A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan Page B

leaping into Normandy on D-Day at the head of a battalion of paratroops. He summed up the prevailing attitude in a pep talk at the Seminary: “It isn’t much of a war, but it’s the only war we’ve got, so enjoy it.”
    Timmes was also reflecting more than the excitement of an adventure in his remark. These men were the regulars of an Army that had chafed for eight years under President Eisenhower’s strategy of “massive retaliation.” The mission of the Army had seemed reduced to occupying the radioactive rubble of Eastern Europe, Russia, and China after theAir Force and the Navy had won World War III by loosing their planes and missiles in a thermonuclear holocaust. The military budget had been apportioned accordingly. The Army had become a mendicant. Now the Army had a president in John Kennedy who was intent on making “the sword … an effective instrument of foreign policy,” in the words of his military mentor, the distinguished general Maxwell Taylor. Kennedy wanted a military establishment that would enable him to apply whatever level of force was necessary to have his way wherever the United States was challenged. He saw an expanded Army, revitalized with the latest in mobility and weapons, as the principal means of wielding the sword under his strategy of “flexible response.” Taylor had minted the term to contrast the apparent rationality of this approach with the irrationality of Eisenhower’s strategy of massive retaliation. The strategic concept was the logical application of Taylor’s doctrine of “limited war.” He had retired as chief of staff of the Army in 1959 to preach the doctrine in a much-praised book called
The Uncertain Trumpet
. Kennedy had adopted Taylor’s ideas enthusiastically, exploiting them during his 1960 campaign for the presidency. He had made the doctrine, with Taylor’s catchy name for it, the national strategy after his election. He had also appointed Taylor as his White House military advisor.
    The new American president and the men around him saw the guerrilla insurgency that Vann was determined to crush in the northern Delta as the most insidious form of challenge that the Communists had yet devised. Fidel Castro had come to power in Cuba with a guerrilla revolution, and similar insurrections were expected elsewhere throughout the so-called Third World—the poor countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It was for this reason that Kennedy had instructed the Army to use Vietnam as a laboratory to develop techniques of “counterin-surgency.” The Pentagon had composed an acronym for this mission of suppressing revolutions—COIN. The Soviet dictator of the day, Nikita Khrushchev, had announced the guerrilla war strategy to a Moscow conference of Communist parties in January 1961. Khrushchev had said that the Soviet Union would avoid an atomic war with the United States but would support “liberation wars and popular uprisings” in the poor nations of the Third World. The Chinese had vowed what appeared to be like intentions. Kennedy had condemned such revolutions as “wars of subversion, covert aggression.” The war in Vietnam was more than a test of the feasibility of Taylor’s doctrine of limited war, in which the Army had such a stake. Vietnam in 1962 was a test of whether the “Free World” or the “Communist World” would prevail.
    Americans of the early 1960s, paid little attention to the animositybetween the Soviet Union and China and to other cracks in the monolith they called “International Communism.” The enmity between Moscow and Peking had been evident and growing for quite a while. In the summer of 1960, Khrushchev had cut off all aid to China and withdrawn thousands of Soviet technicians working on development projects there. The implication of Yugoslavia’s break with Russia in 1948, that a nationalist movement could be led by native Communists, was not a matter to which Americans gave serious thought. Vann and the Americans of his