A Bright Shining Lie

A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam is a book by Neil Sheehan, a former New York Times reporter who covered the Vietnam War. It is about retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann and United States involvement in the Vietnam War. For this book Sheehan was awarded the 1988 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. It was adapted as a film of the same name released by HBO in 1998, starring Bill Paxton and Amy Madigan. John Paul Vann became an adviser to the Saigon regime in the early 1960s. He was an ardent critic... of how the war was fought, both on the part of the Saigon regime, which he viewed as corrupt and incompetent, and, as time went by, increasingly, on the part of the U.S. military. In particular, he was critical of the U.S. military command, especially under William Westmoreland, and their inability to adapt to the fact that they were facing a popular guerrilla movement while backing a corrupt regime. He argued that many of the tactics employed further alienated the population and thus were counterproductive to U.S. objectives.
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