A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988) is a book by Neil Sheehan, a former New York Times reporter who covered the Vietnam War. It is about U.S. Army retired Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann and the United States involvement in the Vietnam War.
For this book, Sheehan was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1989 and a National Book Award in 1988. A film adaptation, A Bright Shining Lie, was released by HBO in 1...
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A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988) is a book by Neil Sheehan, a former New York Times reporter who covered the Vietnam War. It is about U.S. Army retired Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann and the United States involvement in the Vietnam War.
For this book, Sheehan was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1989 and a National Book Award in 1988. A film adaptation, A Bright Shining Lie, was 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...
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