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

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1988 by Taylor Branch

Young girls

"He was illegitimate," writes Sheehan, opening an interlude on Vann's background that is a kind of personalized echo of the earlier chapter on Vietnam history. Once again the theme is deceit. Vann was born Johnny Spry, after his no-account father, who was married to someone else when he abandoned Vann to his mother, Myrtle, a Norfolk, Virginia floozie of Tobacco Road sensibility and barnyard manners. She taunted young Vann about his bastardy. As a boy, he and a friend once peeked into a parked car to behold Myrtle being humped by a local doctor for money. Vann never received a dime of the earnings to offset the added shame of her prostitution, as Myrtle spent all the money on fur coats and jewelry right through the near-starvation of the Depression. The only respectable man who befriended the skinny, trapped kid turned out to be an undercover CIA Arabist who took rat poison when criminal indictments finally caught up with his sideline as a child molester. Vann discovered the body on home leave from the Army.

Vann seldom saw his wife or five children even when home because he himself pursued women almost as relentlessly as Sheehan later pursued the sordid details of his former hero's rotten past. More than one shamelessly deceived young conquest was frightened or desperate enough to ask Mrs. Vann whether it was really true that they were getting divorced so that he could marry her, and if so, why had he not called? She lied under oath to protect Vann from court-martial charges of statutory rape, and Vann completed his evasion of responsibility with strenuous training to get his denials past the Army's lie detector machine. Immensely relieved, Vann told his wife of the lesson he had learned: "Next time I'll make goddamn sure they're old enough.'"

Blocked from becoming a general by the statutory rape investigation in his records, Vann had arranged a post-retirement job before he ever left for Vietnam in 1962. Why he took such risks there and cultivated the false impression that his career was on the line is a mystery Sheehan does not pretend to fathom, but the wrath of a snookered reporter shines through the discovery.

Spurned by the Army and bored by civilian life, Vann maneuvered his way back to Vietnam as a civilian adviser in 1965. Uncannily, once again, he landed just as President Johnson was sending U.S. soldiers to take over the war from the helpless South Vietnamese. There he kept two permanent concubines in ignorance of one another, resisted the pleas of their Vietnamese fathers to legitimize or free them, and ravaged a procession of young girls on the side.

In his account of this period, Sheehan puts aside his disillusionment over Vann's character, leaving it in the reader's mind with the other filmy overlays of the wan Vann the cruel manipulator retains a keen and brutal sense of truth about the war i"We're going to lose because of the moral degeneration in South Vietnam coupled with the excellent discipline of the VC," he predicted in 1965. But for the geopolitical necessity of thwarting the Chinese communists, he wrote later that year, "it would be damned hard to justify our support of the existing government. . . .If I were a lad of 18 faced with the same choice-whether to support the GVN or the NLF-and a member of a rural community, I would surely choose the NLF." Sheehan offers a rare speculation that Vann's haunted childhood allowed him to identify with the poverty and anger of the Vietnamese peasants.