Bright Shining Lie?
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it was a trip to see the village mayor. I was tapped to go with our vehicle maintenance sergeant to see the village mayor – of the village just outside Lai Khe. This village supplied most of our Vietnamese workers.
The mayors house had a dirt floor, his wife chased chickens out of the house when we got there. The bathroom was a slit trench in the backyard. My understanding the major received a payment for each worker he supplied us with. Even with this it hit me how poor Vietnam was and how little our being there helped the people economically.
Years later while reading A Bright Shining Lie I remembered this visit and it struck me how correct at least parts of the book were.
The Book: A Bright Shining Lie:
John Paul Vann became an adviser to the Saigon regime in the early 1960s. He was an ardent critic of how the war was fought by the Saigon regime, which he viewed as corrupt and incompetent, and increasingly, on the part of the U.S. military. He was critical of the U.S. military command, especially under William Westmoreland and its inability to adapt to the fact that it was facing a popular guerrilla movement while backing a corrupt regime. He argued that many of the tactics employed (for example the Strategic Hamlet Program of relocation) further alienated the population and were counterproductive to U.S. objectives. He was often unable to influence the military command but used the Saigon press corps including Sheehan, David Halberstam and Malcolm Browne to disseminate his views.