a055  0529  19 Dec 88
BC-WKD--Vann, ADV 30-01,0739
$Adv 30-01
For Release Weekend Editions, Dec 30-Jan 1 and Thereafter
Books and Authors: A Study of Futility
By MORT ROSENBLUM
AP Special Correspondent
    PARIS (AP) - ''A Bright Shining Lie,'' Neil Sheehan's profile of Lt.
Col. John Paul Vann and his war in Vietnam, may turn out to be an
enduring handbook for powers bent on foreign adventures.
    The National Book Award in nonfiction, conferred on the author Nov.
29, recognized literary merit and careful research. However, the book
is more than a well-written biography. It is a study of futility on a
world scale.
    Vann, a dedicated career officer, spoke out early in the war against
the brutality and ineffectiveness of U.S. strategy in Southeast Asia.
He learned at the battle of Ap Bac in 1962 how hard it was to kill a
man dug into a hole if that man was determined to stay there until
his enemy ran out of bullets and will.
    Sheehan, at the time United Press International's Saigon bureau
chief, discovered it was scarcely easier for reporters to get across
that simple reality in the face of prevailing wisdom back home.
    A decade of escalating technology, rising troop numbers and a
burgeoning U.S. commitment did not change those basic lessons. But
the elusive light at the end of the tunnel captivated even Vann. 
    In 1972, a civilian with the rank of major general and head of an
uphill program to win hearts and minds, Vann died still fighting a
war he thought he might win. He was director of the government's
Civilian Development Program and was killed in a helicopter crash
returning from battlefield inspection.
    Sheehan, who later reported for the New York Times and who helped
report on the Pentagon Papers in 1971, spent 16 years shifting the
evidence and then reciting facts so readers in a calmer time could
draw clear conclusions.
    ''We had also, to all the visitors who came over there, been one of
the bright shining lies,'' Vann remarked to a U.S. army historian in
mid-1963. Sheehan used those words as a frontispiece.
    While the book is a finely etched portrait of a complex zealot, it
also catalogs the false assumptions, self-delusions and
miscalculations that widened a hopeless war.
    Initial policy was influenced by Gen. Edward Lansdale, sent to
Vietnam in the 1950s after thwarting communist insurgency in the
Philippines. Sheehan wrote:
    ''Men who succeed at an enterprise of great moment often tie a snare
for themselves by assuming that they have discovered some universal
truth. Lansdale assumed, as much as his superiors did, that his
experience in the Philippines applied to Vietnam. It did not.''
    Vann, as a young adviser, watched ragtag guerrillas humiliate large
U.S.-backed forces. He could not convince superiors that South
Vietnam's unmotivated army was in no shape to defeat the Viet Cong.
As a political analyst, he argued in vain that corrupt, autocratic
leaders could not win over disaffected peasants, however much
material and moral support they got from Washington.
    And, toward the end, after the Tet Offensive shook U.S. resolve, he
could not persuade Richard Nixon to hold out, to understand that
North Vietnamese regulars were foreigners just like the Americans.
    Vann was anguished over the Americans' ''blind and destructive''
policy that sought change but clung to their image of themselves as a
people who championed self-determination.
    Americans waded into a bloody civil war, he said, but refused to be
involved overtly in bringing about a government that responded to a
majority of its people.
    Vann wrote, as Sheehan noted, ''It is a scathing indictment of our
political awareness that we have sat idly by while many patriotic and
non-Communist Vietnamese were literally forced to ally themselves
with a Communist-dominated movement in the belief that it was their
only chance to secure a better government.''
    Analysts find parallels in Latin America and Africa where U.S.
operatives seek to influence events without reference to the national
currents behind them.
    In 800 pages of lively prose, Sheehan never outlines in concrete
terms the underlying message, but even the casual reader sees it:
Exported ideology fares badly against a nationalist cause.
    ---
    EDITOR'S NOTE: Mort Rosenblum, an AP correspondent since 1967, was
covering Vietnam when John Paul Vann died.
    End Adv for Weekend Editions, Dec 30-Jan 1 and Thereafter
    
 
AP-NY-12-19-88 0815EST
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