Joseph Heller: Catch-22 (1961) David Halberstam: The Best and the Brightest (1972) Neil Sheehan: A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988) Dispatches by Michael Herr is available in paperback from Picador (£9.99).
"Neil Sheehan's 'A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam' is the book I have just finished.
Neil Sheehan, the New York Times reporter who helped him publish the Pentagon papers, portrays him in "A Bright Shining Lie" as a competitive over-achiever with a fondness for fast driving and attractive women.
Students of America's involvement in Vietnam can refer to a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Neil Sheehan, published nearly a quarter of a century ago, "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam".
As Neil Sheehan's masterpiece "A Bright Shining Lie" shows, it was a war of Vietnamese nationalism, and the French and American interventions were seen by most Vietnamese as last stands of colonialism rather than as Cold War imperatives.
Writers like Tim O'Brien ("The Things They Carried"), Neil Sheehan ("A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam") and many others began to look more deeply into the war and the men who made and fought it.
Nagl, in his book, portrays Colonel Vann -- the protagonist of Neil Sheehan's Pulitzer-Prize-winning book "A Bright Shining Lie" -- as a clear-eyed officer who saw what was wrong and had the courage to say it out loud.
In all these ways, he reminds me and other journalists (though it's a comparison that McMaster quickly rejects) of John Paul Vann, the Vietnam-era colonel who was killed, in 1972, still thinking victory was possible, and who became the central figure in Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie".
One problem with any heist is what to do with the loot, and it was to Neil Sheehan — then a correspondent for the Times, and later the author of "A Bright Shining Lie" (1988), one of the indispensable books on Vietnam — that Ellsberg wisely went.
It is set in an America that is not so much a bright, shining lie as a blunt, bruising truth, inhabited by people who are pathologically honest, both in their opinions of others and about their own crippling lack of self-esteem.
