Moral delusion A Bright Shining Lie -John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan
Reviewed by Steve
Taylor Explaining the American defeat in Vietnam has become a growth industry in the States. Unlike most of the reecent accounts, Neil Sheehan's book is neither an attempt at retrospective justification nor a study in dumb ignorance. Bright Shining Lie is a detailed and throughly researched exploration of the war, written by a Vietnam correspondent who had access to hard information and high ranking informants.
Sheehan is primarily concemed with the practical consequences of the political and military strategy adopted by the United States. The book gives full and vivid expression to the sheer vanity of the enterprise undertaken by the Americans. Lie deserves to be read purely for Sheehan's account of Khe Sanh and the Tet offensive.
However, the main focus of the book is the life and times of Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann. Through Sheehan's exploration of the Bright Shining Lie, Vann becomes a partial metaphor of the American role in Vietnam.
Vann understood that victory was dependent on mobilising the Southem Vietnamese and he understood that the war was being lost by this failure.
He spent most of his time, from his arrival in 1961 until his departure in 1972, attempting to convince his superiors to adopt a more sophisticated approach than the carpet bombing and wanton destruction which characterised their military strategy. Neil Sheehan was part of the lobby which Vann utilised to promote his ideas about the conduct of the war. They met and became friends.
Vann never ceased to believe that America could win the war.
Sheehan charts the Lieutenant Colonel's rise
through the competing hierachies but is never seduced by Vann, and this is a major strength of the book.
Vann was finally given the command and co-ordination of military and social resources in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. By 1971 he was one of the few remaining commanders who still believed in America's ability to turn the war around. Vann became the first civilian General of the conflict. He was killed in a helicopter crash after momentarily halting the North Vietnamese advance at Kontum.
The personal and protracted failure of Vann is perceived by Sheehan as the historic failure of the United States.
Vann's main achievement was to prolong a war that had already been lost. It is this ultimate delusion which compounds and electrifies Sheehan's moral indictment of the American campaign.
Hovever while Sheehan's indictment is powerful, moving and just, the strategy advocated by Vann has survived: it has become quietly incorporated into America's subsequent geo-political conduct.
A integrated command structure; the use of locally recruited soldiers; American hardware under American direction; the selective recruitment and training of both civilian and military personel; the careful targetted use of both terror and large scale terrorism; the deployment of American advisors and technicians rather than ground forces; the de-Americanisation of completed military objectives, and the development of social programmes aimed at subverting unrest: each of these methods, advocated by Vann amidst the cacophony of the Vietnam war, have become basic elements of current US policy.
The political and miltary leadership which lost the war in Vietnam have survived and learned from their mistakes. John Paul Vann can take a good deal of posthumous credit for this. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 25, June 1990
Vann's legacy - American troops are now training local combatants