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

"It’s about the Vietnam war and it’s a masterpiece, a stone cold masterpiece. An amazing book. There’s this comparison between Vietnam and Afghanistan that’s been made so much, but it’s apposite. For a start, I think there’s a lot to be said concerning parallels between modern western perceptions of Islam and past perceptions of Communism. What Neil Sheehan shows is the patriotic dimension of the struggle from the Vietnamese point of view, that this is really what it was about, much more than Communism, just as in Afghanistan it is more about Pashtun identity than about Islam. Communism was a means of rallying and systematising a patriotic movement. It’s often said, but never seems to be taken on board by people at the top level, that in Afghanistan, Pashtun nationalism and the identification of Pashtun customs with Islam is the driver of resistance to the West. Sheehan’s brilliant telling of the Vietnam story through the career of one man – John Vann – makes comparisons to Afghanistan impossible to avoid: the handing of an effectively free mercenary service to a corrupt government, the ability of the north Vietnamese to retreat to and be supplied from places where it was politically difficult to engage them directly, the way that the Americans, if they’d had less money, would have been forced to engage more with the population. Instead, in Vietnam and now in Afghanistan, they create little bubbles. American bases in Vietnam had ice-cream shops and burger shops. When Americans go to war, they literally project their own maps on to the landscape. They rename all the roads and landmarks with their own codenames. It’s at the root of their apprehension of a foreign environment to shut it off."

"A Bright Shining Lie is about John Paul Vann, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who clung to the belief that the U.S. could achieve its objectives in Vietnam—until he finally saw that perspective was a tissue of lies. More broadly, it’s about how a country can convince itself that a flawed strategy can succeed if you just give it one more month or a few thousand more troops. You can’t read that book without thinking about Afghanistan and Iraq and how the United States has handled the COVID pandemic. It illustrates how a nation is able to lie to itself and how one man is able to lie to himself and those he advises. This story reminds me that national security work must always be rigorously honest, transparent and decision-making driven by data. This story shows that even the experts, even the most well-intentioned and patriotic policymakers, get fooled by ideology and flawed perspectives."