He was a bitter soldier when he left the Army in 1963. Vann was instrumental in leading the ARVNs defense of Kontum, which prevented South Vietnam from being bisected, but as protests mounted back home, the feat barely made a ripple. Ironically, the man who once said the most discriminating weapon in insurgency warfare was a knife or a rifle had now acquired the nickname of Mr. A week later, at his Washington memorial service, Vanns family felt that he wasnt getting the respect he deserved. (speaking of the, "If it were not for the fact that Vietnam is but a pawn in the larger East-West confrontation, and that our presence here is essential to deny the resources of this area to Communist China, then it would be damned hard to justify our support of the existing government. After distinguishing himself in Korea and in post-war Germany, Vann ended up as an American advisor to the South Vietnamese in 1962 (pre-escalation). John Paul Vann had a horrific upbringing, but during wartime, he had focused energy and was a great strategist and tactician, which is rare in an officer. [4], It received the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights 1989 Book Award given annually to a book that "most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's purposes his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity. From Tet forward it was an anticlimax, maintained Sheehan, who left Vietnam in 1966. As the years went on, Mr. Sheehan increasingly regarded Vann as the personification of Americas long, painful war effort. Vietnamese woman walking down a dirt road in Viet Nam, ca. Porter then assigned Vann as the American adviser to Colonel Huynh Van Cao, commander of the ARVN 7th Division, who later became a corps commander and then a South Vietnamese senator. Soon American troops were patrolling with the ARVN regulars, and American helicopters were providing covering fire on search-and-destroy missions in the South. He went to Vanns home of Norfolk, Va., and found out the boy was born out of wedlock to a prostitute whose clients were upper-class men who preferred not to visit the brothel. Vann's wit and iconoclasm did not endear him to many military and civilian careerists but he was a hero to many young civilian and military officers who understood the limits of conventional warfare in the irregular environment of Vietnam. ", "These people may be the world's greatest lovers but they're not the world's greatest fighters. But it took his death for the book idea to coalesce. . [7] For his actions from April 2324, 1972, Vann, ineligible for the Medal of Honor as a civilian, was also awarded (posthumously) the Distinguished Service Cross,[8] the only civilian so honored since World War II. When it finally came out, the political climate in America surrounding the war had changed immensely. Weyands hunch paid off. Vann had retired from the Army by then. Seated up front were Vanns widow, Mary Jane, and his four sons. In the face of enemy fire, far too many ARVN officers and soldiers opted not to engage the enemy and took flight. 1966. You wondered, first of all, why this man could bring all these people together., On that hot, humid Friday, I had the feeling that we were burying more than John, Sheehan said. He was 47 years old. On this trip to Vietnam, a lot of my time was spent in search of the elusive character of John Paul Vann, the subject of Neil Sheehan's prize-winning history, A Bright Shining Lie.The book, some . He died believing he had won his war.. I set out to write a normal-length book in a few years time, but Vann turned out to be the most extraordinarily complicated man I ever met, Mr. Sheehan, 81, said from his Washington home. By the time he died in 1972, Vann had embraced the follies he once decried. Vann had dodged a huge bullet. By that time, too, John Paul Vann was back in Vietnam, heading a civilian pacification program. This page was last edited on 28 September 2022, at 11:11. He was an early proponent of the war, believing that American policies in South Vietnam were the main thing blocking the Communist drive to control all of Southeast Asia. [3] They had five children.[4]. Born in Holyoke, Mass., in 1936, Sheehan grew up in an era when Americans believed in their soldiers and their wars. As U.S. forces started to draw down in Vietnam, Vann saw an opportunity to redeem his aborted military career through an alternate path, which was to replace McCown as the IV CTZ senior adviser when McCowns tour ended in May 1971. A BRIGHT SHINING LIE: JOHN PAUL VANN AND AMERICA IN VIETNAM by Neil Sheehan New York: Random House 861 pp. In retrospect, Neil was actually kind to my father and didnt plumb the depths of what was there. He certainly never took the feelings of his wife, Mary Jane, into consideration. History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. He would have to take risks that other men were unwilling to take, because he would have to defeat the system in order to scale it., The ambiguities of Vanns character often perplexed Sheehan as he was chiseling away at the complex individual who was the center of his book. If Kontum fell, Pleiku would go with it. He was critical of the U.S. military command, especially under William Westmoreland and its inability to adapt to the fact that it was facing a popular guerrilla movement while backing a corrupt regime. As author Neil Sheehan described the funeral, it was like an extraordinary class reunion. The depths of Vanns sexual compulsions are thoroughly examined in A Bright Shining Lie, and they were overwhelming. Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, a bright and idealistic Virginia native whose commitment to South Vietnam's survival drove him to pathological extremes, learned this the hard way during his stint as an adviser to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) before the United States had officially committed its own forces there. A half-century later, the hurt Vann caused the family lingers. Vann's mother married Aaron Frank Vann, and Vann took his stepfather's surname; Vann had three half-siblings, from Aaron and Myrtle: Dorothy Lee, Aaron Frank, Jr., and Eugene Wallace. The birds-eye view of the high-profile crowd gave him his opening line: It was a funeral to which they all came., I was watching all these important people coming in one after another, like a class reunion, Mr. Sheehan told me. We were burying a whole era of boundless self-confidence. It took Sheehan 16 years--longer than the war itself--and 385 interviews to unravel this complicated character and the war he took part in. The ambassador and the commanding general in South Vietnam were telling the Kennedy Administration that everything was going well and that the war was being won., Vann believed then and continued to believe that the war could be won if fought with sound tactics and strategy, Sheehan recalls. Mr. Sheehan took a leave from The Times to write his book, but he never returned. It makes it sound like something very strange. John Paul helped coordinate Cao's unit, the 7th division, one of the most successful South Vietnamese forces. Neil dug up a lot more and unfortunately, its all true, John Allen Vann said. Now I realize we were wasting our time., Such turnabouts in opinion make Sheehan all the more convinced that Vann was lucky to die when he did. I am particularly interested in what became of his mistresses, Lee and Annie, and his daughter Thuy Vann. After North Vietnamese troops marched into Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in 1975, Chau was put to . The Communist North Vietnamese, acting through their Viet Cong proxies in the South, were wreaking havoc among the populace outside of Saigon. [2], Vann married Mary Jane Allen of Rochester, New York in October 1945, at the age of 21. Confident to the point of arrogance, John Paul Vann had an unbridled sexual appetite that led to the charge of statutory rape that would keep him from attaining the generals status he coveted so dearly, Sheehan writes. [1], Neil Sheehan wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnam history and biography of Vann, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, in which Sheehan also examines two of Vann's alleged career-stunting incidents involving morals charges during his service in West Germany and at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and how these possibly affected Vann's future actions and resulting career path both in and after Vietnam. Sheehan, who makes his home in Washington now, is 52 and silver-haired. Yet his victory at Kontumencompassing up to 40,000 North Vietnamese casualtieswas largely predicated not on guerilla finesse or a mature ARVN but rather . of 1 John Vann was my friend, I had known him in those three years I'd been in Vietnam and I'd see him periodically afterwards. But they're good people and they can win a war if someone shows them how." John Allen avoids contact with his sister and one of his brothers. He graduated from its high school in 1941, and from its junior college program in 1943. We have one year's experience twelve times over. (Army Chief-of-Staff) William Westmoreland was chief pallbearer. He died believing he had won his war. So too, will Neil Sheehan. On June 16, the President met with members of the Vann family at the White House where he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to Mr. Vann. Mr. Sheehan found himself standing in the back of the chapel. As soon as he left the service in 1962, he went full time with UPI. He attempted to draw public attention to the problems through press contacts such as New York Times reporter David Halberstam, directing much of his ire towards MACV commander General Paul D. Harkins. Weyand, who had served as an intelligence officer in the China-Burma-India Theater in World War II, valued unconventional thinkers. The best weapon for killing would be a knife, but Im afraid we cant do it that way. We were burying what Henry Luce called the American Century., At home that night, Sheehan wrote out a memo of this uncanny funeral. The more the thought about the implications of what had transpired that afternoon, the more excited I got. As he pondered the man who had fought the war as fiercely as he came to doubt it, he recalled, It struck me that John did sum up in his life and his character and his experience there our venture in Vietnam.. Has anyone managed to find anything about what became of them. Like his fellow print correspondents, Sheehan soon came to rely on Lt. Col. Vann, a military adviser to the South Vietnamese who fast established himself as an accessible source. He died in a helicopter crash in 1972 at 47 years old. In June 1942, Frank Vann officially adopted John. The discussion was aired on C-SPAN in five 30-minute segments and was the basis for the later C-SPAN show Booknotes. ", "We don't have twelve years' experience in Vietnam. Dzu actually spent more time with Vann than he did with Maj. Gen. Hal McCown, who was Dzus official senior adviser in the IV CTZ. In May 1967 OCO was replaced with Civilian Operations and Revolutionary Development Support under the military chain of command. Vietnam Questions (NSSM-1) . The worst is an airplane. Assigned to Fort Benning, he undertook paratroop training. By late 1961 and early 1962, the Kennedy administration started to focus its attention on the conflict in South Vietnam. 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