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

1 " Prevost was an imaginative gladiator of the air. He persuaded Vann to give him a pair of the new lightweight Armalite rifles, officially designated the AR-15 and later to be designated the M-16 when the Armalite was adopted as the standard U.S. infantry rifle. The Army was experimenting with the weapon and had issued Armalites to a company of 7th Division troops to see how the soldiers liked it and how well it worked on guerrillas. (The Armalite had a selector button for full or semiautomatic fire and shot a much smaller bullet at a much higher velocity than the older .30 caliber M-1 rifle. The high velocity caused the small bullet to inflict ugly wounds when it did not kill.) Prevost strapped the pair of Armalites to the support struts under the wings of the L-19 and invented a contrivance of wire that enabled him to pull the triggers from the cockpit to strafe guerrillas he sighted. He bombed the Viet Cong by tossing hand grenades out the windows. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

2 " Lansdale was a victim in Vietnam of his success in the Phillipines. Men who succeed at an enterprise of great moment often tie a snare for themselves by assuming that they have discovered some universal truth. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

3 " Patton had been a reflective man, an extraordinarily well-read student of wars and military leaders, ancient and modern, with a curiosity about his war to match his energy. No detail had been too minor or too dull for him, nor any task too humble. Everything from infantry squad tactics to tank armor plate and chassis and engines had interested him. To keep his mind occupied while he was driving through a countryside, he would study the terrain and imagine how he might attack this hill or defend that ridge. He would stop at an infantry position and look down the barrel of a machine gun to see whether the weapon was properly sited to kill counterattacking Germans. If it was not, he would give the officers and men a lesson in how to emplace the gun. He had been a military tailor’s delight of creased cloth and shined leather, and he had worn an ivory-handled pistol too because he thought he was a cavalier who needed these trappings for panache. But if he came upon a truck stuck in the mud with soldiers shirking in the back, he would jump from his jeep, berate the men for their laziness, and then help them push their truck free and move them forward again to battle. By dint of such lesson and example, Patton had formed his Third Army into his ideal of a fighting force. In the process he had come to understand the capabilities of his troops and he had become more knowledgeable about the German enemy than any other Allied general on the Western Front. Patton had been able to command with certainty, overcoming the mistakes that are inevitable in the practice of the deadly art as well as personal eccentricities and public gaffes that would have ruined a lesser general, because he had always stayed in touch with the realities of his war. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

4 " Vann had a practiced eye for loneliness. He walked over to her and said that she was pretty and complimented her on her clothes. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

5 " When Gene Crutchfield brought his troubled friend to Hopkins in 1938, Hopkins was twenty-four years old and in charge of LeKies Memorial, the Methodist church in the Atlantic City neighborhood. He had taken over the parish the year before and wore a mustache to try to make himself look older. It complemented his horn-rimmed glasses and added a bit of distinction to an otherwise unimpressive medium height and build. Hopkins’s father and grandfather had been Methodist ministers, but tradition was not the reason he had dropped out of law school and entered the ministry. He had been attracted by the ideas then being promoted within the Methodist Church in Virginia. They were ideas of the kind that are now taken for granted in American life—nutrition and welfare support for dependent children; free medical care for the impoverished and the aged; the right of workers to organize a union, to receive a minimum wage, to strike; interracial cooperation. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

6 " Cao reveled in the acclaim and the prospect of a general’s stars. “I kill fifty Viet Cong today,” he would announce to reporters coming to the command post. He began to learn the public relations game perhaps too well. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

7 " Cao sent the battalions chasing long-gone foxes because he wanted to give the presidential palace the impression he was on the alert. Afterward he would order the battalion back to its base to “rest” instead of returning it to the training center. Training his men for combat was not one of Cao’s priorities. He pretended they were already well trained. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

8 " Beneath Ba’s bravado, he was a conservative man. He did not lack courage. Neither was he a professional risk-taker like Vann. He had been an officer in a colonial army that had lost its war. He was fighting this second war for the Tory regime of his class. He was doing precisely what could be expected of a man who had grown up in a system where, when in doubt, the best thing to do was to do nothing. He was stalling. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

9 " Lansdale became the Agency’s expert on guerrilla warfare and countersubversion. He also acquired something more important in government than recognized expertise: a mystique, a reputation for being able to perform miracles. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

10 " President Kennedy would have been better served if he had remembered from his days as a junior officer in the Navy that the closer one gets to a fight, the more one learns of its essence. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

11 " Inflation was held to between 50 and 60 percent a year, mainly by more than doubling the commodity imports AID financed for the South Vietnamese economy ($ 650 million in 1966) and by shipping millions of tons of American rice to a country that had been able to export rice as recently as 1964. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

12 " Disaffection, once begun, acquires a momentum of its own, "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

13 " Yellow and brown men forgot in listening to the rhetoric of American presidents that the United States was a status quo power with a great capacity to rationalize arrangements that served its status quo interests. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

14 " Armies, like human beings, are not capable of what is not in them. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

15 " I had read the official reports. I knew by then that official reports were never enough to explain John Vann. There was always more to his story. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

16 " Magsaysay’s "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

17 " John Vann had learned a lot in two and a half years in the Army. The most important thing he had learned was that he was a different person in this uniform. When he had this uniform on he wasn’t little Johnny Vann or LeGay or what’s-his-name, the bastard kid of that good-timer Myrtle down at the end of the bar. He was Lieutenant John Paul Vann of the U.S. Army Air Corps. The Army and the war had freed him in a way that Ferrum could not do from that trash-filled house in Norfolk, and he wasn’t ever going back into it again. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

18 " When inspecting barracks he insisted that the coal stacked in the bins at the back slope down at a perfect angle. He would not tolerate a single piece out of line. This was one of several tricks he had put together over the years to train and discipline troops to perfection. He was not a martinet, despite his eccentricities. He had the good commander’s knack for instilling pride in his troops, and he showed them kindness and consideration. His rough side, a frankness to the point of brutality, was reserved for his equals and his superiors. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

19 " You never hurt me any more than I wanted to be hurt,” Vann said. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

20 " after his second and more satisfying career in the service of the American state, the furniture of Ellsworth Bunker’s mind had settled into place. It was impossible for him not to see Vietnam in the perspective of the Caribbean and Central America. "

― Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam