Word: vann
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...very few Americans had ever heard of. Secretary of State William Rogers, Senator Edward Kennedy and conservative columnist Joseph Alsop were there, as were General William Westmoreland and Daniel Ellsberg, who was about to stand trial for leaking the Pentagon papers. They had come to mourn John Paul Vann, one of the nation's proconsuls in Viet Nam, who had died in a helicopter crash. "In this war without heroes," writes Neil Sheehan at the beginning of his engrossing and provocative new book, "this man had been the one compelling figure...
...middle of A Bright Shining Lie, it is difficult to disagree with this bold assertion. Perhaps Sheehan overstates his case when he credits Vann with saving the Saigon regime from collapse, not once but twice: after the 1968 Tet offensive and again in 1972. Nevertheless, in Sheehan's characterization Vann emerges as a personality to rival the most complex creations of fiction. He was a brave soldier, a brilliant analyst, a born maverick and a savvy political infighter. He was also, as Sheehan eventually learned, a shameless hypocrite with a "secret vice" he could not or would not control...
...Vann first arrived in Viet Nam in 1962 as an Army lieutenant colonel. He quickly learned that the South Vietnamese forces he was advising suffered from "an institutionalized unwillingness to fight." When his superiors refused to heed his reports and force Saigon to engage the Communist guerrillas, he took his case to the small cadre of resident reporters, including Sheehan and David Halberstam of the New York Times. By the time Vann's one-year tour ended, the reporters were convinced that he had jeopardized his military career by speaking out. Halberstam, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his Viet...
What Sheehan later discovered was that Vann suffered from a sexual compulsion that led him to seduce hundreds of young women. His career was permanently stained even before he arrived in Viet Nam when he narrowly averted being court-martialed for the statutory rape of a 15-year-old baby- sitter...
...Vann, retired from the Army, was back in Viet Nam as a civilian "pacification officer" for the Agency for International Development. He opposed Westmoreland's attrition strategy because he believed it resulted in needless U.S. and Vietnamese casualties. The U.S., he argued, should reform the corrupt Saigon regime and woo the peasantry. Despite his role as gadfly, Vann rose through the system, ultimately becoming the top U.S. adviser for central Viet Nam and the first civilian, according to Sheehan, ever to command U.S. troops in wartime...