The End of a Village

Jonathan Schell published “The Village of Ben Suc” in the July 15, 1967, issue of The New Yorker when he was twenty-three years old. (That same year the article came out as a book, published by Knopf.) I’d been Schell’s classmate and friend since we were very young, and in 1967 I had thought we were both still more or less boys, figuring things out. When I read his article I realized that Schell had mysteriously and secretly grown up. To my amazement, he’d somehow figured out how to express his intense and passionate outlook on the world through the cool and simple sentences of a factual article about a military campaign, and I could even see his characteristic sense of the absurd glinting out from behind the grimly serious story that he told.

Indeed, the essential features of his sensibility were all there in the unselfconscious pages of his first published work: a sort of tranquil respect for all living things; a steadiness of moral vision; an unblinking and almost semihumorous awareness of the ridiculousness in what people thought and said; and all the same, a warmth and affection that were extended even toward individuals whose actions he couldn’t accept; and underlying everything else, an unmistakable kindness and gentleness of spirit. And as it turned out, his article was the beginning of his speculation on the subject to which he devoted his life: human destructiveness—the apparently unquenchable madness that drives people to kill each other—with a particular focus on the citizens of the United States.

It’s quite a terrible thing to expose the crimes of one’s own tribe. A deep part of our nature cries out against doing that. And the United States at the time he published the article was not the cynical nation that it was about to become and has fully become today. On the contrary, I think most Americans at that moment had a very idealistic belief in the basic goodness of their country, their government, and most particularly their military establishment, which was still basically seen in the glowing light of its victorious and apparently honorable role in World War II. Schell began his career as a writer by presenting a sour, disillusioning image of the US military forces in action, and some people never forgave him for it.

Even as he was growing up, Schell had always been open to the attraction of what people in the 1950s called “different cultures.” He was drawn to the ideas of Zen Buddhism when he was fifteen years old, and as he got a bit older he was inspired by his older brother, Orville, to specialize in East Asian history as an undergraduate. (Orville ultimately became one of his generation’s most influential American writers and thinkers on the subject of China, which he has written about in these pages for the last twenty-five years.) Immediately after he graduated from college in 1965, Schell went to Tokyo to study Japanese, and during the year and a half he spent in Japan the American presence in Vietnam grew from fewer than 100,000 soldiers to more than 300,000, and he eventually decided that on his way home to the United States he would stop off in Vietnam to see for himself what was happening there. In the early days of the war—and these were for the United States the early days of the war—the American military was not particularly paranoid about what the press might write, and Schell was able to gain remarkable access to people and places using only his college newspaper’s press card.

It was natural that Schell would submit what he wrote to The New Yorker. He and I had both grown up on a steady diet of The New Yorker, where my father was the editor-in-chief. From an early age we absorbed countless factual articles about far-flung subjects, such as the techniques involved in the cultivation of oranges or the customs of herdsmen in Uganda, as well as the more abstract and thought-provoking pieces by writers including James Baldwin and Hannah Arendt.

While we were reading New Yorker articles, President Lyndon Johnson was changing his mind back and forth, as we now know, about whether he ought to involve the United States in a full-scale war in Vietnam. In 1965 and 1966 he decisively committed American forces to the fight.

Obviously Lyndon Johnson was not an original thinker. He naturally accepted the dogmas of his time and place. And very few Americans in positions of power at that time questioned the rather elaborate theoretical structures of thought according to which the United States was threatened in every corner of the planet by a frighteningly powerful and implacable foe, World Communism, whose clear intention was to devour the entire globe piece by piece until it finally swallowed up Washington and New York. The growing conflict between the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists did not prevent the philosophers of American strategy from theorizing that if any country were to “fall” to Communism, Communism as a whole would grow stronger, America’s will to fight it would be doubted by friends and enemies alike, and countries geographically close to the “fallen” country would fall themselves.

Vietnam had been part of the French empire. Ho Chi Minh and his Marxist-Leninist anticolonial forces had defeated the French, but the military equation that had obtained after that triumph nevertheless obliged the winning side to accept a compromise victory. Vietnam was split in half. Ho and his colleagues ruled over North Vietnam, while a strange and chaotic collection of anti-Communist figures, with the United States in the background, attempted to create a nation, or the appearance of a nation, out of South Vietnam. Meanwhile Ho’s revolutionary forces carried on with the struggle to achieve their ultimate goal—a unified country under their leadership—and the revolutionary guerrilla forces were indeed winning the support of the peasant population in a growing proportion of the South. And this was precisely the moment when Schell arrived in Vietnam.

Schell decided not to write in his article about Lyndon Johnson and Ho Chi Minh and whatever they might have believed or felt. He wrote exclusively about what he saw in and around a single military operation centered on a single village, the village of Ben Suc, which once had had a population of around 3,500. It turned out that Schell had a remarkable affinity for telling his tale in a quiet, deliberate, orderly manner that fit perfectly into the pages of The New Yorker of that era, patiently laying down one fact after another, without drawing any particular attention to himself or to what it felt like to report the story, without making any obvious attempt to attract or charm his readers or grab them by the throat, and without pandering to whatever depraved interest they might happen to have had in irrelevant but lurid material appealing to their sadistic or prurient instincts.

And yet despite the calm and gentle surface of his prose, the story he told his readers in “The Village of Ben Suc” was grotesque, though perhaps the grace and lucidity of his sentences made its impact particularly shocking. Ben Suc was in an area that the Americans believed to be dominated by the revolutionary guerrilla forces, and so the American soldiers understandably saw everyone who lived in the area as a possible threat, but there were no reliable techniques available to the soldiers for distinguishing those in the area who might be trying to kill them from those who simply happened to live there. It was rumored and believed that the enemy guerrillas wore black clothing. That was often true, but it was also the typical clothing of a great number of Vietnamese peasants.

The American operation in Ben Suc killed perhaps twenty-five people, maybe several more; it was very hard to say. But in any case, apart from those who died, all the people who lived in Ben Suc at that time—they were mostly women, children, and the elderly, because many of the men were fighting in the war—were forced out of their homes and their land by the American soldiers, who then proceeded to drench the grass roofs of their houses with gas and light them on fire. Finally the Americans crushed all the buildings with bulldozers, and then the entire area—buildings, fields, and trees—was bombed to rubble, to nothingness.

Schell didn’t write extensively about the technicalities of the military operation. He wrote about the peasants who were removed from the village and the American soldiers who removed them. When describing the villagers, he wrote with a sort of delicate, restrained compassion, without pretending to understand their suffering or their thoughts any more than he did. When he described the American soldiers and officers he met, he was not at all unsympathetic to them. Of course there are certain writers who clearly despise their fellow countrymen. (Thomas Bernhard comes to mind.) But Schell was not one of them. He generally seemed to like the military men he encountered. It’s just that what they were doing was appalling.

Plucked from the farms, small towns, and slums where they had lived in the United States, and where up until a few months earlier they had worked in factories or barns or shops or offices, packing shirts in boxes or selling greeting cards to familiar customers, the draftees and even the officers of the American military had awakened to find that they’d been dropped down into a land that for them was alien, strange, and actually uncanny, where they were surrounded by people whose words, gestures, and expressions they couldn’t interpret. These American soldiers were not malevolent or vicious. At least as Schell met them in 1966, they didn’t really seem terribly different from the fresh-faced, smiling, gum-chewing, candy-distributing American GIs who were greeted as liberators by people in many countries at the end of World War II.

They certainly composed an army much less deliberately cruel, much less motivated by hatred, than many we all know about. They were fairly nice young men. The problem was only that they knew basically nothing about the place to which they’d been sent, they had no idea why they were there, and they didn’t really know what they were supposed to do there; they had no idea what sort of danger these Vietnamese peasants could possibly pose to their own American families back home; they had no idea what their “enemy” was fighting for; and they had no idea why they were supposed to kill certain Vietnamese peasants but not others, and what exactly it was about those they were assigned to kill that made them worthy of death.

To call the American soldiers racist would not be exactly inaccurate, but the more important fact was that they were situated inside an enormous multibillion-dollar operation that was entirely based on the unquestioned assumption that the Vietnamese peasants weren’t very bright and could be easily manipulated. That wasn’t true. So the American soldiers were confused. Schell clearly portrays the early signs of the frustration and rage to which their confusion led in the next couple of years, resulting ultimately in the shooting of American officers by their own men and the deliberate, crazed massacres of entire peasant villages by out-of-control American troops.

Roughly speaking, the first half of Schell’s book shows that indeed the American military, equipped with well-worked-out principles of military organization and brilliantly constructed machines for transporting people and for blowing things up, did a very good job of accomplishing its basic military objective, which was to remove the village of Ben Suc from the face of the earth so that it could not be used by the enemy as a base or refuge. It’s in the second half of the book that we learn how bad a job the Americans did when called upon to answer the question inevitably posed by their successful destruction of the village, namely: What were they going to do with all the people who had lived there? And beyond that, how were they going to deal with the villagers in a way that would actually please them, that would earn their loyalty and support, that would win over, in the phrase of the time, their “hearts and minds”? How could they persuade the villagers, in other words, that the people who had just destroyed their village and killed their family members were in fact their friends? Because this was the ultimate objective of the American invasion of Vietnam.

The American establishment in Washington and the soldiers on the ground both contrived in a way to be oblivious to the fact, to forget the fact, that people generally don’t like to be ruled by foreigners, and that to persuade people who’ve been invaded and occupied by a foreign army to feel a loyalty to that army, to support that army, to risk their lives and die for that army—well, that couldn’t be anything other than a very hard trick to pull off. All the same, a great many of those who were in charge of the American side of the war did have at least a vague understanding that without winning those hearts and minds they couldn’t win the war.

And in Schell’s description of the miserably third-rate attempt of the American soldiers to construct a temporary camp for the villagers in the days after their village had been obliterated, we can see with perfect clarity why the Americans were destined to lose the war, why the Communist forces would inevitably one day march into Saigon and rename it Ho Chi Minh City. In attempting to build this supposedly temporary camp for the villagers, the soldiers and officers of the American army behaved the way unmotivated people with lousy jobs do in any mediocre, low-morale office in any mediocre, low-morale business back home. They did the minimum required. But that wasn’t enough to win over many hearts or minds.

The Vietnamese revolutionaries were fighting for their own country, for their own families. The Americans were not. They didn’t know what they were fighting for. They did what they were told to do, and as Schell shows almost poignantly, they pretended to one another, and they pretended to themselves, that they were doing a pretty good job. The only ones who weren’t fooled were the Vietnamese. They weren’t fooled at all.

In other words, Schell’s book could have been the crystal ball that led American policymakers to realize that quasi-imperial American interventions of this type could not succeed in the contemporary world, and if the policymakers had read Schell’s book and studied it carefully, who knows, maybe a million or more Vietnamese lives could have been saved, along with the lives of 50,000 American soldiers, along with countless lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. Anyway, the policymakers who read the book—and of course there would have been a few who did—apparently didn’t take the time to think through its pretty obvious implications.

One of the writers who most influenced Schell throughout his life was Hannah Arendt. And four years before the publication of his article on the village of Ben Suc, Schell had been exposed to an alarming four-word expression that Arendt had first introduced to the world in the pages of The New Yorker: “the banality of evil.” She used this phrase in the course of explaining that the extermination of six million European Jews had been carried out by a bureaucratic organization that operated more or less in the manner of any typical, ordinary industrial enterprise—and that this organization’s many thousands of employees were not a group of crazed fanatics whose principal motivation was a loathing of Jews but rather a group of fairly typical humans obediently carrying out the tasks assigned to them by their bosses.

The disturbing implication of this was that monstrous crimes could be perpetrated by people who did not necessarily, in their thoughts, speech, or demeanor, appear to be evil. And this raised deep questions about the much more popular way of looking at the world, namely that there are good individuals and bad individuals, good groups and bad groups—and that the world would be a lovely place if only all the bad individuals and all the bad groups could be stopped, contained, or killed. If one accepts the idea that the ugliest of crimes can be perpetrated by people who aren’t obviously ugly criminals, then the possibility seems to arise that even reasonably nice people might at times be involved in evil.

And without mentioning Arendt’s thoughts or getting into any philosophical speculation, this is precisely what Schell shows us in his description of the American soldiers in The Village of Ben Suc. At least until relatively recently, most Americans have liked to think of themselves as well meaning, friendly, basically decent people. That wasn’t an entirely false belief in 1966, and it’s not even entirely false now. But reading this book today, over half a century after it was written, over half a century since the village of Ben Suc was obliterated, and over ten years since Schell’s death, I feel Schell’s steady, questioning eye still staring at all the innocent people maimed and killed around the world by the possibly overconfident friendly Americans.

This essay appears, in somewhat different form, as the introduction to a new edition of Jonathan Schell’s The Village of Ben Suc, to be published by New York Review Books in November.