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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 our October 3 issue, Wallace Shawn writes
about Jonathan Schell’s 1967 investigation into the American army’s razing of Ben Suc village, some thirty miles outside of Saigon. Schell was only twenty-three years old and writing on spec, but he managed “to gain remarkable access to people and places using only his college newspaper’s press card.” The New Yorker published the exposé, and thus 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.” Below, alongside Shawn’s essay, we have compiled a selection of writing from the Review’s archives about Vietnam.
Jonathan Schell’s account of the US military’s destruction of the village of Ben Suc in Vietnam laid bare the problem with many American interventions.
“Most American soldiers landing in Vietnam in the 1960s were handed a ninety-three-page booklet called A Pocket Guide to Vietnam. Produced by the Department of Defense, it described how small, well-proportioned, dignified, and restrained Vietnamese people are, how the delicately-boned local women appear in their flowing national dress, how Vietnamese love tea, and don’t like slaps on the back, how they excel at cooking fish. Peasants labor in their paddies and at their traditional crafts, while upper-class men never work with their hands.” —August 20, 2012
“The war was fought, Schell answers, in order to show that America was willing and able to fight. Its importance, according to a memo prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962, lay in ‘the psychological impact that a firm position by the United States will have on the countries of the world….’” —June 24, 1976
“Among the many anomalies of the Vietnamese war none has been more startling than the experience of opening our newspapers last Christmas Day and reading the first of a series of dispatches by Harrison Salisbury, filed directly from Hanoi, describing life in North Vietnam and the effects of the US bombing. During the following ten weeks, the Hanoi government granted visas to half a dozen American journalists, including myself, to visit North Vietnam.”
I confess that when I went to Vietnam early in February I was looking for material damaging to the American interest and that I found it, though often by accident or in the process of being briefed by an official. Finding it is no job; the Americans do not dissemble what they are up to. They do not seem to feel the need, except through verbiage; e.g., napalm has become “Incinder-jell,” which makes it sound like Jello. And defoliants are referred to as weed-killers—something you use in your driveway. The resort to euphemism denotes, no doubt, a guilty conscience
or—the same thing nowadays—a twinge in the public-relations nerve. Yet what is most surprising to a new arrival in Saigon is the general unawareness, almost innocence, of how what “we” are doing could look to an outsider.
—April 20, 1967
“We can hardly avoid asking ourselves to what extent the American people bear responsibility for the savage American assault on a largely helpless rural population in Vietnam, still another atrocity in what Asians see as the “Vasco da Gama era” of world history. As for those of us who stood by in silence and apathy as this catastrophe slowly took shape over the past dozen years—on what page of history do we find our proper place?”
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