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

by Neil Sheehan

This passionate, epic account of the Vietnam War centres on Lt Col John Paul Vann, whose story illuminates America's failures & disillusionment in SE Asia. A field adviser to the army when US involvement was just beginning, he quickly became appalled at the corruption of the S. Vietnamese regime, their incompetence in fighting the Communists & their brutal alienation of their own people. Finding his superiors too blinded by political lies to understand the war was being thrown away, he secretly briefed reporters on what was really happening. One of those reporters was Neil Sheehan.--Amazon (edited)
Neil Sheehan was a Vietnam War correspondent for United Press International & the NY Times & won a number of awards for reporting. In 1971 he obtained the Pentagon Papers, which brought the Times the Pulitzer gold medal for meritorious public service. A Bright Shining Lie won the National Book Award & the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. He lives in Washington DC.
Maps
The funeral
Going to war
Antecedents to a confrontation
The Battle of Ap Bac
Taking on the system
Antecedents to the man
A second time around
John Vann stays
Acknowledgments
Interviews
Documents
Source Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Genres: History, Nonfiction, War, Biography, Military Fiction, American History, Military History

896 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1988

About the author

Cornelius Mahoney "Neil" Sheehan is an American journalist. As a reporter for The New York Times in 1971, Sheehan obtained the classified Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg. His series of articles revealed a secret U.S. Department of Defense history of the Vietnam War and led to a U.S. Supreme Court case when the United States government attempted to halt publication.
He received a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for his 1989 book A Bright Shining Lie, about the life of Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann and the United States involvement in the Vietnam War.

Reviews

[Lyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Bright, Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan is an erudite, well-informed and exhaustive narrative of the Vietnam War.

Sheehan provides a complete modern history of Vietnam, from the French Colonial period beginning in the 1850s to the end of French rule, particularly the period of Ho Chih Minh’s rise to power after World War II. As a reporter on the ground in the 1960s, he also provides a detailed analysis of American foreign policy in the region and the complicated cultural make-up of Vietnam, with its odd assortment of aristocratic mandarins, both communist and non-communist, dynastic vestiges, French and catholic influences and the seemingly ever present shadows of Russo-Sino and American intrigue.

This is also a fine portrait of America in the 20s to 40s. Most poignant was the observation that children of this era were taught to understand at an early age that the spread of communism must be stopped in Asia, because if it was not stopped here, then communism, like a great ravenous organism, would then move to Hawaii and then to the western shores of the United States. Sheehan uses the story as a vehicle to describe how the United States came to be what it was in Vietnam, especially how the military leadership had evolved from a lean and hungry, almost desperate group at the beginning of World War II, to the victors of that war, to the aristocratic mis-directions of MacArthur in Korea and then to the delusional, bureaucratic and careerist misdeeds in Vietnam.

Sheehan also shows the greatness and shortcomings of the hero, John Paul Vann, a complex, fundamentally flawed man who is almost an intelligent, dark Forrest Gump; a sinister American Everyman of the middle of the twentieth century. Vann is shown as a microcosm of America’s greatness and it’s immoral, ugly underside.

Riveting, compelling, and at times deeply thought provoking, the novel also tends to flounder under its own weight, as Sheehan’s ambition is realized, but with flaws. The book won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and is thoroughly well researched and crafted by a talented author, but it fails to answer many of the questions it raises and ultimately leaves the reader feeling educated and moved, but unsympathetic and without an enduring moral.

[Christy Hammer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I skimmed this book again over the last couple of weeks having plowed my way through it over some months in 1989, me a 30 year old twit in grad school in New Hampshire, co-reading with my historian of war Dad in Wyoming. He is a pro-military, conservative (Boll Weevil) type Democrat, and everything I read across the disciplines were pushing me further and further hard-left. I'm assuming that Ken Burn's series on Vietnam will drive further interest in Sheehan's story, and that will be good as it includes remarkable historical detail from the Pentagon Papers and also journalistic accounts that didn't always make it into the US media coverage of the war. I remember that this was the human story version of a work I greatly admired and emulated in its model of content analysis: Griffin and Marciano's Teaching the Vietnam War (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...) that showed how US media didn't cover so much of the darkness of the war in terms of our motives, our actions, and who was fighting against who and for what. Griffin and Marciano walked back and forth between what we were told about the war (newspaper accounts) and the quite contradictory evidence in the Pentagon Papers.

The Sheehan book particularly highlights for me the casual way sexual aggression to the end of rape is the spoils of war, as certainly how the main character used young Vietnamese girls would be considered sexual assault in the US, and is how he used and abused women both while in uniform and also when he returned as a civilian. Both books point to the language of the war - how even though US firepower was the greatest in Vietnam ever used on the earth and still holds that record, the North Vietnamese "agressors" are those that "attacked" us and the South Vietnamese, while we merely "retaliated" or "returned" fire.

I am interested in people's reaction to the Ken Burn's series. I find it mesmerizing, but also know of how some social activist friends in Veterans for Peace are thinking about it as less than accurate and with a clear US bias. (I did see it was funded by the Koch brothers, although I know they own everything...) There was a screening of the entire series for vets in New Hampshire (home state of Ken Burns!) and it sounded like all were critical of how US motives were portrayed as "honorable", the insinuation that on some level we "stumbled into" the war, perverting the desires of the No. Vietnamese, glossing over the reasons why we lost, and even Burn's view expressed in the series' narration that Americans are naturally drawn to war. (Some VfP folks were adament that nothing is "natural" about modern warfare except that it's a pivotal part of our political economy and we have to socialize children into accepting it.) Here is a website of information VfP put together reacting to the series: http://www.vietnamfulldisclosure.org/

Oh, and I thought the movie of Bright Shining Lie was horrible compared to the book - made into an adventure drama instead of a brilliant way to teach us all about the "lie" of Vietnam. My uncle is damaged from Agent Orange and I'm not sure if it was cause-effect but he did vote for Trump. (I've wondered how of those wounded by Agent Orange voted for Trump?) I hope Right-wing soldiers who were in Vietnam will reflect on the series, too, especially those drafted, even though we know fewer on the Right watch PBS.

We see Trump insist upon military decorum from our athletes on the sports field, as they're our secular soldiers - socialized as ready to die for the cause. It's fascinating the "take a knee" uproar is happening at the same time Burns' series is running, as disportionately Black US soldiers were among the 10s of thousands who were killed, and now we see (primarily) Black football players getting no respect, still.

I do wish Burns was more radical, but that's not who Burns is, and that is fine. He can't do a strong political economy of war and the Military-Industrial Complex on "public" airwaves. As Manuel Castells, the Spanish economist of war said, "all wars are fought for economic reasons. Social and political ones have to be evoked to make (war) palatable."

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, I've finally finished this epic. Now all I have to do is read it a second time, and maybe I'll be able to retain close to 50% of it. Robert Stone wrote that it belongs to the same order of merit as Michael Herr's Dispatches, and I agree, but the contents of the two books are very different. Dispatches is like a painting that conveys the impression of being there, at the ground level, as things were ramping up in the late 60s. Sheehan's book is also impressionistic, somewhat, but offers different angles: historical, operational, bureaucratic, societal, personal. Sometimes it seems to be a work of history, sometimes a novel, and sometimes a biography of John Paul Vann. It begins with a description of Vann's funeral, on June 16th 1972: "Some had come because they had admired him and shared his cause even now; some because they had parted with him along the way, but still thought of him as a friend; some because they had been harmed by him, but cherished him for what he might have been." Afterwards, at the White House, Vann's family has to talk one of his sons, Jesse, out of presenting Nixon with half of his draft card.

If you had never heard of John Paul Vann before, you're not alone. So who was he, and why should you spend your time reading about him? A lieutenant colonel and later a civilian, he was first sent to Vietnam in 1962, before it was clear (or even conceivable to many, including Vann) that there would be a full-scale US air and ground war there. Some of the early sections describe his attempts to cultivate a man named Cao, a Vietnamese ARVN commander in charge of an area designated as IV Corps (the Mekong Delta); Vann is assigned to be Cao's advisor. What may at first have seemed to be personal qualities of Cao's (his unwillingness, for example, to engage the guerillas in battle) turned out to be representative of the ARVN's institutional problems; the same might be said of Paul Harkins, the US General broadly in charge of operations in Vietnam, whose capacity for self-delusion (including the ability to convince himself that the American/Saigon side had fared well at the battle of Ap Bac) was part of a pattern in the US military that discouraged self-evaluation and -criticism, and earned him the nickname among journalists in country of 'Colonel Blimp'. In Sheehan's telling, Vann was one of the few members of the military who saw clearly the foolishness of the US/Saigon strategy; he became gradually bolder (and strategic) in speaking about it, which made him something of a hero to many of the young journalists covering the war, including David Halberstam (who was known to have pounded his fist on a table at a reception and declared that General Harkins should be court-martialed and shot, and whose increasingly grim appraisals of the war for the New York Times bore Vann's influence- at one point, Sheehan refers to Halberstam as Vann's "instrument") as well as Sheehan himself. Vann also became close friends with Daniel Ellsberg, who would later leak the Pentagon Papers to Sheehan and attend Vann's funeral, though he and Vann had come to differ strongly over the war. Sheehan freely admits that his own criticisms of the war in the early 60s, as well as Vann's, were confined to the methods with which the war was being fought. When he stumbles across a monument in a hamlet dedicated to those 'killed by the puppet forces in 1955-1956', ostensibly years of peace in Vietnam, he is told that Ngo Dinh Diem, the US-backed leader in Saigon, had orchestrated a campaign against the cadres that Hanoi had left behind in the south after Geneva in order to foment revolution, and that the number of dead had reached into the thousands. He thinks nothing of it until much later. "In those years, like almost all Americans", he writes, "I saw nothing wrong with shooting Communists and their 'dupes.'"

Most Americans my age have grown up, I think, with a vague cultural understanding that the Vietnam War (also known as the Second Indochina War, or, in Vietnam, as the Resistance War Against America or the American War) was a mistake. But if someone had asked me why exactly it was a mistake, or what the nature of the mistake was, I'm not sure what my answer would have been. My impression from the book is that there are at least two good answers to this question, not mutually exclusive. One mistake was simply the broad foolishness of the strategy. The more-or-less indiscriminate bombing of hamlets and villages for example, aside from being morally wrong, was strategically stupid if the end goal was counterinsurgency (i.e., winning hearts and minds), and only reinforced the delusions of military leaders who believed that the 'numbers' demonstrated that the war was being won. The isolated outposts set up throughout the south, putatively a demonstration of strength for Saigon, were distributed American arms and then constantly ambushed and overrun, ensuring a steady flow of American weapons to the Viet Cong. At one point Cao, whatever his failings as a military commander, explains to Vann just one of the common-sense problems with what was called the Strategic Hamlet Program:

The religion of the majority of the Delta peasants was a meld of Buddhism, ancestor worship and animism- devotion to the spirits that were thought to dwell in the streams, rocks and trees around their hamlets. Cao...explained [to Vann] that many of the Delta farmers had comfortable homes by their standards. His government would profoundly anger the peasants...if it systematically destroyed their houses and made them leave their fields and the graves of the ancestors they worshiped.

The expectation that the average Vietnamese would side with and want to fight and die for General Edward Landsdale's creation in Saigon was just as foolish. Landsdale had helped to install a man named Ngo Dinh Diem, whose expectations of rule were dynastic. "His concession to modernity", Sheehan writes, "would be to call himself president." Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, became Diem's counselor. Nhu was "an intellectual with a corrosive wit", and "responsible for the hodgepodge of ersatz Fascist and Communist techniques that the regime resorted to in its efforts at...control. Totalitarianism fascinated him." Steve Bann- err, I mean, Nhu- created an extralegal police force called the Republican Youth, also known as the Blue Shirts, to employ against enemies of the regime.

He was fond of convening mass meetings of his Republican Youth in Saigon...he would often arrive dramatically at the stadium or soccer field in a small French helicopter...Before Nhu gave his speech from a high podium, the assemblage of Blue Shirts would drop to one knee in obeisance, thrust a stiff arm into the air in the Fascist salute, and shout allegiance to the leader.

The bloodshed of 1955-56 that Sheehan discovered the monument to had occurred as a result of Diem's Denunciation of Communists Campaign, launched with US encouragement and support. The exact number of dead is unknown, but is in the thousands; arrests were often conducted at night, with men and women taken from their homes and either gunned down in the street for their families and neighbors to find the next day, or sent to 'reeducation' camps. Most of the Viet Minh sympathizers in the south, Sheehan writes, "...were not Communists. They were the non-Communist majority who had followed the Communists out of nationalism." Diem did not understand, furthermore, "...that if he persecuted the Viet Minh he would be persecuting a great mass of non-Communist Vietnamese who looked back on what they had done with the emotions of patriotism."

Another problem with the Diems was that they were Catholic. This was a problem because, Sheehan writes, "Vietnamese converts to Catholicism had been used by the French as a fifth column to penetrate precolonial Vietnam and then had been rewarded...for their collaboration. They were popularly regarded as a foreign-inspired, 'un-Vietnamese' religious sect." The significance of Nhu's flying a French helicopter would not have been lost on most Vietnamese. The US had announced, consciously or not, that they were picking up where the French occupation had left off. These were all strategic blunders that exacerbated the real problem, which Eisenhower apparently saw clearly enough in 1954: "...that if a free election should then be held in North and South Vietnam, Ho Chih Minh would win 80 percent of the vote as the father of the country in the eyes of most Vietnamese."

From the US perspective at the time, it was nearly impossible to imagine a homegrown national Communist movement independent of China and/or the USSR, Tito in Yugoslavia being an outlier that couldn't apply, or so the thinking went, to countries in southeast Asia. "Vann and the Americans of his time", Sheehan writes, "were mentally habituated to a globe halved between darkness and light." In other words, the explanation for the Communism of the North could only be that they were Soviet or Chinese dupes. But there was another, much older tradition in Vietnam: their long history of driving out more conventionally powerful invaders, from the Chinese to the Mongols to the French, by utilizing guerrilla warfare and the distinctive terrain of their country. The beginning of the war against the French was even marked by a surprise attack during the Lunar holiday of Tet (hint, hint). "The Vietnamese ideal became the intellectual and man of action who was also a great soldier, a mandarin-warrior", Sheehan tells us. "The Vietnamese had few gentle heroes like Lincoln. Their heroes, as a foreigner might notice after studying the porcelain figurines on shelves and tables in Vietnamese homes, were men on horseback or elephants, clad in armor, swords in hand." It was Ho Chih Minh, not the regime in the south (who were backed by and collaborated with the Americans, after all), who seemed to be following in this ancestral tradition that was profoundly important and a source of great pride to many Vietnamese. In Sheehan's telling, Ho Chih Minh became a Communist almost by accident. After WWI, Ho was unable to secure in Paris even an audience from any of the Allied victors to discuss autonomy within the French empire for Vietnam. "He discovered", Sheehan writes, "that Wilson's self-determination applied only to the Czechs and Poles and other white peoples of Eastern Europe...not to the brown and yellow peoples of Asia or to the blacks of Africa." Meanwhile, Ho found in the writings of Lenin what he took to be support for the independence of the victims of colonialism in southeast Asia. Yes, he would later appeal for help against the French from Stalin and Mao; but also from Truman and Churchill. The great struggle of his life was not for Communism, but for the independence of his country. It seems reasonable to think that the same was true for many of his followers. Doug Ramsey, a friend of Vann's in Vietnam who was captured in 1967 and would be held until 1973, got a sense of this while talking with his captors:

"We have no fear that the present Chinese regime will attack us...", the youth said, "but if things changed in the future and a new government even dared to try..." He began to describe how the Vietnamese had smashed invading armies from China in centuries past.

Ramsey started to explain further why Americans saw the Vietnamese as pawns of the Chinese. Ramsey was wrong, they said. Just because China had become...socialist...did not mean that it could dominate Vietnam. The Vietnamese would not tolerate any foreign domination...least of all Chinese. [Ramsey] was fascinated that these products of a Communist movement, which denounced modern vestiges of 'feudalism', could identify so passionately with the figures of their feudal past...It occurred to him that Americans need look no further than this Vietnamese Communist enemy for the best possible native barrier against Chinese expansion into southeast Asia.

When the Viet Minh broke the will of the French at Dien Bien Phu, they solidified themselves as national heroes. Vann understood this at least by 1965 (and probably before), and understood that Saigon had to offer a better alternative, unless the endgame for the US was to rule in perpetuity as a colonial power over a hostile population. For Vann, this meant starting a revolution in Vietnamese culture; for this to happen, the US had to overcome what he viewed as its squeamishness about being seen as a colonial power and take the primary role in raising the standard of living in the country, instead of waiting around for the Vietnamese to do it. He wrote a letter to a friend in 1965 that seems to exemplify his thinking at the time. It was the closest he came, from what I can tell, to questioning the legitimacy of the war outright:

If it were not for the fact that Vietnam is but a pawn in the larger east-west confrontation, and that our presence here is essential to deny the resources of this area to Communist China, then it would be damned hard to justify our support for the existing government. There is a revolution going on in this country- and the principles, goals and desires of the other side are much closer to what Americans believe in...I realize that ultimately, when the Chinese brand of Communism takes over, that these 'revolutionaries' are going to be sadly disappointed- but then it will be too late- for them; and too late for us to win them.

* * *

One of the ways the book can seem somewhat off-kilter is that Sheehan takes much less time to describe the events from 1965-72 than he does 1962-65. In a way, it's almost all antecedent to the war we're familiar with from depictions in popular culture- Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, etc. I imagine there are books that are much more informative about the years from 1965 onwards. As for Vann, it becomes clear that this is not a hagiography. One of the other reviewers here says he is a 'jerk.' Maybe, although I've never understood why this should be a criticism of a book; I would say that we learn he had a dark side, like most people, and that I always find it more interesting to read the truth about someone's life, and more of an opportunity for self-reflection, than an idealized version. It might be fair to say that Vann found what he needed in war; it suited him; it satisfied his aspirational, physical, psychological, and even sexual needs. And if you feel like drawing a parallel with the US as a whole, well, I don't think Sheehan would discourage that.

Strangely, as Sheehan tells it, it was only after Tet that Vann came to believe that the war could be won, after all. Once again, he was out-of-step with the consensus. Part of this may have been psychological; the more time, energy and blood you invest in something, the more difficult it is to finally just let it go and admit that it will come to nothing. The Vann of '62 foresaw that full-scale American involvement would bring catastrophe; the Vann of later years had at the least reconciled himself to Westmoreland's strategy of attrition. He became an enthusiastic proponent of the war, he met once with Nixon, and he advised Kissinger on how to break his friend Daniel Ellsberg's defense strategy while Ellsberg was getting ready to stand trial for having leaked the Pentagon Papers. He died in a helicopter accident in 1972. Part of the effect of the compression of the book's later sections is that it's difficult to tell how stark Vann's transformation really was; he was a compartmentalized person, and Sheehan understands that Vann had always shown him the parts of himself that he wanted Sheehan to see. A review of the book I found online talks about how Vann is 'Conradian', and it occurred to me that Heart of Darkness is really about an idealist who either changes or discovers what was part of his nature all along, depending on how you read it. This as I see it is an example of the ambiguity of most great art, and Vann's story contains this ambiguity as well. Sheehan, for his part, offers a final opinion: "He died believing that the war had been won."

[Brett C · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very informative and engaging read about the Vietnam War as a whole. It was a biographical account of a US Army military adviser sent to South Vietnam in 1962. It was a full biographical account from his childhood and growing up in Virginia, his early years and adolescence, and his eventual path in the military. The account of the Vietnam War and Lt Col Vann's part in it mesh into one as the book progressed. For me, the precolonial history of Vietnam from the Chinese sphere of influence (both culturally and socially), to the introduction of French colonialism and the role of Roman Catholicism, and Ho Chi Minh and his proclamation of "national salvation to rid Vietnam of the French" made the book worth a read. This was part two Antecedents to a Confrontation from pages 127 - 201. Saddly, Lt Col Vann was killed in a helicopter accident in South Vietnam in June 1972.

Overall this was a loaded book about Lt Col Vann that ran parallel to the Vietnam War. I would recommend this to anyone interested in a biography and war-time history. Thanks!

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nominally a biography of John Paul Vann--a soldier and civilian who was one of the first American Advisers in Vietnam at the beginning of American intervention and remained involved in the conflict until his death in 1972--this is actually the most complete history of the Vietnam War that I have ever read. I feel that, for the first time, I really understand this conflict, what lead to it, and why America could never have really won.

Among the things I never knew was that the Viet Cong was essentially the Viet Minh, the armed nationalists who overthrew the French colonialists. That the Vietnamese people saw no difference between the French and the Americans. That Ho Chi Minh was drawn to communism only because it was the only governmental theory at the time to preach against colonialism and mean it. That Minh was originally hopeful that America would support him against the French because American Presidents were saying that it was time for Colonialism to end. That Presidents as early as Eisenhower admitted that Minh would win any election in Vietnam with 80 percent of the vote. That every South Vietnam government was ridiculously corrupt because they could never be comprised of nationalists, only people who didn't mind colluding with foreign powers for their own gain. So there's that.

And then there's John Paul Vann, who was a womanizer, a jerk, prone to bouts of irrational anger, and a man who always believed that America could win the war. Beyond that, though, he left the Army for complicated reasons near the beginning of the conflict in Vietnam with one of the reasons being protest of how the war was being handled. He didn't believe in bombing the village to save the village. He worked closely with--became good friends with--many of the Vietnamese. After leaving the army, he returned to Vietnam as a civilian working with the pacification program. Perhaps his ideas were based on false premises, and some--like me--might argue he wasn't even a very good man, but he wanted to be a hero. Better than that, at least for those reading a biography, he was an interesting man who led an interesting life.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book in 1988 while a member of the "Book of the Month Club," before it became a best-seller and Neil Sheehan won a Pulitzer for this remarkable book, 16-years in the making.

And I've been talking about it ever since.

"A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam" is THE primer on contemporary US foreign policy and should be read by every student of American history. School boards should buy this book and stock the high school libraries (excuse me, "media centers") with at least 10 copies.

If you liked "Born on the Fourth of July" by Ron Kovic, "Charlie Wilson's War" by George Crile or the "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone" by Rajiv Chandrasekaran then read Neil Sheehan's work, one of America's best contemporary journalists and political history writers.

Daniel Ellsberg gave Neil Sheehan The Pentagon Papers for a reason. Find out why by reading this book and taking account of American "hard power", just as John Paul Vann did.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great compliment to The Best and the Brightest.

This book focuses less on the domestic politics behind the Vietnam War and more on the military/operational realities than confronted the US military, as well as delving into the corruption of the South Vietnamese regime that the US tried to prop up 18 different ways, coup after coup after coup.

The conclusion of the book is basically that if the Vietnam War was ever winnable, it was no longer winnable after 1965-66. The failure of the LBJ administration and the WWII generation of Army and Air Force officers to understand the true nature of the conflict led to a pointless, protracted war in defense of a hollow, corrupt South Vietnamese regime.

[John Devlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A near monumental achievement.
Lie is an outstanding piece of scholarship wedded to the story of a singular man told with skill and authority.

I could expound on the parallels between Vann the man and America in Vietnam but that would be self indulgent pedantry.

Suffice it to say, anyone wanting to understand America in Vietnam, the people of Vietnam, the soldiery of US forces from WW2 to Nam, the Viet Minh, or the NVA could not read a better book. The works length at 800 pages moves quickly which is just one more testament to Sheehan’s ability as a storyteller.

[Larry Bassett · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an extensive coverage of the war in Vietnam and includes many of the details of covert actions that were withheld from the American public at the time they were occurring. At the end of the book there are extensive notes by the author about how he researched the book until it's completion in 1988. John Vann was a unique character in the war both as a soldier and an officer and ultimately as a civilian involved in depth with the decision making process at the highest levels. The Pentagon Papers are a significant source for the book. It seems ironic to me that John Vann and Daniel Ellsberg were friends and close associates.

This book is perhaps the one that covers the war from at the very beginning through its end although John Vann died in a helicopter crash in Vietnam shortly before the US withdrew from Saigon in the notable helicopter flights from the roof of the US Embassy.

The corruption of the Saigon government as well as the corruption and incompetence of the South Vietnamese military is clearly and convincingly portrayed throughout the book. This is not a book that takes you out into the jungles and battles as so many books do. It is a book that takes you into the homes and buildings of power where the decisions were made that led to the deaths of so many Americans and Vietnamese. John Vann was always convinced that the US could win.

For some reason I thought the strangest part of the Book was the occasions where it focused on John Vanns personal life. He was a womanizer and a bit of a scum of a man. He was married for 25 years to a woman who put up with his being moral scum.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know of many books that win both the Pulizer and the National Book Award. Sheehan's book is one of them, and it shows.

An entirely engrossing narrative of the profound arrogance, paralyzing complaisance and careerism, and the incorrigible, altogether impenetrable ignorance of Americans in Vietnam. Generals Harkins and Westmoreland seem to have been the two most seriously impaired of the bunch. And as a result millions died. [Let's just say that in comparison 9/11 is only a vanishingly small down-payment on the full measure of retribution that peoples of color around the world are due.] These guys can't die off quickly enough.

But then again we have Obama and McCrystal now. So maybe this blinding hubris is part of the American character - at least until we spend ourselves into oblivion.

It appears that we now have the opportunity to consider Vietnam II - of particular interest, I hope, to those too young to have seen the "prequal." The 60's were great fun - the very best of times. The self-destruction of presidents is always amusing to watch, and the volumes of history that follow make great reading.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's surprising that such an idiosyncratic book has become the most popular history on the Vietnam War. While it offers some historical background, this isn't a general history of the war or of America's involvement in Vietnam. Some parts of the war are handled in great detail (the Battle of Ap Bac), whole periods of the war (including its climax in '68-'69) are glossed over.

What Sheehan gives us the story of John Vann, a remarkably complex man who through sheer force of will and personality probably had more impact on the war than anyone outside Ho Chi Minh and the top brass in America. Sheehan uses his own friendship with the man to vividly capture Vann's charisma and energy, his way of getting to the truth of the matter and inspiring other men. Then Sheehan pulls the rug out from under our feet with the disclosure of the other side of Vann, one of deception and exploitation. How much the two faces of Vann - the heroic and the self-serving - represent the U.S. involvement in Vietnam is left up to the reader.

While this was a fascinating insight into the war Sheehan experienced, and a compelling biography of a tragic person, I'd hesitate to give it full marks as a history of the war. The author was too deeply involved in much of the story he covers, from his friendship with Vann in the early days of America's involvement, to the run-ins he and his friend David Halberstam had with the American authorities. I can't shake the feeling I need to read more on the subject to correct for Sheehan's personal bias - moreso than is typical in the histories I read.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam is a monumental reckoning—a 900-page excavation of war, ego, idealism, and the profound machinery of deception that powered America’s involvement in Vietnam. Published in 1988 after more than fifteen years of research and interviews, the book won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and it remains one of the most devastating critiques of American military policy ever written.

I read it in 2024, at a time when proxy wars and shadow interventions were once again simmering globally, and the book felt eerily contemporary.

At its center is John Paul Vann—a charismatic, flawed, and fiercely intelligent Army lieutenant colonel turned civilian adviser who becomes both a mirror and a cautionary symbol of America’s tragic misadventure in Southeast Asia. Vann, as Sheehan paints him, is the perfect narrative device: deeply embedded within the American military-industrial complex, yet capable of recognizing its dysfunction from within.

He was not a passive observer, but a man whose desire to "win" the war made him speak out against the very machinery he was part of.

The book moves on two parallel tracks: it is simultaneously the biography of John Paul Vann and the anatomy of the Vietnam War. It charts Vann’s journey from a poor Virginian upbringing to his service in World War II and Korea, and eventually to his initial deployment to Vietnam in 1962, where his disillusionment begins.

His internal war against the military’s top-down decision-making, inflated body counts, and refusal to understand Vietnamese political realities becomes the book’s ethical backbone. He is the officer who calls out the lie while still believing in the possibility of American redemption through smarter, more ethical warfare.

But Sheehan is not interested in mere hero-making. Vann is rendered in all his contradictions—a brilliant strategist and inspiring leader, but also a womanizer, a manipulator, and a man dogged by a troubling scandal from his early career. The psychological complexity with which Sheehan treats his subject lifts the book from reportage into literature. Vann’s death in a helicopter crash in 1972—when he had nearly become a mythical figure in U.S. advisory circles—is as much a narrative ending as it is a historical one.

What gives A Bright Shining Lie its historical and moral weight, however, is the way Sheehan interweaves Vann’s story with that of American involvement in Vietnam.

The book exposes how senior U.S. military and political leaders, from Westmoreland to McNamara, consistently misread the Vietnamese context. Obsessed with military metrics and conventional combat, they overlooked the conflict’s essentially political nature. Counterinsurgency was reduced to troop surges and search-and-destroy missions. Vann knew better. He tried to implement pacification programs and community engagement, but these often clashed with bureaucratic inertia and the South Vietnamese regime's own corruption.

Sheehan’s prose is rigorous yet evocative. The battle scenes are vividly drawn but never gratuitous. More importantly, the structural dissection of the American war machine is forensic in its precision.

Through Vann, we see a system that rewards conformity over competence, optimism over honesty, and metrics over meaning. It is a critique not just of a war but of a national psyche that refused to admit error until it was too late.

In the context of other major Vietnam War literature, A Bright Shining Lie stands apart for its breadth and depth. Where Michael Herr’s Dispatches captures the surreal immediacy of combat journalism and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried meditates on the emotional landscape of soldiers, Sheehan offers a panoramic view of war—its planning, its politics, and its human cost. Compared to David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, which charts the intellectual architects of the war, Sheehan goes further by fusing the macro with the micro: national policy filtered through one man’s life.

Reading this in 2024, one can’t help but reflect on the echoes of Vann in contemporary figures who straddle the line between military service and advisory politics in conflict zones like Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen. The tension between tactical brilliance and strategic blindness remains. So does the tendency of empires to mistake data for truth, resolve for righteousness.

The title itself is ironic—a bright shining lie is what Vann both fought against and, in some ways, embodied. His belief in the power of American will and ingenuity was ultimately undone by the very structures he tried to reform. The war could not be won because the premises upon which it was fought were flawed. And yet Vann persisted, driven not only by patriotic duty but also by ego, ambition, and perhaps a messianic delusion. Sheehan neither lionizes nor condemns him. Instead, he invites the reader into that murky ethical terrain where good intentions spiral into disaster.

In many ways, A Bright Shining Lie is also a meditation on storytelling itself—on how nations, armies, and individuals construct narratives to justify violence. The military's need to maintain the illusion of progress created a theater of success that masked the grim realities on the ground. Sheehan, like the Maniac in Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist, rips through the official script to reveal the absurdity and cruelty beneath. The difference is that Sheehan uses meticulous documentation instead of theatrical farce.

The book is demanding, yes. It expects the reader to sit with maps, acronyms, and political backstories. But it rewards patience with an unmatched clarity. This isn’t just a book about Vietnam. It is a cautionary epic about hubris, about the clash between idealism and imperialism, about the cost of refusing to learn from history.

In conclusion, A Bright Shining Lie is not merely a biography or a war chronicle. It is a searing moral inquiry that uses one man’s life to unravel the fabric of a nation’s greatest military failure. It is a classic of narrative nonfiction, a cornerstone of war literature, and an urgent reminder—especially in the present climate of remote warfare and geopolitical meddling—that truth, however inconvenient, must be faced before the next lie becomes doctrine.

[N.N. Heaven · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been over a decade since I last read this book. One of the best books ever written. If you're a history buff, pick this up.

My Rating: 5+++++++++++++ stars

[Jerome Otte · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling, balanced and insightful work.

Sheehan focuses on Vann and uses his Army and USAID careers in Vietnam to tell the story of the war and why the American effort failed. He does a good job immersing the reader in the action as it happened. The style is somewhat journalistic,describing the story in factual terms and leaving broader conclusions to the reader. Sheehan dwells a lot on the subject of deception, noting Vann’s unfaithfulness to his wife and his deceptive comments to the author of the book. He also notes Vann’s blunt briefings to reporters and his criticisms of Diem’s corruption, ARVN shortcomings, pacification, and strategies of attrition. Sheehan refers to the South Vietnamese government as one of “moral depravity and buffoonery.” He credits Vann with “moral courage” for making these statements, though a cynic might note that Sheehan only uses it when he happens to agree with Vann’s assessments. Still, Sheehan does cast doubt on the idea that Vann resigned from the Army in protest, reminding the reader that Vann was planning to retire from the Army anyway due to the rape accusations against him, and his concern that the paper trail from this inquiry would look bad in front of promotion boards.

The narrative is rich, broad and engaging (if a bit convoluted), and Sheehan provides sharp portraits of the people involved. His coverage of political issues is solid. The accounts of battles are vivid. Some readers may wish for more analysis on questions like the background of American involvement in Vietnam, or on American debates about pacification. Some of Sheehan’s observations seem superficial. There could have been more discussion of what exactly made Vann an effective leader or officer. The post-Tet years are covered in a shorter section than I expected, almost like Sheehan began losing his interest, and Sheehan suggests that Tet made American failure inevitable. The book also ends with Vann’s death in 1972, with no commentary on events afterwards. Some readers may be annoyed by Sheehan’s occasional use of first-person writing. There’s also more detail on the Korean War than I expected.

An accessible, well-researched and well-written book.

[Steve]

For what reason, I do not know, I was reminded of Brian Lamb’s CSPAN interviews with Mr. Sheehan in 1988; I might have then seen a portion of one of the five sessions. In the past year or two, I watched those episodes, let some time pass, then decided to open A Bright Shining Lie. I’m glad I did because this is an excellent multidimensional history, offering perspective into America’s behavior in South Vietnam following the French retreat and the life of an American who performed a notable role there. Both were enormously complex, making John Paul Vann a wonderful lens into that regrettable war, a deeply flawed man representing a deeply flawed country. More than a tale of America’s misbegotten adventures in Vietnam, Mr. Sheehan tells a story of America itself. John Paul Vann, son of an alcoholic, abusive, occasional prostitute, himself a serial philanderer with a penchant for underage girls, was remembered at his death as an inspiring force to our efforts in Vietnam; such are the fibers of which our modern heroes are apparently woven.

Mr. Sheehan was an excellent writer who knew John Paul Vann personally for many years, enlivening this volume. It was Mr. Sheehan who broke the Pentagon Papers offered through Daniel Ellsberg, who also served in Vietnam and was also connected to John Paul Vann. A small world. Mr. Sheehan’s effort is mighty compelling, a contribution that outweighs its inherent journalistic flaws, largely due to the amount of exhaustive research he conducted.

I’m left reflecting on a period of mediocre leadership, tone-deaf to uncomfortable, potentially career-ending truths – all the politicians, military leaders and technocrats that betrayed their nation. I went one step further, noting that entry into a war is, by definition, evidence of supreme government failure on all sides. Vietnam was not a failure just for America, though; it was a failure for North Vietnam, too. How many must die to prove that point?

[Ernest · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Vietnam War is one of the most important events in modern history. This is one of the many books written about it.
The amount of detail is staggering. The research that went into this one book must fill a small library with notes, clippings, photographs, references, biographies, maps and more.
Take for example the first day in the Army of the central character in the book - John Paul Vann. This occurs on page 423 in my copy.
" During his first day at Camp Lee and for four days afterward the Army hit him with the psychological shock of disorientation and beginning anew that facilitates the transformation of boys into fighting men. He was made to shed his civilian clothing, including his underwear, and handed Army khaki and olive green; his head was shaved; he was given another medical examination to verify that he had been telling the truth when he signed his arrival statement; and he was revaccinated for smallpox and vaccinated typhoid and tetanus. "

The enormous amount of detail and the size of this book is somewhat daunting. My edition is 790 pages, not including Maps, Source Notes, Interviewees section, bibliography and Index.

Among the facts is the information that the war was partially caused by nepotism, corruption and cronyism based on the Catholic religion. The French colonialism established a Government where you had to be a Catholic or give acceptance to the religion to get promoted or achieve a position. This aspect of the conflict was totally downplayed by the Western news media, which adds another side to the story.
The so called "Domino theory" of Communist take over that was meant to justify the USA involvement has proved to be a sham. Vietnam held suspicions about it's allies in Russia and China and is now a thriving economy based largely on free market ideas. Tourism to Vietnam is a multi-million dollar a year business.
Nobody in the USA has been held to account for involving millions of US troops and at a cost of hundreds of thousands dead. The toxic poisoning of vast areas of Vietnam has caused birth defects, and the contamination will take generations to clear up.

[Evan]

I've had this on my to-read list for 15 years or so, so when a copy became available a few days ago at Half Price Books for $1 it was a no-brainer. I started reading this today while waiting in the long line at the polling booth; I thought it entirely appropriate on election day to begin reading a book about a war and the conflicting policies that got us into it and kept us in it, since all the hubris and misguided do-goodery and righteousness that got us into Vietnam is of the same ilk as has gotten us into the current mess. The book centers on one man, John Paul Vann, who believed in waging the war insofar as America is right and good and does right by the native population to whom we are supposedly aiding in improving their lot. The book is about his conflict with the realpolitik of the powers-that-be that led to scorched earth and loss of hearts and minds. The book begins with Vann's funeral, attended by people who remained his loyal friends even as they had clashed over policy. Vann, it seemed, wanted America to be not just committed to victory when waging war, but to be consistent in its philosophical and humane concerns. Napalm and torture prisons bridge the gap of immorality between Vietnam and the current wars; Vann thought we were better than that. But like I say, I've only started reading this; I've gleaned much already in Neil Sheehan's first chapter. I was reluctant to start this one, at least now, since I had only read Stanley Karnow's massive "Vietnam: A History" less than a year ago, and didn't feel like spending so much time on the same topic. There's a lot of other history I want to tackle. But it looks like I'm in for the long haul with this 800-plus pager. Will report back when I know more...
-E

[Conor Ahern · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I finally finished this beast last night, and with it my sudden interest in anything and everything Vietnam War. I think I leapt headlong into the subject because I was convinced that this was where America started to get it really wrong--fighting colonialist wars, whose outcomes were manipulated by unscrupulous actors like Nixon and Kissinger; having the knowledge of the atrocities we were capable of but not holding ourselves accountable, because patriotism/tribalism wins out over the humanity of the brutalized other; the dawning feeling of vulnerability and decay that is still being exploited by demagogues to speed, rather than reverse, our decline.

But I never really found that borne out. Not because Vietnam wasn't awful, but because I don't think it's really fair to the victims of a longer history to say we had some claim on moral probity before that. It's probably only white dudes like me who have the naiveté required to believe something as silly and demonstrably false as "America got it right, mostly, until the 1960s!"

But I do think that the fear of decline has a potentiating effect. Particularly because we now know that conservatism is so/primarily motivated by fear, this defeat by a militaristically primitive, poorer people really seems to have quickened the fear in the minds of a previously mostly inert group of middle Americans, fused with their contempt for hippy culture and women's lib, drug experimentation, etc. to prefigure the throbbing amygdala governing modern conservative hate/fear culture. Unfortunately, this book did not really go into that much, ending pretty abruptly (for a 900-page book) with the death of JP Vann, its protagonist. But I will continue to try to locate the germ of modern conservative thought in this era.

[Dylan Matthews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy shit.

Ronald Steel, in his initial review in 1988, declared, "If there is one book that captures the Vietnam War in the sheer Homeric scale of its passion and folly, this book is it." I'm not sure I can summarize it better than that. It is especially striking in comparison to The Best and the Brightest, the other classic retrospective volume by one of the wunderkind Diem-era reporters in Saigon. Halberstam can be rambly, but the actual story he tells is narrowly about the choice to escalate and the men who made that choice, and David Halberstam the person is not really a character.

Sheehan, by contrast, almost wrote an autobiography. John Paul Vann is not just a useful protagonist through whom to personalize the story of the war; he was, as Sheehan concedes with remarkable candor, the main person setting Sheehan's whole career in motion.

Vann was the central miliary source in 1963 shaping how Sheehan, Halberstam, Peter Arnett, Malcolm Browne, and the rest of the Saigon press corps conveyed the war to the American public. "One can truly say that without him our reporting would not have been the same," Sheehan recalls. "He transformed us into a band of reporters propounding the John Vann view of the war." Spreading that view of the war through the Buddhist Crisis of 1963 and the coup against Diem made those reporters' reputations, Sheehan very much included.

Years later, when one of Vann's closest American friends from Vietnam was visiting DC and Vann flaked out of hosting him at the last minute, the friend called Vann's buddy Neil Sheehan, who had a guest room. Sheehan and the friend, Daniel Ellsberg, spent all night talking about a secret study on the origins of the war that Ellsberg had worked on. Vann thus had a small but crucial role in linking the leaker of the Pentagon Papers with the reporter who would reveal them to the world, and in giving Sheehan the biggest scoop of his life.

A year or so after that, Vann was dead in a helicopter crash, and Sheehan would spend the next sixteen years going into debt and driving his family to madness finishing a biography of the man who made him. And, in the process, learning that his hero had been concealing half his life from Sheehan, Halberstam, his commanding officers, and practically the whole world.

Sheehan has a high-wire act to pull off. He wants to tell the full story of the war; if you need a rundown of the major plot beats (the French colonial years, WWII, the 1946-1954 war, the Diem coup, the musical chairs of juntas after, the Tet Offensive, Vietnamization …) you will get it. He also wants to tell the story of John Paul Vann. Necessarily this means you'll be flipping between the macro of the war and the micro of Vann with some regularity, and while the two mesh perfectly sometimes (as in the long narration of the Battle of Ap Bac), at other points they obviously diverge.

The tales of Vann's nightmare of a mother, who blew her prostitution earnings on luxuries for herself while her son Gene acquired permanent disabilities from malnutrition, are obviously not about Vietnam. The obligatory recounting of Ho's visit to Versailles in 1919 and subsequent radicalization is not about John Paul Vann. And there are points where he probably goes too far in the weeds in one direction or the other. Sheehan's capsule summary of Korea and editorializing about MacArthur's recklessness is, I would argue, not really about either Vann or Vietnam. 

But for the most part, Sheehan pulls it off, and pulls off the parallelism this structure is designed to convey: Vann, like the US in Vietnam, was a powerful and deadly force, but one wracked by insecurities and profound character flaws that would ultimately doom him. The two threads keep intersecting at bizarre and haunting moments.

At one point, Vann uses a brief period in the US before returning to Vietnam to visit Garland Hopkins, the Methodist minister who saved a 14-year-old Vann from the abuse and depirvation of his mother by getting him into boarding school. Hopkins was also a pedophile who abused Vann, and who Vann allowed to abuse his own sons. At the time of Vann's visit, Hopkins's wife had left him and he was finally facing criminal charges. He ate rate poison, convulsed to death, and forced his victim and houseguest Vann to arrange his funeral. Vann heads back to Vietnam as fast as humanly possible.

Vann was in many ways a terrible man, who repeatedly raped teenage girls in statute if not through force, who convinced a Vietnamese high schooler not to go to university so she could remain his mistress, and who alternately neglected and abused his wife and children (all three of his wives, arguably, if you count the fake weddings he would use to keep affairs going). But as Sheehan documents, he came by his awfulness honestly. Vietnam for him, like the Levant for Lawrence, represented a world apart from the horrors of home where he could prove his mettle and be the man he felt he deserved to be.

The thing is, he did prove his mettle. There's a reason Sheeehan, Halberstam, and the rest flocked to him. The Ap Bac chronicle is perhaps the best evidence here. Vann truly had a plan to pull Viet Cong into an open plain where ARVN, the South Vietnamese army, would pick them off. He transformed the battlefield from one favorable to the guerrillas to one his conventional forces could win. He was a genuinely excellent military commander.

And then ARVN simply … refused to fight. Commanders refused to order infantry to advance and block off the guerrillas. They declined to move armed personnel carriers to the plain. They knew they would be in trouble with Diem if they lost significant numbers of troops, and that Diem cared much more about preserving APCs to protect himself against coups than about winning the war in the countryside. They, rationally, chose to lose the battle to save their careers.

It's one of many ways Sheehan is able to show, in moments big and small, not merely that the US military effort didn't work, but that there was no conceivable way that it could work. The incentives for South Vietnamese fighters were hopelessly broken and could not be fixed. Everything done in service of winning the war, from the Strategic Hamlet Program to the semi-intentional movement of refugees from the countryside to the cities, made it impossible to build political support for any regime the war was meant to bolster. The quest for quantitative metrics of military success led to prioritizing infantry's "body counts" and the number of "structures" destroyed by air, which inevitably meant creating incentives to kill as many people (civilian or VC) and destroy as many buildings (inevitably civilian residences and schools) as possible.

As Sheehan says about the My Lai massacrers, "Had they killed just as many over a larger area in a longer period of time and killed impersonally with bombs, shells, rockets, white phosphorus, and napalm, they would have been following the normal pattern of American military conduct."

Vann was, of course, not the "normal pattern of American military conduct." That was the whole point of Vann. But he was an outstanding Virgil guiding Sheehan's Dante through the layers of hell the war would create. And I feel very lucky that Sheehan did not totally lose his mind figuring out who his mentor was, and diving into the horrors that were his life and his life's work.

[Michael Sova · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.75

I didn’t realize what I was getting myself into here. But at nearly nine hundred pages I should have known. I thought I would read about the origins of the Vietnam war, America’s involvement, and find out how John Paul Vann ⁠— a retired army colonel, serving as an advisor ⁠— played an integral role. Of course, that is all covered. But it did not strictly rely on the dry analytics and politics that can be such a grind in history books. There’s a journalistic sense of duty to maintain truth in the face of adversity. But there’s also a humanistic portrayal behind the hard-as-nails wall of strategic and militaristic facts.

The history behind Vietnam is a complicated one — so vast and controversial that to cover it all including every perspective would be a fool’s errand. Instead, Sheehan portrays what he knows and knows well. He was a journalist who covered the war for The New York Times and even personally knew John Paul Vann. So, he didn’t come to the subject as an outsider to research and produce a broad account based on what others already knew. He was a part of it. And he continued down that path for several years following Vann’s death in 1972 to ensure that his story — which was undermined and lost in the quagmire of American politics — was told, no matter how detrimental it may have been to the reputation and character of those represented including its central “hero”, John Paul Vann.

I say “hero” flippantly, but John Paul Vann — like most people — was the accumulation of many different identities, not all of which are becoming. First and foremost, although he was a civilian �� retired following his service during the Korean War — he was one of the most important factors in Vietnam, coordinating plans on the ground and with the South Vietnamese. There was also Vann the Air Corps lieutenant, the Army soldier, the PhD recipient, and the family man. But he also had a dark past. He grew up the son of a man who was absent and whose name he stripped from his own and the son of a woman whose penchant for booze and lechery overrode any onus of responsibility for motherhood. To say Vann grew up under tumultuous circumstances would be an understatement. This had a significant impact on how he acted and perceived the world around him. Unfortunately, once in adulthood he also ended up becoming the villain within his own family, using them as a façade to keep his good standing as a military man with a wholesome American life. But what I found striking was how this revelation about his personal life subverted my feelings about him and his impact on the war.

Vann is first built up as a fallen hero, starting his tale right at the end — his funeral —like that of T.E. Lawrence in the David Lean epic, Lawrence of Arabia. There’s a mystery about this person who epitomized so much about the war but was so misunderstood. His detractors stood over his coffin just to save face, somehow keeping their egos in check. But Vann’s analysis and attitude toward victory in Vietnam did not align with those who were running the show. And then we come to understand how this all unfolded in Vietnam: his place, his work, his admiration for the people and their culture. But his admiration went beyond innocent curiosity. He had affairs with multiple young Vietnamese women, imploring at least one on several different occasions to abort the pregnancies so he can upkeep his noble American veneer. All this comes following the build up of a man who seemed to be one of the few who had enough sense to understand that attrition in Vietnam was never going to work. And the longer the war went on the more the U.S. created enemies out of those who never affiliated with the Viet Minh.

So, I’m left to wonder how I should feel about John Paul Vann. Far be it for me to critique someone else for his shortcomings when I too am human and possess the same proclivity toward self-destruction. He accomplished more than most while at work. He dedicated himself toward a cause he strongly believed in because he thought winning was possible and just as necessary to the Vietnamese as it was to the Americans. The infallibility inherent in us all can also be the same fuel that drives us toward greatness. That is, if we choose to use it that way.

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 4 out of 5]

In some ways, Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie is the best of the Big Three works on the war from the American viewpoint, the other two being Stanley Karnow's history of Vietnam and David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. Like the other two, Sheehan was there. And as a result, his description of the corruption, incompetence, and egotistical vanity of the South Vietnamese and the Americans rings all too true. His detailed description of how the war moved from a a handful of American advisors to a cataclysm involving over half a million American servicemen is invaluable.

Sheehan's particular hook in this book was to center the history around the biography of maverick American Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, whose early criticisms of the conduct of the war influenced Sheehan, Halberstam, and Karnow. As a biography, the work does a good sell. Vann was a rapist, child abuser, serial adulterer, wife abuser, liar, and victim of an horrific childhood. Sheehan never moralizes or excuses, he simply describes. And whatever it was that made Vann who he was, it also made him uniquely suited to the war in Vietnam. As Sheehan makes clear, Vann couldn't imagine life outside the war.

A couple of problems, in my view. Sheehan is far too eager to picture the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong as completely clear headed and superior in their strategy and tactics. They were not. They were just as capable of fooling themselves and misreading the populace as were the Americans. Tet showed that. I think Sheehan gives North Vietnam and the NLF in the south unearned praise for their concept of honorable mission and purity of purpose.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible accomplishment. I cannot fathom the time, commitment, and energy it must have taken to create a book of this magnitude and scope. Through the life of the tenacious antihero John Paul Vann, Neil Sheehan explains the doomed American engagement in Vietnam with compelling, unflinching clarity. I am not typically interested in war histories, but this appropriately massive biography (of both Vann and the Vietnam War) held my interest for all of its 800 pages. It is a humbling and relevant tome that describes the catastrophic failures of leadership and American hubris that led to the inevitable disaster in Vietnam. Highly recommended.

[Betsy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was one of the first books I read about Vietnam, and that was years ago. I suspect that should I read it now I would give it more stars. It seems hard to believe that the Vietnam War, which played such an important in my young adulthood, has now been over for over 40 years. Also, "the domino effect" of losing the war never occurred. Unfortunately, we still have not learned all the lessons that war could teach us.

[AC · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is powerful, intelligent, poignant -- in listening to it I found myself more than once shaking within. The tragedy described in the brilliant narrative lives with us still.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sheehan's "...Vietnam" is certainly no disaster.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just like John Paul Vann was the "single essential American in Vietnam", A Bright Shining Lie is the single essential general history of the Vietnam War. Sheehan ably blends the overall history of the war, which we know all too well, with the career of one of it's strangest figures: the renegade Lt. Colonel, counter-insurgency expert, early war Cassandra and late war Dr. Pangloss, civilian General, good friend and depraved predator, who was John Paul Vann.

Lt. Col Vann went to Vietnam in 1962 as an adviser to an ARVN division in the Mekong Delta. An ambitious man and skilled soldier, he had some initial successes creating joint plans with his South Vietnamese counterpart, he was unable to force ARVN to fight to a conclusion with the Viet Cong, or mitigate the fundamentally corrupt nature of the Diem government. After the catastrophic battle of Ap Bac, which saw the Viet Cong stand and fight against helicopters and APCs for the first time, Vann began to oppose the relentless optimism of General Harkins and the Kennedy administration. Vann leaked his honest opinions about the incipient defeat to the Saigon press corps, including the author and David Halberstam (The Making of a Quagmire, The Best the the Brightest). Opposing the American strategy and the entire Pentagon bureaucracy, he argued for direct American control over the Vietnamese government to root out corruption, win over the rural peasantry, and contain the use of firepower in favor of an Americanized version of People's War. In after action reports and strategic leaks, Vann sacrificed his career to the truth, earning the admiration of the press corps as the most honest American officer of the war.

But this sacrifice was worthless, and a sop to his friends in the media. Behind the charismatic and energetic officer was a traumatized boy from the slums of Norfolk, the fatherless son of an alcoholic prostitute. Vann managed to make a career in the military, just missing WW2 and serving in Korea, but whether it was symbolic revenge on his mother or other issues, Vann's voracious sexual appetites destroyed first his marriage and then his career when a 15 year old babysitter accused him of raping her. Vann was acquitted, but the charge alone was enough to sink his chances of promotion to general. If he couldn't be on top in the Army, he wanted out.

The war was in Vann's blood like malaria, and after a dissatisfying year on civvie street he went back to Vietnam as a civilian with USAID. Believing himself more or less invulnerable to harm, Vann took insane risks driving rural roads beset with landmines and VC checkpoints (an aid was captured and spent 7 years in a VC prison camp), took up with two Vietnamese girlfriends, and fought a slow war in the bureaucracy that bore some fruit with the establishment of CORDS as a centralized arm for pacification, as opposed to scattered programs run through the State Department, the military, the CIA, Saigon, etc. Corruption in South Vietnam remained unsolved. Making alliances with McNamara's Office of Systems Analysis and Daniel Ellsberg (The Pentagon Papers) Vann survived bureaucratic infighting and the Tet Offensive to rise ever higher in the US government's efforts in South Vietnam, talking a new line that argued that with the Viet Cong decimated in the Tet offensive, victory was now possible. He thought NVA regulars were nearly as alien to the average South Vietnamese peasant as American soldiers, and that the political war could be won.

Vann's pacification campaign was little better than what had gone before, but he achieved his greatest success during the 1972 Easter Offensive. A fixture in Vietnam, and the senior American in II Corps, Vann took charge of the defenses, commanding two ARVN divisions, a paratrooper brigade, and all the attached American aviation assets, from light helicopters to strategic bombers. Vann was a demon in defense, omnipresent in his OH-58 Kiowa scout helicopter. He personally delivered supplies to besieged firebases, evacuated American advisers attacked by tanks, called in 'danger close' B-52 strikes and then flew over the crater fields taking potshots at stunned survivors with an M-16. Only Vann could have held the brittle ARVN command system together for the Battle of Kon Tum, which saved South Vietnam from being split in two by NVA tank columns. He had no time to celebrate his achievement, as his helicopter flew into a copse of trees returning from a victory celebration, killing everyone aboard in a fiery crash. Like a real world Colonel Kurtz, Vann went into Vietnam and became great and monstrous, too much so to ever return to America. The attendees at his funeral, the most senior men in the military, attested to Vann's success against all odds, but the fall of Saigon in 1975 rendered his efforts moot.

A Bright Shining Lie is the book that started me down this strange path. 45 or so Vietnam War books later, it still holds up as the best in its comprehensive sweep of the war from the 1930s to 1972, and its depiction of one of the wiser men who fought it. Yes, it's long. Yes, it's digressive on Vann's personal life, Vietnamese history, and the things Sheehan witnessed as a reporter. But it's the kind of true tribute that only a friend can make, with flaws and grand dreams treated with equal respect. This is a great book.

[Jeff (Jake) · Rating 3 out of 5]

After absorbing this book I'm mentally exhausted from the sheer size and scope of the information contained in it. It was mind numbly daunting undertaking.

As much as I liked parts of it others became extremely taxing and confusing to follow. While I enjoy books with military engagements the endless stream of them, the personnel involved and the political intrigue around each of them in this one should have been significantly edited or removed altogether.

The same goes for some of the sections of the story that detailed the corrupt and bureaucratic mess of the leadership of the South Vietnamese Army and government. He documents the complete history of Vietnam from its origins before the war all the way up to its climax in the mid 70's.

Sheehan does an excellent job of weaving the Vietnam narrative around the life of John Paul Vann. From his humble and troubled beginnings Sheehan tells his life story in incredible detail.

Vann was one of the first military advisors sent to Vietnam before America committed combat forces and engaged in full scale war. He learned immediately that any attempt by the US to commit American troops to the war on North Vietnam was going to be a very bloody, expensive and risky affair.

As early as 1962 he was preaching that the sole responsibility for the military action taken there should be executed by the Army of South Vietnam alone. He had powerful friends in the military and in government that he tried repeatedly to convince that the key to success there had to be tied to humanitarian, social and political change not just a military success.

He didn't succeed at stopping the escalation of the War in the slightest but tried to work inside the framework of it to instill change. Later you learn how his position shifted and how it changed and then ended his life.

I have mixed feelings of the Vann the man with boots on the ground fearlessly and tirelessly trying to help the South Vietnamese cause and Vann the man in his personal life. I respect and admired his passion, commitment and work ethic but was completely disgusted about how he conducted himself with his wife and family and in his personal affairs. His professional service in Vietnam was Heroic but by his own choice his personal life was a disaster and a disgrace.

His life was a tragedy and a triumph but a very interesting one to say the least.

I learned more about the Vietnam War from this book than any other single source I've researched so far. Sadly though there were episodes of the war I wish hadn't learned about too. The title of the book was apply titled, the Vietnam War was, “A Bright and Shining Lie.” In many cases so was the life and career of John Paul Vann.

[Kat M · Rating 2 out of 5]

I learned an awful lot about the Vietnam war. I enjoyed the political history of the war and the more biographical sections of the book. But, overall, the book was way to detail-oriented and focused on military conflicts and strategy for my taste.
I was a little bothered by the hagiography feel the book had. John Vann was pretty despicable in my view as a person, but the author is willing to make excuses for him. To be sure, he had a bad childhood - a fascinating read in the rubber-necking at a car wreck kind of way - but an adult is still responsible for his disgusting behavior. I also did not find John Vann's insights into how the war ought to be fought very compelling. He came across as someone who needed to be in control, so, whether it was a more practical or winnable strategy or not, it just had the fell of central planning to me. He saw the criminal behavior of both American and South Vietnamese soldiers towards Viet Cong and civilians and failed to recommend the simplest, most humane, solution - get the military out of the situation.
However, as someone who was not alive during this war, the book provided me with a much better timeline of how the war started. The author includes the pre-history of the war - the politics and conflicts in Vietnam of the 40's and 50's. To be sure, there was some "mismanagement" of the war, which seems to be the author's primary point. But this seems inevitable when there was no justifiable reason for the war to begin with. Although I don't think this was the author's intention, I did learn exactly how unjust the Vietnam War was. The Vietnamese were a people who had been subject to the rule of invaders for decades. The Communism of the North was not ideological Communism at all, but they used the Communist movement of China to gain support for their opposition to colonial rule. The Viet Minh were only aiming at independence and if the French, and later the Americans, had just allowed the Vietnamese to self-rule, it is unlikely that either full-fledged Communism or Civil War would have resulted.
The cost in human life of Americans and Vietnamese, both military and civilian, is disturbing and a testament to the terrible foreign policy of our leaders - right, left, or center.

[Aristotle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the first of Sheehan’s work that I read. Upon finishing the book I had gained great respect for him as both a writer and a journalist. Sheehan writes in a way that hits all the write notes that a historical non-fiction should hit. A Bright Shining Lie is engaging, tragic, informative and satisfying. It tells the story of John Paul Vann. US Army Colonel and AID employee. It’s an story of the unexpected rise and fall of Vann as he navigated the strategy and politics of the Vietnam War. At his height he managed to advise and often even command entire corps of American and Vietnamese soldiers, as a civilian, at the very crescendo of the conflict. All this also came intertwined with a fascinating personal life, telling a story of love lost and found again the crushing sinkhole of Vietnam. Sheehan does a wonderful job of telling the entire life story of Vann, from birth to death, in a way that’s engaging from start to finish. A Bright Shining Lie’s 277,760 word count seemed to just breeze by as I learned more and more about this man who seemed to encapsulate more features of a Greek tragedy than a skilled US General/Advisor. The story just seems to get more and more intense the longer it goes on, as Vann delves deeper and deeper into Vietnam on a political, tactical and personal level. I would go as far as saying that no other man lived and breathed Vietnam as John Paul Vann did, as told by Sheehan. All this and I, unfortunately, was not able to enjoy the story’s conclusion, for the final few pages of the book we’re ripped out of my copy, and I never found the time to find them. However, as I already knew of Vann’s demise, I was still able to enjoy every other page of the book. To collect my clearly very confusing thoughts on this book, Sheehan displays what good historical writing really is, his book is a drama, history and tragedy all wrapped into one enjoyable package.

[Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Using the life of one man as his framework, Sheehan 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 Viet 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.

Frankly, I didn't have enough background in the history and politics to write that review when I did (still don't, really), but as a reading experience, I got it right. A fantastic book, if you want to know about America in Vietnam.