Books: A Flawed Hero in a Flawed War

A BRIGHT SHINING LIE

by Neil Sheehan

Random House; 861 pages; $24.95

On a warm spring morning in 1972, while the Viet Nam War raged abroad and caused dissension at home, an unlikely assortment of public figures gathered in Arlington National Cemetery to pay their final respects to a man very few Americans had ever heard of. Secretary of State William Rogers, Senator Edward Kennedy and conservative columnist Joseph Alsop were there, as were General William Westmoreland and Daniel Ellsberg, who was about to stand trial for leaking the Pentagon papers. They had come to mourn John Paul Vann, one of the nation’s proconsuls in Viet Nam, who had died in a helicopter crash. “In this war without heroes,” writes Neil Sheehan at the beginning of his engrossing and provocative new book, “this man had been the one compelling figure.”

By the middle of A Bright Shining Lie, it is difficult to disagree with this bold assertion. Perhaps Sheehan overstates his case when he credits Vann with saving the Saigon regime from collapse, not once but twice: after the 1968 Tet offensive and again in 1972. Nevertheless, in Sheehan’s characterization Vann emerges as a personality to rival the most complex creations of fiction. He was a brave soldier, a brilliant analyst, a born maverick and a savvy political infighter. He was also, as Sheehan eventually learned, a shameless hypocrite with a “secret vice” he could not or would not control. To Sheehan, who worked as a young wire-service reporter in Viet Nam and went on to obtain the Pentagon papers for the New York Times, Vann is the very symbol of the U.S. in Viet Nam: a courageous do-gooder masking a dark streak of amorality. Vann’s story, as told by Sheehan after 16 years of painstaking reporting, is not just a biography but a sweeping history of a war that, Sheehan argues, the U.S. could never have won.

Vann first arrived in Viet Nam in 1962 as an Army lieutenant colonel. He quickly learned that the South Vietnamese forces he was advising suffered from “an institutionalized unwillingness to fight.” When his superiors refused to heed his reports and force Saigon to engage the Communist guerrillas, he took his case to the small cadre of resident reporters, including Sheehan and David Halberstam of the New York Times. By the time Vann’s one-year tour ended, the reporters were convinced that he had jeopardized his military career by speaking out. Halberstam, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his Viet Nam reporting, lionized him in his 1965 book, The Making of a Quagmire.

What Sheehan later discovered was that Vann suffered from a sexual compulsion that led him to seduce hundreds of young women. His career was permanently stained even before he arrived in Viet Nam when he narrowly averted being court-martialed for the statutory rape of a 15-year-old baby- sitter.

By 1965 Vann, retired from the Army, was back in Viet Nam as a civilian “pacification officer” for the Agency for International Development. He opposed Westmoreland’s attrition strategy because he believed it resulted in needless U.S. and Vietnamese casualties. The U.S., he argued, should reform the corrupt Saigon regime and woo the peasantry. Despite his role as gadfly, Vann rose through the system, ultimately becoming the top U.S. adviser for central Viet Nam and the first civilian, according to Sheehan, ever to command U.S. troops in wartime.

By then, Sheehan argues, “Vann had lost his compass.” The trappings of power and his two young Vietnamese mistresses (each of whom was kept ignorant of the other for years) “satisfied him so completely that he could no longer look at ((the war)) as something separate from himself.” Sheehan’s conclusion is as sobering as it is powerful: Vann, like the U.S. leaders in Viet Nam he had once criticized so adroitly, was finally consumed by his own illusions.