"[last lines] John Paul Vann was America's warrior. He personified our good intentions, our arrogance, our courage, and ultimately our folly. He had fought to redeem the unredeemable, to salvage the doomed enterprise called South Vietnam. In death, he had triumphed over defeat while the rest of us are left to ask... "Why?""
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A_Bright_Shining_Lie