Neil Sheehan Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

He had scribbled a note in pencil giving Patton authority to assume command of the four American divisions in Tunisia the moment he landed there, and Patton had taken off again directly for the front. Eisenhower had followed up his note with a memorandum of instructions. Patton was not to keep ' for one instant' any officer who was not up to the mark. 'We cannot afford to throw away soldiers and equipment ... and effectiveness' out of unwillingness to injure 'the feelings of old friends,' Eisenhower had written. Ruthlessness of this kind toward acquaintances often required difficult moral courage, Eisenhower continued, but he expected Patton 'to be perfectly cold-blooded about it.' The first old acquaintance to go had been the general who had commanded at Kasserine, a man whom Eisenhower had rated, prior to the start of the serious shooting, as his best combat leader after Patton. This general had been shipped home to spend the rest of the war excercising his top-notch paper qualifications as an elevated drill instructor.

The monks fought back in a Vietnamese way. On the morning of June 11, 1963, a seventy-three-year-old monk named Quang Duc sat down in the middle of a Saigon intersection a few blocks from Ambassador Nolting's residence. He crossed his legs in the lotus position of meditation while another monk poured gasoline from a five-gallon plastic container over his shaven head, soaking his orange robe. The old monk's hands moved swiftly when he lifted them from his lap to strike the match, lighting his body into a symbol of anger and sacrifice and setting ablaze the tinder of resentment in the urban centers of the South ... A photograph of Quang Duc's suicide taken by Malcolm Browne, the Saigon bureau chief of the Associated Press, astonished the American public and international opinion and embarrassed the Kennedy administration.

Malcolm Browne managed to take a photograph of Arnett [AP's Peter Arnett] standing behind Halberstam for protection a moment later, just before another plainclothesman sneaked up behind Browne and smashed his camera with a rock. The rock did not damage the film inside. The Surete men backed off. They apparently had orders not use clubs, and they decided Halberstam was too much for them hand to hand. The uniformed police did not intervene

Lieutenant Calley, who herded many of his victims into an irrigation ditch and filled it with their corpses, was the only officer or soldier to be convicted of a crime. He was charged with personally killing 109 Vietnamese. A court-martial convicted him of the premeditated murder of at least twenty-two, including babies, and sentenced him to life in prison at hard labor. President Nixon intervened for him. Calley was confined for three years, most of the time under house arrest in his apartment at Fort Benning with visitation rights for a girlfriend.

The best nonfiction book on the war came out in 1988 by a former war journalist, Neil Sheehan. Titled A Bright Shining Lie,

Magsaysay’s

He had not felt any genuine grief until the moment he accepted the flag, because he had hardly known his father and knew even less about what his father had done.

The cockiness of this bantam did not put off Porter, a senior colonel of infantry, large-boned in build and white-haired at fifty-two, whose restrained manner tended to obscure his knowledge of his profession and the firmness of his own character.

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.

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.

There are Calleys in every army. What makes them dangerous is a set of circumstances in which their homicidal aberrations can run amok. The laws of war say that it is the responsibility of the highest leadership to do all in its power to prevent such circumstances from occurring.

The best nonfiction book on the war came out in 1988 by a former war journalist, Neil Sheehan. Titled A Bright Shining Lie, it told in hellish detail of endless American waste and failure. It told of intelligence ignored and wisdom cast aside. The book

Vann was vindicated when, on January 31, 1968, the Communists took advantage of Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year holiday, to launch a surprise offensive against installations in cities and towns throughout the country, penetrating even the U.S. Embassy compound in the middle of Saigon. The war-of-attrition strategy was discredited. Westmoreland was relieved as commanding general in Vietnam.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bowers had noticed on earlier operations that the ARVN noncoms, unlike their officers, seemed to welcome help and thought an American sergeant enough of a cut above them so that they could blame him if things went wrong.

To burn the helicopters would be another act of great psychological value, and the battalion commander did not want to surrender the opportunity lightly.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

This was an army that shared a confidence too in its weapons and in its combat skills. The world was a tactical map to these men. They were prepared to fight any enemy at any grid coordinate.

George Jacobson had disciplined himself during his twenty-four years in the Army to study the character and mindset of a superior in order to avoid futile clashes with idiosyncrasies and preconceptions.

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.