Four excerpts from A Bright Shining Lie published as part of the recurring "Annals of War" feature in The New Yorker in 1988 are available below:
"An American Soldier in Vietnam—The Rooster and the Tiger" (June 20, 1988)
"An American Soldier in Vietnam II—A Set-Piece Battle" (June 27, 1988)
"An American Soldier in Vietnam III—An All-Around Man" (July 4, 1988)
"An American Soldier in Vietnam IV—The Civilian General" (July 11, 1988)
Foreign Service reserve officer John Paul Vann as senior American military adviser to Army of the Republic of South Vietnam II Corps (coterminous with much of South Vietnam), c. 1972. As the first civilian to command Armed Forces personnel in battle before perishing in a helicopter crash in June, the onetime "renegade lieutenant colonel" who had previously retired in 1963 in protest of American policy (a decision also informed by a past statutory rape investigation that may have forestalled further promotion) was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Distinguished Service Cross for his decisive actions in the Battle of Kontum during the North's Easter Offensive.
Revered by early Vietnam skeptics like Sheehan and David Halberstam for anti-attrition circumspection, Vann (a logistics expert who held a MBA and doctoral coursework in public administration from Syracuse University) returned in 1965 to apply his maverick ethos to CORDS. Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support was the "pacification" program and "other war" (including the Phoenix Program, a CIA-led initiative that embraced torture and free fire zones) designed to win the "hearts and minds" of the rural pro-North Vietnamese insurgency, directly prefiguring the Nixon administration's Vietnamization policy.
In a conflict dominated by short tours, his continuing presence from 1965 to 1972 served as an important bastion of knowledge solicited by the elite institutions (including the Army War College and West Point) that had once spurned the poor "redneck" from Norfolk, VA who earned his commission as a wartime Army Air Corps cadet out of junior college. His unprecedented II Corps assignment was a major general's billet, and he aspired to come full circle by eventually serving as Secretary of the Army after an American victory.
Yet his victory at Kontum—encompassing up to 40,000 North Vietnamese casualties—was largely predicated not on guerilla finesse or a mature ARVN but rather on the banality of conventional American-led B-52 strikes. And he was only forced to take control of military operations after his South Vietnamese counterpart (alleged drug trafficker Ngô Du) suffered a nervous breakdown amid the incursion. Ultimately, Vann had come to personify the "bright shining lie" of an American victory; in his final briefing after Kontum, he even suggested that the byproducts of the war (including widespread literacy and the dissemination of high technology) fully justified the conflict.
Within a year of his death, however, the Paris Peace Accords would solidify the land gains of the Easter Campaign (the real objective, as full American withdrawal was imminent due to the antiwar movement) and leave the ARSV with no American support, leading to the reunification of Vietnam and the fall of the American-backed South in 1975. But as Sheehan notes, for better or for worse, Vann died "believing he had won his war."