A Bright Shining Lie

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Bright Shining Lie is a book by Neil Sheehan, a former New York Times reporter covering the Vietnam War, about U.S. Army retired Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann and the United States involvement in the Vietnam War.

He was awarded a non-fiction Pulitzer Prize in 1989 and the National Book Award.

In 1998, the book was turned into a film by HBO, starring Bill Paxton and Amy Madigan.

Sheehan told Times columnist Maureen Dowd in a Nov. 25, 2006, piece: "In Vietnam, there were just two sides to the civil war. You had a government in Hanoi with a structure of command and an army and a guerrilla movement that would obey what they were told to do. So you had law and order in Saigon immediately after the war ended. In Iraq, there’s no one like that for us to lose to and then do business with."