A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
by Neil Sheehan
Summary
Neil Sheehan opens the book at John Paul Vann's funeral in June 1972, then spends the rest of it working back through Vann's career to explain how an Army officer forced out of uniform by a personal scandal, an accusation of statutory rape among other affairs, became the first American civilian to command United States regular troops in combat, holding the authority a major general would normally carry. Vann arrived in Vietnam in 1962 as a military adviser and quickly became one of the war's sharpest internal critics, arguing that the tactics commanders such as General Paul Harkins favored, including forced relocation of villagers, were turning a winnable counterinsurgency into a popular uprising against the government Washington was trying to prop up.
Sheehan structures the book in seven parts that move between Vann's private life and the war's official record, showing a man whose insight into Vietnamese politics and society consistently outpaced his superiors even as his own career stalled and then, unusually, revived once he left the military and returned to Vietnam as a civilian official with more actual authority than he had ever held as a soldier. The book follows him through a decade of escalating American involvement to his death in a helicopter crash in 1972, by which point his early warnings about the war's direction had been proven right in ways almost no one in Washington wanted to hear.
At close to nine hundred pages, the book reads as both a single man's biography and a full narrative history of how the war was actually fought and argued over inside the American command, and the New York Review of Books called it an unforgettable narrative with rewards that are aesthetic and almost spiritual. It suits a reader who wants the Vietnam War's internal contradictions carried by one specific, complicated life rather than told as abstract policy history.
Historical Context & Significance
The book won the 1988 National Book Award for nonfiction and the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. That year's other Pulitzer finalists were McGeorge Bundy's Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, Timothy Ferris's Coming of Age in the Milky Way and Howard Kohn's The Last Farmer.
HBO adapted the book into a 1998 television film starring Bill Paxton as Vann and Amy Madigan, bringing Vann's story to an audience well beyond the book's own considerable readership. Sheehan had reported from Vietnam himself as a young correspondent in the early 1960s, reporting that first put him in contact with Vann, and the sixteen years he spent researching and writing the book are themselves part of its reputation as one of the most thoroughly reported single volumes to come out of the war.