A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.

• Author: Branch, Taylor

John Paul Vann's one-man war against the Viet Cong and the Pentagon symbolizes all that was right and wrong with what we did in Vietnam.

On June 16, 1972, Neil Sheehan attended what amounted to a state funeral for the war in Vietnam. The body on the caisson behind the six gray horses belonged to John Paul Vann, killed after nearly a decade of continuous fighting in America's longest siege of blood and belief. His friends, gathered in muted pomp at Arlington Cemetery, spanned the full range of the conflict, from Edward Lansdale, the legendary Ugly American given credit for inventing South Vietnam by clandestine maneuver to Vann's old grenade-throw ing companion, Daniel Ellsberg, then on trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Vann had promised to testify in support of Ellsberg's sterling character while conspiring simultaneously with officials bent on imprisoning him as a traitor to national security. One of Vann's war-damaged sons dropped half his draft card into his father's grave and then tried to give the other half to President Nixon in the Oval Office. It was one of the countless awkward, incoherent episodes in the struggle over the war's meaning.

As the New York Times reporter to whom Ellsberg delivered the Pentagon Papers, Sheehan had acquired some notoriety among the special breed then called the New Journalists--reporters who rebelled against dull objectivity by adopting causes and lively personal styles. Therefore Sheehan's book about Vietnam was news from the moment he undertook to write it. Announcements rolled forth as he joined his contemporaries in promising definitive works on the largest topics of the day: Gay Talese on Sex, David Halberstam on the Press, Tom Wolfe on Space, and Sheehan on Vietnam. Each one of these young authors disappeared into the maw of his subject, but they struggled back one by one, battered if not chastened by the reach of ambition. In the Reagan years only Sheehan was left undelivered. Many observers feared that he, as the most workmanlike and least glittering of these writers,might be forever lost as a casualty of Vietnam introspection. Against this background, Sheehan's book* arrives with the haunting quality of a phoenix. Although it will survive as the insider's account of Vietnam, the work rises above all the sins common to the species. There is no I-told-you-so spirit here. The result is a great saga without hubris.

What humanizes the work is Sheehan's tool of discipline-the life of John Paul Vann as an organizing metaphor for the many layers of pain from Vietnam. Vann's life is arresting enough on the surface. Always at the heart of American turmoil over Vietnam, he amounted to a one-man history running backward: from piercing dissenter against an immoral war policy in 1962, years before most Americans had heard of Vietnam, he became the war's last true believer, slaughtering his way toward victory after even the commanding hawks had given up hope for anything beyond graceful defeat.

Sheehan gradually peels away the facade around Vann's inner life to reveal the naked war biography of a man utterly at odds with his reputation. Vann's courageous dissent turns out to have been a manipulator's lie, and so does his true belief. Sheehan allows the pathos of Vann's background to excuse at least some of his personal cruelties, and he carries through every sordid discovery a fleeting, perverse admiration for Vann as a wild, old-style American hell-bent on shaping the world to fit his character. These qualities account for the positive adje"bright"shining" in Sheehan's title, which he borrowed from Vann. But the Vann novel and the war narrative mingle inseparably beneath the title word "lie."

Blunderbuss shelling

Sheehan begins to recreate the war with Vann's arrival in President Kennedy's first major wave of reinforcements. An army lieutenant colonel on volunteer assignment, Vann entered at just the right moment, as usual, and exuded the cocky skills that suited an American soldier of his time: "His body was all lithe, all muscle and bone, and wonderfully quick. . . .At 37 he could still perform a backflip somersault '" The war was an adventure then. Only 20 Americans had been killed. In order to conceal the war from American politics, the Kennedy administration banned combat medals for the advisers, as well as flags or other symbols of authority. The task of the U.S. soldiers was to insinuate themselves among the South Vietnamese commanders by persuasion and example, Vann himself excelled in the role. When told that control by the communist guerrillas made a road impassable, his...