A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (Pulitzer Prize Winn [Paperback]

25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION. One of the most acclaimed books of our time—the definitive Vietnam War exposé.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

When he came to Vietnam in 1962, Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann was the one clear-sighted participant in an enterprise riddled with arrogance and self-deception, a charismatic soldier who put his life and career on the line in an attempt to convince his superiors that the war should be fought another way. By the time he died in 1972, Vann had embraced the follies he once decried. He died believing that the war had been won.

In this magisterial book, a monument of history and biography that was awarded the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, a renowned journalist tells the story of John Vann— the one irreplaceable American in Vietnam —and of the tragedy that destroyed a country and squandered so much of America's young manhood and resources.

Masterly. . . . One of the few brilliant histories of the American entanglement in Vietnam. --The New York Times

A brilliant work of enormous substance and ambition. In telling one man's story [A Bright Shining Lie] sets out to define the fatal contradictions that lost America the war in Vietnam. It belongs to the same order of merit asDispatches,The Best and the Brightest, andFire in the Lake. --Robert Stone,Washington Post Book World

A compelling, graphic, and deeply sensitive biography [and] one of the few brilliant histories of the American enthanglement in Vietnam. . . . Sheehan's skillful weaving of anecdote and history, of personal memoir and psychological profile, give the book the sense of having been written by a novelist, journalist, and scholar all rolled up into one. --David Shipler,The New York Times

If there is one book that catpures the Vietnam War in the sheer Homeric scl–