VIETNAM, WITH TEARS
Sheehan, Neil
Vietnam, with Tears A BRIGHT SHINING LIE: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan Random House. 861 pp. $24.95. This is a monumental book which Neil Sheehan, who covered the Vietnam...
...military forces...
...I read A Bright Shining Lie in one stretch, and some parts of it drove me to tears of anger and grief...
...This is a monumental book which Neil Sheehan, who covered the Vietnam war as UPI bureau chief in Saigon and later as a New York Times reporter, has spent sixteen years researching and writing...
...The next worst is artillery...
...Only at that level can the Vietnam war be felt and understood by both Americans and Vietnamese, especially by the post-Vietnam generation...
...He was accused by a fellow officer of having an affair with a fifteen-year-old girl while he was a student at the Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth and was charged with statutory rape...
...But, buried in the background of that proud, arrogant, fearless "guardian of the American empire" is the "bright shining lie" that was the source of Vann's shame...
...In 1965, David Halberstam quoted Vann in The Making of a Quagmire: "This is a political war and it calls for discrimination in killing...
...It is an account of the war through the life of John Paul Vann, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S...
...In blending history and biography, in combining rigorous scholarly research with absorbing storytelling, Neil Sheehan has elevated the story of the Vietnam war into an epic in which the human condition is revealed at its most dramatic and compassionate...
...In the early years of his assignment (1962-1965) as an adviser to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), Vann spoke out against government corruption, brutality, and the senseless killing of civilians...
...He was the illegitimate son of a married man named Spry (Vann is the name of his stepfather), and his mother was a prostitute...
...He lied to his wife, Mary Jane, with whom he had five children...
...The worst is an airplane...
...In 1965, Vann returned to Vietnam as a civilian official in the U.S.-directed pacification program...
...Army...
...John Paul Vann's personal life and his career, represented and reflected in various degrees, form the contradictions, the deceptions, and the moral degradation of the Vietnam war itself...
...The best weapon for killing would be a knife, but I'm afraid we can't do it that way...
...Once, he tried to steal the file, but the Army still had the records of the charge...
...Barring a knife, the best is a rifle—you know who you're killing...
...He was not, to begin with, John Paul Vann...
...I never thought that some day I would be able to read a book about Vietnam by a non-Vietnamese that would arouse an avalanche of emotions in me—the way such Asian classics as The Ramayana and The Three Kingdoms had captured the imagination of my youth...
...The man who once denounced artillery and airplanes as the worst weapons was now calling in B-52 bombers of the Strategic Air Command, obviously not to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese but to win the "political war," even if the result of that victory would be to make Vietnam a desert and call it peace...
...Tran Van Dinh (Tran Van Dinh is professor of international politics and communications at Temple University and editorial adviser of "The International Encyclopedia of Communications...
...He lied to both of his mistresses...
...Until he died in a plane crash in the Vietnam highlands in 1972, he was the most powerful American in Vietnam after the ambassador and the commanding general of the U.S...
Vol. 53 • March 1989 • No. 3
