A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988) is a book by Neil Sheehan, a former New York Times reporter who covered the Vietnam War. It is about retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann and the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War.
For this book, Sheehan was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1989 and a National Book Award in 1988. A film adaptation, A Bright Shining Lie, was released by HBO in 1998 starring Bill Paxton and Amy Madigan.
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John Paul Vann became an adviser 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 part of the U.S. military. In particular, he was critical of the U.S. 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 U.S. objectives. When being unable to influence the military command, he often used the Saigon press corps, Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam and Malcolm Browne among them, to leak his views.
The volume begins with a prologue giving an account of Vann's funeral on June 16, 1972, following his death in a helicopter accident in Vietnam. The author, Sheehan, a personal friend, was present. The subsequent account is divided into seven "books" detailing Vann's career in Vietnam and America's involvement in the conflict. Book I tells of Vann's assignment to Vietnam in 1962. Book II "The Antecedents to a Confrontation" tells of the origin of the Vietnam War. Book III gives a detailed account of the shambolic Battle of Ap Bac on January 2, 1963 in which the South Vietnamese army suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Viet Cong. Book IV details Vann's criticism of the way the war was being fought, his conflict with the U.S. military command and his transfer back to America. Book V tracks back to give Vann's personal history before his involvement in the war. In the final chapters, Books VI and VII give an account of Vann's return to Vietnam in 1965 and his doomed attempt to implement a war winning formula for the beleaguered U.S. army and how he eventually compromised with the military system he once criticized.
A Bright Shining Lie was accorded high praise from critics. According to The New York Times Book Review: "If there is one book that captures the Vietnam war in the sheer Homeric scale of its passion and folly, this book is it. Neil Sheehan orchestrates a great fugue evoking all the elements of the war".[1] The New York Review of Books proclaimed it "An unforgettable narrative, a chronicle grand enough to suit the crash and clangors of whole armies. A Bright Shining Lie is a very great piece of work; its rewards are aesthetic and...almost spiritual".[2]