Volume 54, Number 18 · November 22, 2007
The Unconscionable War
By Robert Stone
The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam
by Tom Bissell
Pantheon, 407 pp., $25.00
In 1989, Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie presented a brilliant weaving together of one American soldier's personal history and his country's fateful efforts in Vietnam. With great sensitivity and originality Sheehan demonstrated how the story of Colonel John Paul Vann's life may be read as a succession of events behind which the dragon shape of the Vietnam conflict could be discerned. Vann's influence on American press coverage in the early days of the fighting was extensive and complex. Sheehan, like a good novelist, subtly led readers to the insight at the heart of the tale—that Vann was indeed 'the personification of the American war,' a man with a way of turning his considerable gifts against himself. His life, with its weight of self-deception, egotism, and rash energy, uncannily fit the war that eventually consumed it.
Review, 3476 words
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