A Bright Shining Lie

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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.

[edit] Synopsis

John Paul Vann became an advisor to the Saigon regime in the early 1960s. He was an ardent critic of how the war was fought, both on the part of the Saigon regime, which he viewed as corrupt and incompetent, and as time went by, increasingly on the US military. In particular he was critical of the US military command, especially under William Westmoreland, and their inability to adapt to the fact that they were facing a popular guerrilla movement while backing a corrupt regime. He argued that many of the tactics employed (for example the strategic hamlet relocation) further alienated the population and thus were counterproductive to US objectives. When being unable to influence the military command, he often used the Saigon press corps, Sheehan among them, to leak his views.

[edit] Trivia

Sheehan told Times columnist Maureen Dowd in November 2006: "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." ^[1]