Read A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam for Free Online

never met one among the thousands of men who served with or under John who didn’t admire him. He educatedand inspired a whole wartime generation of Vietnamese and Americans—as our teacher, our colleague, our institutional memory, our hair-shirt, and our friend.”
    Komer was swept up by the occasion and by what he was saying. His voice rose into a high pitch it acquired whenever he felt great emotion. He spoke his words sharply and distinctly. He said it was fitting that Vann should be buried in Arlington.
    “For he was the highest type of professional soldier, whose last tour fulfilled his secret longing to be back in command of American troops. But John was more than a professional soldier. He understood well that firepower alone was not the answer to Vietnam’s travail.
    “Let us hope,” Komer said, trying to be positive even on this day, “that his real monument will be the free and peaceful South Vietnam for which he fought so well.
    “Yet whether or not this tragic conflict ends with that aim fulfilled, all of us who served with Vann will long remember him. He is not a man who will be easily forgotten. So we salute one of the authentic heroes of a grim and unpopular war, who gave all of himself to the cause he served, finally even his life. No, we shan’t forget you, John. You were the best we had to give.”
    Ellsberg, who had worked with Komer and had once been friendly with him, did not feel any friendship toward him today, even at Komer’s praise of the friend they had shared. He felt alienated from Komer and others in the chapel who still supported the war. “Yes,” he said to himself in an angry play on Komer’s last words, “he was the best we had to give away.”
    The chaplain said the concluding prayers and a benediction, and then the head usher announced: “Everyone please rise.” The assembly stood up. The organist began to play a hymn. The coffin was wheeled back down the aisle, this time preceded by the official pallbearers. They formed two lines of honor, one along each side of the green canvas archway leading out from the center door of the portico, for the coffin to pass through as it followed them from the chapel. The generals and the South Vietnamese Army colonel saluted and the civilians placed their right hands over their hearts when the coffin was lifted off the wheeled frame and placed on the caisson trimmed in black bunting and hitched to the six gray horses that had been waiting in the sun. The drum major raised his silver mace high into the air and brought it down sharply. The band struck up a march for the procession to the grave three-fifths of a mile away through the gate and down the cemetery road.
    The band led the way, playing the march that Mary Jane had requested for Vann because it had been his favorite. It was a tune of unbroken will, “The Colonel Bogie March” from the film
The Bridge on the River Kwai
. He had bought a record of the march after he had seen the movie and had never seemed to tire of listening to it. The honor guard, the color bearers, the pallbearers in two files, and the chaplain marched in sequence behind the band. Next came the horses drawing the caisson, followed by the family in black Cadillac limousines lent by an armaments and aerospace firm for which Vann had briefly worked as an executive in between his retirement from the Army and his return to Vietnam. Despite the heat and the distance, many in the assembly chose to walk behind the limousines out of respect for Vann rather than to ride in their own cars.
    They passed, most without noticing them, the monuments to the “splendid little war” with Spain in 1898 which had thrust the western frontier of the United States across the Pacific from San Francisco to Manila and inaugurated the American imperial age whose confident enthusiasm this gathering was symbolically laying to rest today. The first monument was the memorial to the 385 men killed in action in the whole of that war, less than