Scan barcode
A review by paul_cornelius
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan
4.0
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.
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.