Product Description

This story of America's involvement in Vietnam told through the portrait of John Paul Vann received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Sheehan, a Vietnam correspondent for United Press International and the "New York Times", won numerous awards for war reportage.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #100588 in Books
• Published on: 1990-04-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 880 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
This passionate, epic account of the Vietnam War centres on Lt Col John Paul Vann, whose story illuminates America's failures and disillusionment in Southeast Asia. Vann was a field adviser to the army when American involvement was just beginning. He quickly became appalled at the corruption of the South Vietnamese regime, their incompetence in fighting the Communists and their brutal alienation of their own people. Finding his superiors too blinded by political lies to understand that the war was being thrown away, he secretly briefed reporters on what was really happening. One of those reporters was Neil Sheehan. This definitive exposé on why America lost the war won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1989.

Review
Using the life of one man as his framework, Sheehan (The Arnheiter Affair, 1971) has written the best book on America's involvement in Vietnam since Frances Fitzgerald's Fire in the Lake. John Paul Vann was a visionary as well as a gung-ho army officer. Arriving in Saigon in 1962 as a Lt. Colonel, Vann soon perceived something amiss in the US approach to the blossoming war. The American-backed ruling family, the Ngo Dinhs, were considered foreigners by most of the population; the ARVN existed primarily to protect them and generate graft; and American-supplied weapons were going almost directly to the Vier Cong. Vann was quick to realize that until the US took the loyalties and traditions of the population into account, it would be pouring lives and money into the quagmire to no avail. Vann was to retire and return to Vietnam as a civilian in the Foreign Service before he was listened to; eventually, he was regarded as one of the best minds in the field, and his ideas were adopted (too late to change the outcome) at the highest levels; he died there in a helicopter accident in 1972. Sheehan, a friend of Vann's and one of the many newsmen whose understanding of the war was shaped by him (changing the press's relationship with the military), conducted close to 400 interviews and did exhaustive research to put together this brutal, honest, exciting, often funny book. His canvas is broad, filled with neatly integrated historical information, sharply observed portraits (from policy level on down), tactical and logistic detail, and insightful political analysis, along with the biography of a fascinating and uniquely American character. (Kirkus Reviews)

From the Publisher
'Superb. If you ever read just one history of the Vietnam war, read and admire and celebrate this one. ' John le Carre

Customer Reviews

A Bright Shining Lie
Sheehans book is a huge work not to be contemplated by the light hearted. As an accesible history of Vietnam it has little competition. It is the story of John Vann, a US military officer who enters the war full of belief in the way it is run yet quickly becomes cynical about his superiors and their tactic. He leaks the truth to the press and is vilified as a result.
As a biography one would expect support for the main character. However Sheehan presents a harsh portrait of his "hero." He is portrayed as a deeply flawed man beset by depression, cynicism and a womaniser. We are not made to like Vann but Sheehan presents the facts and lets the reader decide how they feel. This book does not leave the reader feeling warm and comfortable; if anything we are left more confused about the whole war than before opening the book. Questions are asked but not answered, moral issues raised but not resolved. Maybe this sums up the whole war?
The book also acts a comprehensive work of history with accessible descriptions of the key battles and political intrigues that made up Vietnam.
This book is not pretty or fluffy. At the end I did not feel happy or pleased with its closure-it however is about reality and reflects this well. Sheehan has written a powerful book which should be read by anyone wanting to understand Vietnam and more widely the impacts of war on people.

If You Read Just One Book About Vietnam, Make It This One...
This is a truly excellent book in every respect, and without doubt the only single volume that comes close to giving an overall "feel" for the situation in Vietnam at the time.

However, unlike other reviewers, I do not think it demonstrates the inevitable futility of US involvement.

On the contrary, the tragedy of this story is that it clearly demonstrates that with a different political strategy, and with people like Vann in command, things could have turned out very well indeed.

Not only is this alternative outcome shown as a real possibility, the book also shows that there were plenty of Americans with a clear vision of what should be done but without the power to change strategy either militarily or politically.

Outstanding Treatment Of America's Disaster In Vietnam
Sociologist C.Wright Mills once wrote that the key to meaningful social analysis was to understand the actions of an individual in the context of his or her social situation, to place the person in a historical context so as to better appreciate the aspects of the social environment that motivate the individual to act and react in a particular way. Thus, to understand the actions of a middle aged German Jew in the context of the 1930s, one must understand the nature of the Nazi society he lived his daily routine within. Here we can observe how brilliantly this principle can be used with journalist Neil Sheehan book, "A Bright Shining Lie", a book in which he not only tells the story of a single man, John Paul Vann, but also explains the history of American involvement in Vietnam. This is a marvelous tale of a modern tragedy, not only for Vann himself, but for the American people and of course, the poor Vietnamese, who had nowhere to run when the bombs started falling.

Vann began his involvement with Vietnam as an Army Lt. Colonel. Because of both some personal troubles and his outspoken criticism of the ineffective and unnecessarily cruel way in which the war was being conducted, he was in effect cashiered, and he returned briefly to civilian life back in the United States. Yet Vann couldn't help but be drawn back into this country he had fallen in love with while doing his initial military tour. He found the opportunity to return to Vietnam as a civilian supporting the American military mission, and threw himself into the opportunity with characteristic energy and enthusiasm. He seemed to have an almost instinctive understanding of how to conduct an effective counter-insurgency operation, and based on his tireless efforts and his success in pacifying the area he was assigned, he gained increased credibility and influence within both the American military as well as the South Vietnamese government, and as a result became much more influential and powerful.

Yet in the moments of his success Vann began to fatefully turn away from precisely those perceptions regarding the nature of the conflict and the need to be effectively engaged at the micro-level, and he, like many other individuals prosecuting the war, turned to more traditional and massive intervention techniques such as carpet bombing, that were not only indiscriminate, but also tended to be counterproductive in the longer term. Vann's slow but inexorable corruption by power and influence is a familiar tale, and indeed sadly documents one specific example of a widespread phenomena which continues to this day within our military; that of careerism. It is easy to understand how the quest for rank in order to do what one believes is right gets twisted into an eventual accommodation with the very devil one is combating in order to get ahead.

Of course, once makes the necessary accommodation to succeed in a military career by mindlessly following orders, then when the particular officer eventually succeeds in getting promoted (by going along with the wrong-headed policies of his or her superiors) he or she becomes exactly that corrupted and compromised type that he or she was originally so motivated to replace. This, then, is the true tragedy of both John Paul Vann in particular and the American Army in Vietnam in general. In my humble opinion, everyone in the officer corps shared this dirty little secret of co-option that made each of them, to some degree, at least, un-indicted co-conspirators in a quite deliberate and systematic campaign to murder countless men, women, and children in living in nameless hamlets and villages in Vietnam. Of course, I am not alone in this view, and former officers such as Col. David Hackworth and Lt. Col Anthony Herbert have written poignantly about this very subject. This is a wonderful book about a terrifying truth, and we should all read in order to better understand the true dimensions of the tragedy in Vietnam.