John Paul Vann

John capital of Minnesota Vann is the central source of Sheehans defy, the sheath around whom the whole Vietnam war seems to turn. Fearless, misguided, Vann appears to stand for America itself. Ameri target embassador and commanding general were informing the Kennedy ecesis that everything was going well and that the achievement was theirs. Vann saw Vietnam War new(prenominal)(a)wise. In the end Vann was kil lead when his helicopter crashed and burned in rain and fog in the mountains of Vietnams commutation Highlands, leaving behind a most extraordinary legend.He succeeded in imposing himself as the real commanding officer of a whole region in Vietnam, and the Pentagon, in an unprecedented move, gave him confidence everywhere all U. S. military forces in his area. He commanded as umteen troops as a major general. Vann never hesitated to use about(prenominal) level of force was necessary to achieve his ends, but considered it morally slander and stupid to wreak violenc e on the innocent (another reason for his popularity with the anti- struggle people). The diverge he wielded both(prenominal) within the U. S.civil-military bureaucracy and the Saigon government made him, by general agreement, the most important American in Vietnam afterwards our ambassador and commanding general, a side of meat recognise at his Arlington funeral, attended by the entire capital of the United States military establishment. Neil Sheehans book is now popular with both critics and popular, and Hollywood would heretofore think of making a film portrait an American military hero from the Vietnam War with such(prenominal) sympathy. DEVELOPMENT OF origin Both John Paul Vann and Neil Sheehan went to Vietnam in the early sixties, Vann as a military advisor, Sheehan as a reporter for united Press foreign (UPI).As the months passed, Vanns disillusion with the state of wars progress eventually led him to share his frustrations with Sheehan and other reporters, and the advisor became bingle of the correspondents most valuable sources of tuition on the true dynamics of the situation issue in the countryside. In the mid-1960s Sheehan left Vietnam for assignments in the United States, but Vann remained and, after assuming a civilian position, rose to be add up 1 of the most baronful Americans in the country.In 1972, a short clipping after Vanns death in a helicopter crash, Sheehan began study on a biography of the soldier. sixteen long years later, the book was finally published to a let loose of critical praise. John Paul Vann went to Vietnam in work on 1962 at epoch thirty-seven. A lieutenant colonel in the U. S. Army, he served as senior advisor to the S catch forwardh Vietnamese Armys 7th Infantry Division, which was headquartered at My Tho in the Mekong Delta south of Saigon. An intelligent, fearless man possessed of alarming stamina and a deeply held belief in the legitimacy of U.S. occasion in Vietnam, Vann was an ideal advis or in many respects. Sheehan wrote in A sharp sheeny double-dealing that the military mans character and education had combined to produce a mind that could be tout ensemble possessed by the immediate task and at the same time sufficiently detached to discern the root elements of the problem. He manifested the faith and the optimism of endureWorld War II America that any challenge could be overcome by will and by the disciplined application of intellect, technology, money, and, when necessary, arm force. (134)But as the months passed and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) troops that he was advising proceed to flounder, Vanns frustration grew. South Vietnamese commanders proved reluctant to pull troops to confrontations because of political concerns rear in Saigon and their own instinct for self-preservation, and the optimistic forecasts of American policymakers troubled him as well. Moreover, Vann matt-up that both the South Vietnamese government and U. S. prescri beds did not appreciate the significance of the social problems plaguing the country, and he argued that U. S.bombing policies and the strategic Hamlets program (in which peasants were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in group encampments) were corroding already tenuous support for the Diem regime out in the countryside. By the end of his first year in Vietnam, wrote Sheehan, Vann saw that the war was existence lost. The ambassador and the commanding general in South Vietnam were telling the Kennedy administration that everything was going well and that the war was being won. Vann recalld then and never ceased to believe that the war could be won if it was fought with sound tactics and strategy (102).Sheehan and the other members of the Saigon press corps bucked attempts by U. S. and Vietnamese officials to spoon-feed the media information on the wars progress, and relations amid the camps quickly deteriorated. Within a occasion of months, however, the adventurous UPI reporter had developed an effective network of independent sources and constituted a productive partnership with David Halberstam of the New York Times. One of the correspondents best sources in the U. S. military was John Paul Vann.Writing in A capable Shining Lie, Sheehan described the relationship between Vann and the reporters in similar terms Vann taught us the most, and one can truly say that without him our reporting would not ease up been the same. He gave us an expertise we lacked, a certitude that brought a qualitative multifariousness in what we wrote. He enabled us to tidy sum on the official optimism with gradual but steadily increasing detail and thoroughness (254). Sheehan noted that he and most of the other correspondents initially supported Americas presence in Vietnam.We believed in what our government said it was trying to accomplish in Vietnam, and we wanted our country to win this war just as stormily as Vann and his captains did, (211) Sheehan said. But the reports of Vann and other sources, coupled with their own firsthand observations out in the field, convinced the press corps that the U. S. prosecution of the war was essentially flawed. While attending the funeral for John Paul Vann in 1972, Sheehan was struck by the stature of those in attendance (from General William West more(prenominal)land, who served as a pallbearer, to Ellsberg, who had been one of Vanns closest friends).Upon returning home, Sheehan secured a two-year leave of absence seizure from the New York Times, along with a contract from a publisher, and began work on a biography of Vann. The writer felt that by studying Vanns life, he would also be able to examine Americas role in Vietnam. As he wrote in A lucent Shining Lie, The intensity and distinctiveness of his character and the courage and drama of his life had seemed to sum up so many of the qualities Americans admired in themselves as a people. By an obsession, by an unyielding dedication to the wa r, he had come to personify the American endeavor in Vietnam.He had exemplified it in his illusions, in his well(p) intentions gone awry, in his pride, in his will to win (325). As the mid-seventies blurred into the early 1980s, Sheehans obsession with Vanns story grew. month after month passed by as the writer try to put in Vanns dark secrets (a troubled childhood, a sexual appetite that deuced his phalanx career) with the honorable soldier he had known in the Mekong Delta. And over it all lay the shadow of the war itself, the contradictions of which Sheehan continued to see encapsulated in Vann. Sheehan fell into a reclusive routine in which his waking hours were reign by the book.In August 1986 Sheehan finally completed the manuscript for A Bright Shining Lie. Over the course of the adjoining year, the author pared the book big money to 360,000 words, still a massive work. In 1988sixteen years after Sheehan began work on the Vann biographyA Bright Shining Lie was finall y published. Paralyzed by our own Newtonian paradigm, we defeated ourselves by persistently viewing the Vietcong as being unlike from us in degree, when in fact they were different in salmagundi. Underestimating them as being different only in degree, the U. S.military often contemptuously referred to them as those raggedy-assed little bastards (205). To Americans, the Vietcong obviously had less technology to fight with but the Vietcong knew they had a different kind of technology the land, and they used it to great advantage against U. S. technology. In his A Bright Shining Lie, Sheehan relates a story that perfectly expresses how the Vietcong used nature in concert with their kind of technology. A Captain James Drummond is told by a prisoner that the most important Vietcong training camp in the Yankee Delta is located in clumps of woods above a crossroads.When he gets there, Drummond finds . . . quartette thatched-hut classrooms furnished with blackboards under the trees . . . (88). The very idea that blackboards under the trees a virtual(prenominal) oxymoron in American thinking -could be used to defeat the United States, is, once again, unthinkable. It represents what psychiatrist Charles J. Levy calls inverted warfare, which Gibson explains as the sense in which American common sense on how the world operates was reversed or inverted in Vietnam.A Bright Shining Lie confirms, that the core of the U. S. word of honor operating theatre in Vietnam during the crucial years from 1961 to 1963, came under the influence of a mid-level U. S. Army adviser, Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, who was convinced that he had lick the riddle of how to galvanize what was essentially a fifteenth-century South Vietnamese army into a twentieth-century fighting force Get rid of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, and have the United States take over the war, in toto.On January 2, 1963, the ARVN 7th Infantry Division, which was under the command of General Huyn h Van Cao, carried out orders to destroy a Vietcong radiocommunication transmitter located in the hamlet of Tan Thoi in the Mekong Delta. Acting on intelligence that indicated that the transmitter was protect by a force of about one hundred Vietcong in nearby Ap Bac, Vann and his staff settled on a plan of attack that featured his usual precise calculations. Vann saw an opportunity to use the ARVNs advantages in mobility, firepower, and armor to destroy a Viet Cong unit, noted Harry G.Summers, jr. in the Historical Atlas of the Vietnam War. But instead of wreaking havoc on the guerrillas (whose hit-and-run tactics had frustrated the American advisors over the preceding months), the operation proved disastrous for Caos troops. Larger-than-expected Vietcong forces at Ap Bac and Tan Thoi were ready for the attack, having intercepted radio messages concerning the upcoming operation. When the raids first helicopters arrived, they were met with withering ground fire, and trine of the H-21 helicopters and one Huey (UH-1) gunship were promptly downed.The first few minutes of the battle set the pattern for the rest of the clash. As the hours dragged by, ARVN forces committed a series of strategic blunders somewhat over the objections of Vann and his staffthat served to supercharge deteriorate their position. Finally, Vann felt that Caos forces showed little appetite for battle, a factor that boost contributed to the debacle. By the next morning the Vietcong guerrillas had slipped away, leaving behind eighty ARVN dead and another one hundred wounded. Significantly, three Americans had been killed as well.Later in the morning, Cao ordered a fraudulent air strike on the area, nearly killing Sheehan and two other Americans who were surveying the long- throw out battlefield. In the battles aftermath, U. S. and South Vietnamese officials tried to call the clash at Ap Bac a victory, but Vann and his staff quickly disabused the press corps of any such notions. Enraged b y the whole operation, Vann called the ARVN effort a miserable damn performance, and even though correspondents who used the quote did not reveal his identity, U. S. officials familiar with Vann knew whose voice it was.As a battle it did not amount to much, but Ap Bac would have sound consequences for the later prosecution of the war, wrote Summers. Prior to Ap Bac, Sheehan pointed out, the Kennedy administration had succeeded in preventing the American public from being more than vaguely conscious that the country was involved in a war in a place called Vietnam. Ap Bac was putting Vietnam on the front pages and on the television evening news shows with a drama that no other event had yet achieved (421). Vann retired from the army several months later.When those who knew him knowledgeable of his departure, many assumed that he had selflessly sacrificed his military career so that he could comment on the war with greater freedom, and his reputation was further enhanced. His admirer s were unaware that Vanns myriad sexual indiscretions (including a valid statutory rape charge that he lastly beat) had permanently scarred his record, efficaciously limiting his advancement anyway. In 1965 Vann returned to Vietnam as a civilian, serving as a provincial pacification representative for AID (the Agency for transnational Development).As American involvement in the war expanded, Vanns authority increased, even though he continued to be an outspoken critic of some aspects of the wars prosecution. His leadership qualities and his dedication to the war had assisted his promotion, as had a realization by those in power in Saigon and Washington that his dissent over tactics or strategy was always meant to further the war effort, not hinder it, wrote Sheehan (436). In May 1971 Vann was promoted to an advisory position that gave him authority over all U. S. military forces in Vietnams Central Highlands and adjacent provinces along the central coastline.The unprecedented arra ngement gave Vann more power than he could have ever wielded had he stayed in the army. By this point, some people who knew Vann felt that the years of involvement in the war had changed the man, and not for the better. They noted that Vann had adopted a much more lenient ism about appropriate methodologies for winning the bitter war. Those who recalled his harsh criticisms of bombing strategies precedent in the conflict for the toll that they exacted on civilians found that he had befit an enthusiastic proponent of intensive bombing campaigns.Sheehan wrote about an exchange between Vann and Washington Post reporter Larry Stern that dramatically reflected Vanns change of heart Anytime the wind is b modesting from the north where the B-52 strikes are turning the terrain into a moonscape, you can tell from the battlefield stench that the strikes are effective, (365) Vann reportedly told Stern. In March 1972, North Vietnamese forces launched the three-pronged Easter Offensive, a bol d effort to fire South Vietnam by attacks on three strategic regions.All three thrusts were ultimately turned back, however, as the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) was handed a major setback. Vann was widely credited with being a key frame of reference in the acknowledgment of An Loc, a site seventy-five miles north of Saigon that had been one of the NVAs capital targets in the offensive. In June of that year, however, Vann was killed in an air crash when his helicopter, flying low over an otherwise treeless valley at night, hit a small group of trees standing over a primitive Montagnard necropolis (Montagnards are aboriginal tribespeople who make their homes in some of Vietnams more mountainous areas).EVALUATION OF THE THEME AND BOOK PRESENTATION As the months passed, and disastrous events such as the Ap Bac debacle and the Buddhist uprising erupted, Sheehan emerged as one of the wars finestand most controversialcorrespondents. He did so despite struggle with an almost paralyzing certainty that death would claim him when he went out into the field. When he first arrived in Vietnam, Sheehan had been exhilarated by violent, dangerous excursions out in the countryside, but the events at Ap Bac changed his attitude in dramatic fashion.While surveying the film of the battle, Sheehan and two others (reporter Nick Turner and Brigadier General Robert York) had nearly been short-winded apart by General Caos fraudulent attack against the abandoned Vietcong positions in the area. In June 1964 Sheehan left UPI for the New York Times. A year later he returned to Saigon, where he stayed until 1966, when he was transferred to Washington, D. C. That same year he wrote an article, non a Dove, but No Longer a Hawk, that reflected his growing disillusionment with Americas involvement in Vietnam. In the late 1960s he served as the newspapers Pentagon and White House correspondent.By 1971 Sheehan had come full circle he emerged as a critic of the war. In 1971 Ellsbergs disenc hantment with U. S. policies led him to give Sheehan a massive accrual of confidential government memorandums and reports on the war that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. To opponents of the war, the records in this archivecommissioned by Defense Secretary McNamara back in 1967, they included reports dating back to the 1940sprovided stark tell that U. S. involvement in Southeast Asia had too often been characterized by deceit, misjudgments, and bureaucratic arrogance.Sheehans massive tome garnered many awards (Pulitzer Prize, National check Award for nonfiction, capital of South Carolina Journalism Award, Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and others) and laudatory reviews in the months following its publication. Boosted by the recognition, the book became a best-seller. Reviewers were almost unanimous in their praise for Sheehans work (the harshest dissent with the critical consensus appeared in the National Review). New York Times Book Review critic Ronald Steel commented th at if there is one book that captures the Vietnam War in the sheer Homeric scale of its passion and folly, this book is it.Indeed, reviewers recognized that the book worked in large measure because of its choice of subject matter. Critics felt that, in John Paul Vann, Sheehan had found a larger-than-life figure whose experiences in Vietnam offered valuable insights into the character and nature of American involvement in the conflict. Making more sense of what happened in the conflict than most books, this is a thoughtful, well-made work. References Sheehan, Neil. (1988). A Bright Shining Lie John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York Random House.