
