A Brief Summary of Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie
David R. Walker
John Paul Vann arrived in Vietnam for the start of his first tour of duty in late March 1962. A little over ten years later, on June 9, 1972, he died when his helicopter crashed in a remote area of the Central Highlands. His decade of service to the Republic of South Vietnam encompassed the beginnings of the large-scale American involvement under President Kennedy, the Americanization of the war undertaken by President Johnson, and the early steps toward disengagement initiated by President Nixon. Neil Sheehan argues, and many Vietnam hands likely would agree that, next to the American ambassador and the commanding general of U.S. forces, Vann was the best known American in Vietnam. Sheehan would further assert, and on this point he likely would encounter some disagreement, that the nature of Vann's service, the efforts he undertook to further American objectives, and the forces that drove him to approach his duties in the manner he did, constituted the quintessence of the entire United States effort in South Vietnam. In Sheehan's view, Vann became the physical manifestation--the paradigm--of American national will in Southeast Asia. A Bright and Shining Lie is the result of decades of research by Sheehan to explore the parallels between Vann and America in Vietnam
Book I: Going to War
Vann's first assignment called for him to work as a military advisor to the South Vietnamese. Shortly after his arrival in country, Colonel Daniel Boone Porter, principal American advisor in the III Corns Tactical Zone, appointed Vann to serve as the senior American advisor to the 7th ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) Division, operating in the northwestern Mekong Delta area. At that time, III Corns stretched from the tip of the Ca Mau Peninsula northward to a string of provinces that lay north and east of Saigon and included the area for which Vann and the 7th Division had responsibility. Very early on, Vann recognized that considerably more than simple advising on technical matters would be required to get the Vietnamese motivated to fight as they should and wage war successfully. South Vietnamese units, as a rule, preferred to take whatever steps were necessary to avoid the enemy rather than confront him and, in so doing, keep friendly casualties low and reduce the likelihood of damaging or losing expensive military equipment. Vann refused to accept this approach and set himself the task of transforming the 7th Division into one of the more energetic and aggressive in
the entire South Vietnamese order of baffle.
Vann discovered that the reluctance on the part of the South Vietnamese officers to seek out and fight the Viet Cong arose from the deeply-held, and near universal, belief that South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem wished battlefield casualties to be kept as low as possible. It naturally followed that any South Vietnamese officer who lost a great percentage of his men, regardless of the damage done to the enemy in the process, could likely expect a prompt rebuke from Saigon, which might ultimately eventuate in disastrous career consequences. According to the story, Diem believed that the failed 1960 coup attempt against his government had grown out of dissatisfaction among the ranks of military units suffering heavy losses. To prevent another attempt to overthrow the government, troops should be well cared for and not required to stand and fight pitched battles. A further danger that might arise if the South Vietnamese troops took heavy losses in battle vis-a-vis their Viet Cong adversaries concerned relations with the U.S. If the Americans became convinced that the Saigon forces were not capable of waging a successful defense of their country, it might lead the United States to re-examine its commitment to Diem and this reconsider- ation could well mean disaster for the South Vietnamese Government (the
GVN).
South Vietnamese commanders, Vann observed, carefully considered their every action with one eye focused on Saigon politics. Many, if not most of their military actions, they directed at targets and locations they knew harbored few, if any, enemy. Their subsequent "victories," many of them patently bogus, were lavishly reported to higher headquarters; and when the accounts reached Saigon, they often generated a shower of medals for bravery, valor, and so forth. On those relatively few occasions when there was no choice but to move against the guerillas, the ARVN officers would strut around prior to battle like freshly-starched mini-martinets, rending the air with their swagger sticks and bombast, threatening to dump all sorts of doom and annihilation on their enemies. Once the battles began, however, the bluster and bravado gave way to hesitation, delay, indecision, and above all, an unalterable determination to leave their enemies a clear path from which to escape the battlefield. Allowing the enemy to retreat forestalled the likelihood of an intense battle in which both sides would suffer heavy losses. Vann came to see that this mindset of avoidance, while it might stand one in good stead in Saigon, ran counter to every theory for waging successful war and if permitted to go unchecked, could lead the United States into a major international disaster.
Book III: The Battle of Ap Bac
Vann's growing dissatisfaction with the timidity and duplicity of his South Vietnamese counterparts reached a bitter culmination on January 2, 1963, when the 7th ARVN Division launched an attack against a Viet Cong position at Ap Bac, a village situated some fourteen miles northwest of the city of My Tho in the upper Mekong Delta region. Despite a substantial numerical and technological superiority, the South Vietnamese forces and their American advisors suffered a humiliating defeat, including the loss of several helicopters. As in times past, the ARVN commanders permitted the enemy to escape. Vann was present during the battle, most of the time in a spotter plane that afforded him an excellent view of the ground action. From his position, he quickly determined that what should have been a comparatively simple South Vietnamese action to envelop the enemy and destroy him turned instead into a Viet Cong victory. A line of well entrenched guerrillas, concealed in dense brush cover, was able to maintain a clear field of interlocking fire and prevent all forward movement of the South Vietnamese infantry and armored units. The ARVN artillery and air strikes proved generally ineffective. Repeated calls to division headquarters to position troops to encircle the enemy and block any retreat were suspiciously garbled in transmission or delayed in translation. Similarly, requests sent to corns headquarters for additional troops and equipment were unconscionably delayed, deemed "not prudent," until too late in the day to make any difference in the outcome of the engagement.
Book IV: Taking on the System
In the after-action assessments of what went wrong at Ap Bac, Vann could barely contain his anger and frustration. He believed many of the South Vietnamese officers had shown egregious incompetence, if not outright cowardice. His rage intensified when he discovered that many American officers at the upper echelons in Saigon, including General Paul Harkins, the commanding officer of the United States Military Assistance Command/Vietnam (MACV), proved either unable or unwilling to see the defeat for what it was and agreed with the South Vietnamese high command that the battle at Ap Bac had dealt the VC a devastating blow. Vann attempted on several occasions to paint for his superiors a true picture of what had occurred at Ap Bac and what that portended for the future, but his efforts went for naught. MACV headquarters persisted in its rosy belief that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the South Vietnamese forces. The ARVN was winning the struggle with the Viet Cong and victory could be assured with a few more weapons and supplies, a little more time, and a lot more American patience and understanding. Despite growing pressure from Vann to use American influence to reform the South Vietnamese military, make it more aggressive, and restructure the focus of the American assistance program so that it rewarded improved ARVN performance, Harkins refused to deviate from his position that everything was working as it should and according to schedule.
Unable to get a receptive ear in Saigon and with his access to Washington blocked by MACV officials who would not stray from the official line put out by Harkins, Vann stepped outside regular channels. He began to voice his opinions and complaints to members of the American press. To broadcast his message, he latched on to several young, up-and-coming reporters, including David Halberstam of the New York Times and Neil Sheehan of the Associated Press. Armed by Vann, these reporters and others (who agreed to attribute their inside information to anonymous sources so as to protect Vann's identity) were able to challenge the official version of the war as offered by MACV briefers. In Sheehan's words:
He gave us an expertise we lacked, a certitude that brought a qualitative change in what we wrote. He enabled us to attack the official optimism with gradual but steadily increasing detail and thoroughness. He transformed us into a band of reporters propounding the John Vann view of the war. (317)
The new view that came forth presented a somberly negative picture of events in South Vietnam, one that strongly criticized the advisory effort and argued that Diem's policies, paid for by American taxpayers and the blood of American troops, were grandly ineffective except to anger and alienate the South Vietnamese people who, in desperation, turned to the Viet Cong for protection. Moreover, the young reporters asserted, only those reforms and policies that were firmly rooted in Vietnamese tradition and which spoke to genuine needs of the Vietnamese people could succeed; all others would fail, regardless of how well-intentioned.
Insiders in both Saigon and Washington soon recognized that Vann was the source for much of this critical reporting and, when he rotated back to the states in early summer, 1963, he found little enthusiasm among the Pentagon hierarchy for his opinions. The rebuffs he received from the Joint Chiefs and their staffs came about, in large part, because he had gone outside the chain of command and spoken critically of the war effort in South Vietnam. He had stopped being a "team" player.
By using the press to publicize his views, Vann was developing a controversial reputation among staffers in the Pentagon and the State Department, the two agencies most concerned with Vietnam. He was also, as every good bureaucrat understands, running the grave risk of ruining his chances for advancement. He was criticizing official policy and the persons who had devised it; bureaucracies do not reward whistle blowers. The question on the minds of many of Vann's friends and acquaintances concerned his motivation for taking on the military/ foreign policy establishment, the professional home to which he had already given many years of dedicated service. Was he, as his admirers believed, criticizing the war and risking his career from a sense of moral outrage at the murderously destructive impact the war was having on the Vietnamese and their society, or was it, rather, a case of a super-ambitious middle-level officer trying to generate as much favorable publicity as possible so as to position himself for success. Sheehan argues that the preponderance of available evidence points to the latter. (In Book II, Sheehan tries to provide a backdrop for this conflict between a lethargic Establishment and feisty "realist" like Vann. Elsewhere in this collection, Professor Rollins discusses the historical background.)
Book V: Antecedents to the Man
Vann was an illegitimate child whose early years brought little but shabby poverty and
varying levels of emotional abuse. His mother, principal interests centered around indulging herself and entertaining her male friends. His father, a drifter and convicted bootlegger, saw his son very seldom. The only real care the four Vann siblings received came from a stepfather and various relatives living near them in the poorer sections of Norfolk, Virginia. Vann's ticket out of this dead end of deprivation and neglect came in the form of several persons who took an interest in him and helped him to help himself. One individual, a minister (and secret pedophile) promoted Vann to others who had the financial wherewithal and the willingness to underwrite much of his education. The minister's motives were not entirely selfless, however, and Sheehan asserts that there can be little doubt but that a sexual relationship developed between the boy from the wrong side of town and this man of the cloth. The improper association between the two, Sheehan continues, grew to be a source of considerable anxiety and insecurity to Vann and caused him to become "ferociously heterosexual" as an adult (478). This likely explains the enormous appetite for sexual release he exhibited throughout his adult years and which very often took the form of extramarital affairs.
In March, 1943, with World War II well underway, Vann joined the Army and was accepted for training in the old Army Air Corps. He distinguished himself early on with his energy and single-mindedness of purpose and quickly came to the attention of his superiors, who bestowed upon him increasing responsibilities and leadership opportunities, all of which he handled with apparent ease. He never earned his pilot's wings, however. Late in training, and as a result of a daredevil violation of the flight rules (he put an aircraft through some prohibited stunt maneuvers), his superiors booted him out of flight training. He, nonetheless, remained in the Air Corps and earned navigator's wings and second lieutenant's bars in February 1945.
World War II ended before Vann could see much action but he remained in the Army, developed considerable expertise in logistics, and proceeded routinely through the schedule of promotions. By the time he arrived in Vietnam, he had attained the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was also approaching the twenty-year plateau for retirement and, unbeknownst to anyone else, had every intention of leaving the Army, or so Sheehan contends.
The factors motivating Vann to end his military career had their origins in an incident that occurred in the late 1950's, while he was completing requirements for an MBA degree at Syracuse University. At that time, he seemed well positioned to reach the very highest levels in the defense establishment. The trouble came when he was charged with statutory rape of a teenage babysitter. He recognized the allegation as one that called into serious question his fitness for being an officer and marshaled all of his resources to defend himself. He launched a
vigorous campaign to slander the girl's reputation, persuaded his wife to testify' on his behalf and made generous use of an unseemly bag of tricks to defeat a lie detector test. His efforts paid off as he eventually cleared himself of the charge, but much of the damage done to his reputation proved to be irreparable. He recognized that the mere presence of the incident on his record would forever close off to him the higher rungs of the military ladder and, when he could not get secret access to his permanent personnel file to destroy all reference to the matter, he decided to leave the Army in order to make his mark elsewhere.
Vann retired from active duty in July, 1963 and took employment with the Martin Marietta Company, a major defense contractor in Denver, Colorado. He performed well in his new job but quickly found that civilian life did not provide the excitement or the challenge that came in the military, especially the military engaged in war. His boredom with the humdrum of civilian life eventually became unendurable and he began to call upon his old contacts in State and Defense to help him find a position in some capacity with the U.S. effort in Vietnam.
Book VI: A Second Time Around
On March 20, 1965, Vann arrived back in South Vietnam as a civilian employee of the United States Agency for International Development, USAID or AID, and was assigned to serve as AID representative in Hau Nghia province, located in an extremely insecure area lying between Saigon and the Cambodian border. His new position called for him to oversee the use of American foreign aid monies to develop the province and strengthen the presence of the government of South Vietnam. He signed off on projects to build schools, infirmaries, roads, bridges, dam and dike systems, and so forth. At the same time, it was his job to convince his counterparts, the Vietnamese provincial officials, to think in terms of public service. Until his arrival, it was not their habit to see the public's needs and wants as the primary function of responsible political leadership. The whole effort, of course, was designed to improve the ability and image of the South Vietnamese government so that it could compete with the Viet Cong for the allegiance of the populace.
In addition to his civilian duties, he also worked closely with friendly military units in the area to upgrade security by challenging the VC/NVA in their strongholds and forcing them to disclose themselves so that friendly forces could go after them. He brought to his new duties the same dedication and energy that had characterized his efforts as a soldier and he was just as unaccepting of incompetence, shoddy performance of duty, and venality. He rebuked friendly military units for their recklessness in using the highly destructive weapons of war in civilian areas. He particularly opposed the indiscriminate use of artillery and air power. The almost inevitable losses in civilian lives and property that resulted from bombs and shells gone astray, or improperly aimed, generated public antagonism toward the United States and the GVN and often strengthened the hand of the Viet Cong. Vann argued that lightly armed ground forces would generate less peripheral (i.e. unintentional), damage in the course of their operations and were, therefore, the best units to employ against the enemy in areas with large numbers of non-combatants. Air and artillery could render their most useful service in destroying those enemy staging and resupply areas remote from population centers. He advocated using aerial bombardment of various sorts to hit the enemy, especially the North Vietnamese, in those areas along the borders with Laos and Cambodia to prevent them from pushing inward toward the South Vietnamese cities, towns, and villages.
Vann also had sharp words for those South Vietnamese officials, as well as American advisors, who failed in the proper execution of their duties. He condemned the corruption, incompetence, and dilatory performance he saw in many of the GVN offices, arguing that the fraud and malfeasance discredited the entire effort to establish a viable, durable, non-communist government in South Vietnam. In a private letter to a friend late in 1965, he candidly assessed the prevailing situation by comparing the Viet Cong enemy and the South Vietnamese allies as he saw them:
If it were not for the fact that Vietnam is but a pawn in the larger East-West confrontation and that our presence here is essential to deny the resources of this area to Communist China, then it would be damned hard to justify our support of the existing government. There is a revolution going on in this country--and the principles, goals, and desires of the other side are much closer to what Americans believe in than those of the GVN… I am convinced that, even though the National Liberation Front [VC] is Communist-dominated, that the great majority of the people supporting it are doing so because it is their only hope to change and improve their living conditions and opportunities. If I were a lad of eighteen faced with the same choice--whether to support the GVN or the NLF--and a member of a rural community, I would surely choose the NLF. (524)
Vann argued, as he had in the past, that despite official pronouncements, the enemy continued to make inroads gaining support among the South Vietnamese people. The growing presence of American troops and the advent of overwhelming allied technological superiority could greatly intensify the level of fighting; they counted for very little, however, when it came to changing the direction in which the two sides were proceeding. More allied bombs and the willingness to use them did not necessarily translate into more support for the GVN. And when the enemy launched the Tet Offensive early in 1968 and wrought such destruction on South Vietnam and on the American will to continue the war, Vann's was one of the few reputations to be enhanced by the disaster. He, at last, came to be seen as at least one individual (there were others) who had been speaking the terrible truth all along amidst all the bright promises of success and imminent victory.
Book VII: John Vann Stays
The Tet Offensive propelled Vann into those highest echelons of leadership he had coveted for so many years. His understanding of the unpleasant reality of the war, and of what would be needed to win it, or at least rescue the American reputation, brought him increased recognition and respect both in Saigon and in Washington. His newfound prominence extended as far as a visit with President Nixon and, he believed a role in developing the policies of Vietnamization.
In the aftermath of Tet, many Americans in Vietnam, including Vann, saw that the enemy had taken a terrific beating. The Viet Cong had shown himself, had been targeted by the allies, and had lost many thousands of his followers, the most important of whom were the more senior cadre, some of whom had been in place since the mid-1950's. With these more experienced guerrillas gone, the GVN, according to the emerging view--now shared by Westmoreland and Vann--should be able to solidify its control over more of the South Vietnamese countryside and population. Additionally, with the Viet Cong seriously weakened and the American public growing heartily sick of anything associated with Vietnam, the Nixon Administration should be able to begin withdrawing American forces, thus responding to the domestic anti-war criticism.
The policy of Vietnamization called for continuing the war on all fronts. The ARVN forces would take over more and more of the military aspects of the struggle -- they must now take the initiative to seek out the enemy and engage him. To give the ARVN an advantage, the U.S. would upgrade the quality and quantity of weapons in the South Vietnamese arsenal and make available the air cover necessary for ground operations. At the same time, the civilian/political/social side of the war would be addressed with increased emphasis on pacification via an expansion of the CORDS program.
The Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support organization (CORDS) owed its establishment to the efforts of those officers, civilian and military, who recognized a need to unify and combine the American advisory programs to reduce duplication. CORDS
teams consisted of both military and civilian personnel and could be found at virtually all levels of the South Vietnamese government. CORDS personnel, most of whom were language trained, focused their attention on every aspect of nation building, up to and including advising local self defense groups that could maintain general order in an area, leaving the ARVN free to deal with large scale enemy formations and movements. Vann had long advocated structuring the advisory effort to resemble something along the lines of CORDS, so when the new organization came into existence, it filled him with confidence that great advances could be made to strengthen the viability of the GVN. And it was at this point, Sheehan argues, particularly as he began to identify so closely with the objectives and purposes of CORDS, that Vann began to lose that critical perspective he had always maintained when assessing the potential and survivability of the GVN. It was as if the new-found credibility he enjoyed as a result of his prescience regarding Tet had led him to confuse his hopes for the GVN, which were high, with its realistic potential to stand on its own, which remained low. This transformation is an essential part of Sheehan's book--both in substance and structure. (See Professor Batteiger's essay in this collection for a rhetorical analysis of the book.)
Debates over the nature of and any differences between, the pre-Tet John Vann and the post-Tet variety will remain as long as people examine and discuss the American advisory effort in South Vietnam. What is clear is that the years 1968-1972 saw Vann emerge as perhaps the major figure in the American advisory establishment. Indeed, he achieved such status that CORDS personnel in training during the late 1960's and early 1970's, both in Washington and in Saigon, received generous instruction in the philosophy and achievements of John Paul Vann. The payoff for Vann came in mid-May, 1971 when he was appointed the director of the CORDS programs in II Corns, with the equivalent military rank of major or general. He now commanded all American military and civilian personnel in all of the Central Highlands. His greatest moment in his new position came during the Easter Offensive of 1972 when he personally guided and directed the defeat of a major North Vietnamese Army attempt to take the Central Highlands and, if successful, to cut South Vietnam in half. Everyone associated with the victory expressed admiration and not a little awe and amazement at Vann's total grasp of tactics and strategy--not to mention his ability to exploit the weaknesses of his opponents. According to Sheehan, however, Vann played the major role in turning back the North Vietnamese precisely because the South Vietnamese commanders in the Central Highlands had shown themselves unable to do so. He had been forced to step in to rescue the situation. Sheehan's Vann missed the significance of his success: "He did not see that in having to assume total control at the moment of crisis, he had proved the Saigon regime had no will of its own to survive" (784). (For an opposing view on why the northern invaders were defeated in 1972, see Professor Hung's essay in this collection.)
Vann's death came just after the successful conclusion of his defense of II Corps. He died, Sheehan writes, "believing he had won his war" (790). Fate spared him the sickening shock of seeing the unconditional collapse of South Vietnam in the spring of 1975--a defeat which Sheehan believes was both inevitable and "true", an irrefutable contradiction to America's "bright shinning lies" about progress in Vietnam. The tragedy of Vann was that he once saw the truth and then became one of the nation's biggest liars. Much of the excitement of reading Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie stems from the detective-like way the author uncovers the tragic flaw of a great American hero who, for a time, saw so clearly.
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