Lies and Versions in Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie Richard P. Batteiger

Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie is in many ways the most complex and ambitious book to have emerged from America's Vietnam war experience. It is sufficiently complex that no single study can comprehend it. In what follows, I make no claim to a comprehensive understanding of Sheehan's book. Rather, I wish to explore one of many possible approaches. The complexity and ambition of this book originates in Sheehan's decision to use the rhetorical device of synecdoche as the central feature of the book as he equates the American war in Vietnam with the life of John Paul Vann, a relatively obscure American advisor who Sheehan calls "the one compelling figure" (3) in "this war without heroes" (3). Sheehan sets up this synecdoche at the outset, in his description of John Vann's funeral, where he asserts that John Vann "had come to personify the American endeavor in Vietnam" (3). According to Sheehan, the identification between John Vann and the war was so complete and so much of a commonplace that those who attended the funeral, "sensed that they were burying with John Vann the war and the decade of Vietnam. With Vann dead, the rest could be no more than a postscript" (4). Proving this assertion would appear to call for a factual, historical account of the war and John Vann's life and the relationships between them. Such an approach would be neither unusual nor without precedent. Other historians have used similar strategies; Barbara W. Tuchman's Stilwell and the American Experience in China may be the best-known example.

Thus, at its beginning, A Bright Shining Lie gives the appearance of being a straight forward, factual rendering of John Vann's life and the Vietnam war and how they came to be so closely identified with each other. This would be an ambitious undertaking on its own terms. However, I will argue here that the book ultimately calls into question whether it should be read as a straightforward account, and that the project on which Sheehan is actually embarked is an even more complex and ambitious attempt to produce a what I will call a version of the life and the war, an interpretation that will become part of what Thomas Myers has called "the master national narrative". If he is successful, Sheehan's version will stand as the definitive interpretation of the war and its place in American history. What is at stake is not so much the facts of the war and the life of John Paul Vann, but whether Sheehan can establish in the public memory that the war was "unredeemable," a "doomed enterprise" (3).

These two projects suggest radically different ways of reading the book. Those who take the book to be a factual, historical account of the life of John Vann and the war will focus on the book's factual accuracy. Readers who agree with Sheehan will want the facts to support his judgments about the war. Readers who disagree with him will want to show that Sheehan shaped his evidence to fit his thesis about the war. This approach to the book quickly becomes a massive, possibly endless session of fact- checking. Did Vann (or someone else) say the things attributed to him? Did the battle of Ap Bac happen as Sheehan describes it? Was Sheehan present at this or that event? Did Sheehan actually interview everyone listed? To read the book in this way is to assume (as perhaps Sheehan wants us to assume) that the facts have some bearing on the validity of Sheehan's larger position that the war was unredeemable and doomed.

However, if the book is not primarily a factual account but an attempt to construct a version of the war, then we will read it in a quite different way. Facts become less important as facts and more important as part of the overall rhetorical framework that they are part of. That is, the purpose of the factual information is not to document events, but to suggest that Sheehan's version of the war is based on and verified by those facts, rather than being an interpretation that may have little or no relationship to the factual account.

Sheehan's establishes his rhetorical frame early in the book when he invokes two concepts that he will explore and exploit throughout the book: lies and versions. Sheehan announces in his title that lies and lying will be a major thematic concern in the book, and he almost appears to be saying to his readers, "caveat lector," warning them that what follows should not necessarily be taken at face value. It is not clear whether Sheehan believes his caveat should extend to his own work; rather, he appears to be setting himself up as the researcher and witness who can separate truth from falsehood. The second part of Sheehan's rhetorical me focuses on the existence of multiple, competing versions of the war. Among these, for example, are the official version of the war, the one that the government tells to itself and to the public. There are Vietnamese versions (14orth and South), anti-war versions, and French versions of the war (Hung, 1991). Much of Sheehan's book is about John Paul Vann's version of the war and how it differed from the official version. Sheehan, of course, puts forward his own version, which is not the same as Vann's. Ultimately, Sheehan comes to believe that Vann's version of the war was as self-delusory as the government's version. Any attempt to produce a definitive version of the American war in Vietnam that will dominate the public memory must deal directly with competing versions by discrediting and displacing as many of them as possible, and that task occupies much of Sheehan's time in the book.

It is important to appreciate the difficulty of the rhetorical task Sheehan has set for himself In order for his version of the war to be accepted as definitive, it must appear not to be a version itself but the Truth, and therefore not subject to the same limitations of ideology or interpretation as the versions he is criticizing as inadequate or false. In effect, Sheehan must, and will, claim the ability to stand apart from the personal, ideological, political, and historical forces that influence other versions and produce an objective account of the war's events and meanings. This seems an exceptionally difficult task, and readers will have to judge for themselves whether Sheehan is successful.

Early in Book I Sheehan establishes his practice of presenting competing versions of the war, evaluating them, discrediting some of them as false, and leaving others standing as part of his own definitive account. He begins with what was apparently the standard version or party line about the war in the early 1960's, the version shared and maintained by Harkins, Taylor, Wheeler, McNamara, and the rest of what came to be known as "the Establishment." According to this version, South Vietnam was a legally constituted independent country that had been invaded by a Communist enemy from the North. Ngo Dinh Diem was the rightful leader of this country, and under his leadership the South Vietnamese were winning the war with a little help from a post-World War II American military organization that believed itself invincible. According to Sheehan, proponents of this version of the war supported their position by lying and by preventing other competing versions from receiving a hearing in Saigon and Washington. As examples of this, Sheehan tells of Vann's lunch with Taylor, during which he was unable to make his point about failures in the field; of Harkins' command changing an intelligence report filed by one of Vann's officers (323-4); and describes in detail how Vann was prevented on several occasions from presenting his own version of the war to Maxwell Taylor and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (340-41). Sheehan brings together the two parts of his rhetorical frame, lies and competing versions, in his repeated assertions that the official version was the product of a military deluded by its past successes, and that its version of the war could be supported only by lies.

Against the official version of the war Sheehan poses the version that came increasingly to be Vann's and, to some extent, his own, a version also shared by David Halberstam, Vann's boss Colonel Porter, and a number of other officers who were in positions that allowed them to observe the war first-hand. According to this version, the official version was a lie. Not only were the South Vietnamese losing the war, they were not even fighting it very well. Colonel Cao, Vann's counterpart during his first tour, was faking operations and would often arrange to let the enemy escape in order to avoid a confrontation that might result in taking casualties. In this version Vann becomes the new hero who replaces the tired, self-deluded generals who can think only in terms of their World War II successes. Vann, in contrast to the generals, is an unconventional officer who is not from West Point but from the wrong side of the tracks in Norfolk. He sleeps only four hours a night, runs roads no one else will travel, survives ambushes, goes on night patrol, and opposes indiscriminate bombing and artillery fire. Above all, he appears to have an intuitive understanding of the war. According to Sheehan, "Harkins was unwittingly preparing a catastrophe.... Vann saw the elements of that catastrophe with more clarity than anyone else in Vietnam at the time [1962], and he was determined to do everything he could to prevent it" (269). Vann decided that, in view of his experiences in the field, he could no longer support the official version of the war, that he could no longer be "a bright shining lie" who told the generals and politicians what they wanted to hear rather than what was true. To avert catastrophe, he would make Colonel Cao into a real soldier and force him to fight; he would convince Harkins, Taylor, and anyone else who would listen that his version of the war was the correct one. One of his tools in this campaign was the press, often in the person of Neil Sheehan or David Halberstam, who would print Vann's version of the war in their articles. The chief advantage of John Vann's version of the war, according to Sheehan, is that it was the truth.

But no sooner does Sheehan introduce Vann's account as the truth than he must call it into question. Vann, it turns out, was an accomplished liar whose survival in the military depended on his apparently considerable ability to persuade others of the truth of his version of his life. When he retired from the Army, Vann allowed his friends and associates to believe that he did so to protest the official version of the war. But Sheehan discovered, in the process of his research, that Vann's real reason for retiring was that his personal conduct, which almost resulted in a Court Martial, had made any further promotions impossible. What is of interest here is not the specific details of the incident, but Vann's reliance on deception and lying to extricate himself from difficulty, a type of behavior which appears to have been deeply ingrained in his character. He attempted to steal and falsify his records; he practiced until he was able to pass a lie detector test even though he knew he was lying. Nor is this the only time that Sheehan documents Vann's lies. At one time he claimed credit for another man's behind-the-lines operations with a Ranger company during the Korean War. He made up a story about carrying his son around Boston's Children's Hospital begging a doctor to examine him. Time after time, Vann's versions of events turn out to be less than the full truth. Often they are complete fabrications.

Once again the two elements of Sheehan's rhetorical frame come together; versions widely advertised as true turn out to be based on lies. Vann's use of deception in his personal life and in his attempts to use journalists to go around the official powers, cannot help but call into question his own version of the war. This should create a dilemma for Sheehan, who came to oppose the war and released the Pentagon Papers, and who apparently wants to believe John Paul Vann's version of the war and use it in support of his own position that the war was unredeemable," a "doomed enterprise" (3). At the same time, he has incontrovertible evidence that Vann was not simply "a bright shining lie," but a liar as well, a person whose life was a series of fabrications. Sheehan was quick to detect what Halberstam called "the monumental effort here to con us [reporters]" (343), and to publicize what he saw as the lies of the official version of the war. But he seems to accept Vann 5 version of the war uncritically, never suspecting that Vann's well-documented practice of lying might call into question his version of the war. In fact, Sheehan often takes pains to avoid this issue altogether. He writes with apparent equal admiration of Vann's "coarse grained honesty" (94), of his reports that are "candid to the point of irritation" (116), and of the duplicity that Vann "could employ convincingly when it suited his purpose" (279). Is it possible that Sheehan is unaware of this dilemma? Or does he have some means, unavailable to the rest of us, for knowing when Vann is telling the truth and when he is lying? John Paul Vann's version of his own life appears to have consisted of fabrications and falsehoods. Is it reasonable to expect that he was capable of telling the truth about the war? Is John Vann's version of the war, presented in his briefings, his after-action reports, and his leaks to the press, any less self-serving than the life he fabricated for himself? Readers are entitled to ask just what they are to believe and how they are to take Sheehan's book.

Ultimately, whatever Sheehan's intentions, the book says less about John Paul Vann and Vietnam than about truth and falsehood and the impossibility of achieving an objective, neutral account of the war. The explicit warning in Sheehan's title requires that we read the book constantly aware that lying is a central theme, and that the warning may apply not only to the official version and Vann' 5 version of the war, but to Sheehan's version as well. This reading also provides a basis for understanding the book's structure. Forewarned, we nevertheless read the first portion of the book as a straightforward and somewhat conventional historical account based on personal authority and extensive research. Sheehan's revelation of his discovery that Vann was an accomplished, possibly habitual liar must force us to call into question everything we have read so far, and serves notice that we must read the rest of the book in light of what we now know to be true. Sheehan could have structured the book differently, identified Vann as a liar at the outset and then gotten on with his own project of constructing an account of the war for the public memory. He chose instead to put it at the middle of the book, where we discover it only after we have committed ourselves to Vann and his version of the war, and to Sheehan as our guide. Placed here, it tells us not only that Vann’s account may not be true, but that Sheehan may not be a reliable guide. And it forces us to ask why Sheehan would undermine his own position. If he is not a reliable guide, if he has been taken in by John Paul Vann, then he must abandon his claim to be writing an objective account of the war that will become a part of the master national narrative.  And that may be the point. Sheehan's project has come apart in his hands. The grand, definitive book about Vietnam that he resolved to write a John Vann's funeral is simply not possible. In fact, the master narrative itself may not exist in any useful sense, but may itself be only a version, not the Truth. We have only versions, and many of them are lies. Somewhat ironically, Sheehan's opening synecdoche remains, but not in the sense that he originally intended it. The war and John Vann are both lies. While they may be bright shining lies, they are lies nonetheless. What began as a book about the war and one of its heroes is, in the end, not about either the war or John Paul Vann, but about Neil Sheehan's process of coming to terms with the war, with being disillusioned by and about his country, and with losing a hero twice, once at his death and again at the discovery that his personal life was itself a lie. It is a book about the impossibility of writing the book that Sheehan set out to write, and so it is less about the war than about the process of its own composition and the recognition that, even after sixteen years of research, filing cabinets full of documents, and hundreds of interviews, we are left to choose among competing versions of the war.

Hung, Nguyen Manh. Personal communication, March, 1991. Professor Hung indicates that, although he is listed in the apparatus of A Bright Shining Lie, Sheehan did not interview him. See Professor Hung's essay elsewhere in this collection, 15-28.

Myers, Thomas. Walking Point. Oxford UP, 1989.

Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New

York: Random House, 1988.

Tuchman, Barbara Wertheim. Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45. New York: Macmillan, 1970.