Word: viets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...warm spring morning in 1972, while the Viet Nam War raged abroad and caused dissension at home, an unlikely assortment of public figures gathered in Arlington National Cemetery to pay their final respects to a man 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...
...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. To Sheehan, who worked as a young wire-service reporter in Viet Nam and went on to obtain the Pentagon papers for the New York Times, Vann is the very symbol of the U.S. in Viet Nam: a courageous do-gooder masking a dark streak of amorality. Vann's story, as told by Sheehan after 16 years of painstaking reporting...
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...
That sort of comment raises the hopes of families such as that of Lieut. Colonel Anthony Shine, who vanished in 1972 while piloting an Air Force reconnaissance jet near the border of Laos and Viet Nam. Shine has been listed as missing in action ever since. "It's not knowing for sure that makes it tough," says Colleen Shine, 24, the flyer's daughter. "There's always the chance that he might walk into this room." For Colleen Shine and thousands like her, that uncertainty remains more terrible than accepting the death of a loved...