Word: vann
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...BRIGHT SHINING LIE by Neil Sheehan (Random House; $24.95). In a riveting portrait, John Paul Vann, a major architect of U.S. policy in Viet Nam, emerges as a man who embodied the contradictions of his ill-fated mission: a courageous do-gooder with a dark streak of amorality...
...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...
...then, Sheehan argues, "Vann had lost his compass." The trappings of power and his two young Vietnamese mistresses (each of whom was kept ignorant of the other for years) "satisfied him so completely that he could no longer look at ((the war)) as something separate from himself." Sheehan's conclusion is as sobering as it is powerful: Vann, like the U.S. leaders in Viet Nam he had once criticized so adroitly, was finally consumed by his own illusions...