A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988)
Pulitzer Prize (Nonfiction) (1989)
Neil Sheehan was one of a group of young war correspondents in Vietnam in the early 60s who were beguiled by Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann. Vann, the epitome of a gung ho, idealistic, fighting man, manipulated reporters in order to bypass the bureaucracy and get his own views about the war out in public. Vann perceived early on that the South Vietnamese Army, which he was there advising, was not developing into an effective fighting force. He chafed at the timidity and widespread corruption among South Vietnamese leaders. He saw how these factors were winning converts for the Vietcong guerillas. As a true believer he found all of this enormously frustrating, especially as he understood the South to be losing the War. Despite these frustrations, Vann had become so committed to the cause that after leaving the Army in 1963, he returned to Vietnam in 1965 as a civilian advisor with the Agency for International Development. In this role he became one of the architects of the pacification and Vietnamization programs. This sort of selfless dedication made him even more of a hero to Sheehan and his press cronies. So when Vann was killed in a 1972 helicopter crash, Sheehan saw his life as a prism through which to write about the bigger war--the hook being that such brave and dedicated men were wasting their gallantry on a corrupt endeavor. However, once he began writing, he discovered that there was a dark secret behind Vann's straight shooting facade. He had been forced to leave the Army because of a series of sexual misadventures, including statutory rape charges. And so, the focus of the book changed and Vann became a metaphor for America--with both presenting a noble face which was little more than "a bright shining lie."
I have no quibble with his assessment of Vann; the man was pretty clearly a sexual predator, which makes him little better than pond scum in my book. But his assessment of the War is almost wholly unconsidered Leftist pap. If Vann, and the rest of us, believed that we were in Vietnam to try to protect them from the aggression of the North Vietnamese and their guerilla proxies, Sheehan believes instead that "the United States was a status quo power with a great capacity to rationalize arrangements that served its status quo interests." In one of the interviews below, he was asked:
Q: What are some of those lessons?
A: There are a whole lot of them. First of all, that
your leadership can be deluded, that your
presidents and your generals can really not know
what they're doing. Americans never believed that
before. War, particularly in the American experience,
was always a good experience. You went off
to war, it was a morally unifying thing. You came
home, you had done your duty, you'd defended
your country, and your leaders knew what they were
doing. That's one thing.
The second thing was that you can fight a wrong war,
in the wrong place for the wrong reasons --
another thing I don't think we understood. Also,
the nature of war itself, how cruel war can be, the
cost of it to yourself, and the cost of it to other
people. Americans, particularly after World War II,
tended to romanticize war because in World War II
our cause was the cause of humanity, and our
soldiers brought home glory and victory, and thank
God that they did. But it led us to romanticize it
to some extent. And I hope we'll draw a lot of these
things out of it.
Remarkably, almost every one of his lessons is either based on a faulty premise or flat wrong. As to the matter of whether our leaders were deluded, here's something I found on the Internet:
Excerpts from Rusk-McNamara Report to Kennedy, November 11, 1961.
l. United States National Interests in South Viet-Nam.
The deteriorating situation in South
Viet-Nam requires attention to the nature and scope of United
States national interests in that country. The loss
of South Viet-Nam to Communism would involve
the transfer of a nation of 20 million people from
the free world to the Communism bloc. The loss
of South Viet-Nam would make pointless any further
discussion about the importance of Southeast
Asia to the free world; we would have to face the
near certainty that the remainder of Southeast
Asia and Indonesia would move to a complete accommodation
with Communism, if not formal
incorporation with the Communist bloc. The United
States, as a member of SEATO, has
commitments with respect to South Viet-Nam under
the Protocol to the SEATO Treaty.
Additionally, in a formal statement at the conclusion
session of the 1954 Geneva Conference, the
United States representative stated that the United
States "would view any renewal of the aggression
. . . with grave concern and seriously threatening
international peace and security." The loss of
South Viet-Nam to Communism would not only destroy
SEATO but would undermine the
credibility of American commitments elsewhere.
Further, loss of South Viet-Nam would stimulate
bitter domestic controversies in the United States
and would be seized upon by extreme elements to
divide the country and harass the Administration...
3. The United States' Objective in South Viet-Nam
The United States should commit itself
to the clear objective of preventing the fall of South
Viet-Nam to Communist [sic]. The basic means for
accomplishing this objective must be to put the
Government of South Viet-Nam into a position to
win its own war against the Guerillas. We must
insist that that Government itself take the measures
necessary for that purpose in exchange for
large-scale United States assistance in the military,
economic and political fields. At the same time
we must recognize that it will probably not be possible
for the GVN to win this war as long as the
flow of men and supplies from North Viet-Nam continues
unchecked and the guerrillas enjoy a safe
sanctuary in neighboring territory. We should
be prepared to introduce United States combat forces
if that should become necessary for success. Dependent
upon the circumstances, it may also be
necessary for United States forces to strike at
the source of the aggression in North Viet-Nam.
4. The Use of United States Forces in South Viet-Nam.
The commitment of United States forces
to South Viet-Nam involves two different categories: (A)
Units of modest size required for the direct support
of South Viet-Namese military effort, such as
communications, helicopter and other forms of airlift,
reconnaissance aircraft, naval patrols,
intelligence units, etc., and (B) larger organized
units with actual or potential direct military
mission. Category (A) should be introduced speedily
as possible. Category (B) units pose a more
serious problem in that they are much more significant
from the point of view of domestic and
international political factors and greatly increase
the probabilities of Communist block escalation.
Further, the employment of United States combat
forces (in the absence of Communist bloc
escalation) involves a certain dilemma: if there
is a strong South-Vietnamese effort, they may not
be needed; if there is not such an effort, United
States forces could not accomplish their mission in
the midst of an apathetic or hostile population.
Under present circumstances, therefore, the question
of injecting United States and SEATO combat forces
should in large part be considered as a
contribution to the morale of the South Vietnamese
in their own effort to do the principal job
themselves....
-Viet
Nam War Documents (Vassar College)
This strikes me as an incredibly clear sighted assessment of the War and it's likely course, written as early as 1961. It correctly identifies the danger--that the North would defeat the South and the consequences--a destabilized Southeast Asia and shaken confidence in American commitments elsewhere. It advocates that the South be assisted in defending itself, but cautions that American intervention may be necessary. And it predicts that introduction of US troops will have political consequences at home. I'm missing the delusion here. Now, I think you can make an excellent argument that we should not have troubled ourselves about "the transfer of a nation of 20 million people from the free world to the Communism bloc." But I don't see how you can say that preventing this was not our prime motive for getting involved in the War.
He really lets his ideological slip show in passages where he says things like: "In this war without heroes, this man [Vann] had been the one compelling figure." Now even if we were to concede that the war was completely illegitimate and senseless, it still would have heroes. Even bad causes have their heroes, witness James Longstreet and Erwin Rommel. Then there's the section where Sheehan states that by 1962 the United States had the largest Empire in human history. He arrives at this remarkable conclusion by lumping in things like Subic Bay in the Phillipines and listening posts in Iran to make it seem like we were some kind of modern colonial power. What Imperialist motives can he imagine we had--there are no economic benefits likelt to accrue to the rulers of Vietnam, was it mere desire to lord it over Asiatics? Such assertions only serve to make the reader, at least this one, dubious about his ability to present impartial history on other issues.
Sheehan gets back on firmer footing when he shows how Vann--who was initially skeptical of the huge bureaucratic War Machine approach to the war and thought that the best hope for winning was reforming the South Vietnamese command structure and armed forces--eventually reached a point here he too was willing to ignore corruption and brutality and to depend on US bombers. Sheehan makes an entirely plausible case that the clear sighted analysis of the ideologue can eventually yield to institutional imperatives, even for someone as focussed and determined as Vann. But here Sheehan is demonstrating America's tactical errors in the War, not that the Strategic vision was itself somehow tainted. The failure to turn the South Vietnamese Army into an adequate defensive force was clearly a major shortcoming of our war effort, but it does not delegitimize the war itself. And on issues like South Vietnamese corruption and the harsh measures with which both they and we prosecuted the war, Sheehan seems to find such things unique, but was the South Vietnamese government worse then the Soviet government that we propped up in WWII? Was napalming jungle worse than firebombing Tokyo & Dresden? These are the types of fundamentally inconsequential but uneasy-making issues that the ideological opponents of a given conflict always raise in an effort to besmirch the War itself. The tactic is no different than Lindbergh saying we should stay out of WWII because only bankers, Bolsheviks and Brits wanted us in. Sheehan and Lindbergh may both have a point, but it fails to address the question of whether we had legitimate reasons for intervening in the respective conflicts.
This then is a pretty good biography and a decent history of the War,
marred by a political thesis and a philosophical prejudice which obscure
more than they reveals. In an odd way, the book is less interesting
for what it tells us about the war specifically, than for what it tells
us about the era of Big Government generally. It can come as no surprise
that the gigantic sclerotic Military-Industrial complex was just as unsuccessful
in the war in Vietnam as the Great Society bureaucracy was in the War on
Poverty. The most charitable reading of these two epic failures
of American government in the 1960's seems to me to be that despite noble
aspirations, the sheer size and inflexibility of the Welfare State made
it unlikely that the government would be able to successfully tackle these
problems. The "Bright Shining Lie" lay not in the stated aspirations
of Cold Warriors or Flak-Catchers but in the ideology that advocated construction
of such bloated government in the first place. One assumes that it
is Sheehan's political leanings which prevent him from discerning this
fairly fundamental point.
(Reviewed:23-May-00)
Grade: (C)
