The New Yorker Radio Hour - A Rookie Reporter in Vietnam Captures the War’s Futility

Episode Date: July 25, 2017

In 1967, a rookie reporter’s eyewitness account of the futility of the Vietnam War shocked readers.     New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent. I think it would be interesting to really try to unravel what his ties. There's this sort of country city divide for their own convenient, and it's not clear where it goes next. From one world trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. We're presenting today a remarkable story that appeared in the New Yorker 50 years ago, the village of Ben-Suk, a first-hand account of the Vietnam War by Jonathan Schell. Inside the Chinook, many of the prisoners held their ears.

Up front on each side, a gunner wearing large earphones under a helmet scanned the countryside. The gunner's weapons pointed out. There was no guard inside the helicopter. A few of the prisoners, some bold and some just young, stood up and looked out the small portholes in the back of their seats. But the first time in their lives, they saw their lands spread below them like a map, as the American pilots had always seen it. The tiny houses in the villages, the green fields along the river pockmarked with blue water-filled bomb craters, some blackened by napalm. And the dark green jungles splotched with long lines of yellow craters from B-52 raids.

The trees around each crater spayed out in a star, like the orb of cracks or on a bullet hole in glass. When we talk about the Vietnam War, it still comes loaded with so many associations. It's the first war that America really lost. We talk about the atrocities committed by our soldiers at Milan elsewhere and the problem of nation building, which is still very much with us in today's wars. But early in 1967, when Jonathan Shell landed in Vietnam for the first time, so much of that was still in the future. Shell was a college graduate who'd spent a year in Japan and wanted to see

a little bit more of the world. He talked about his experience some 30 years later with a historian named Christian Apie. I had a ticket, around the world ticket, that permitted me to stop anywhere I wanted on the way back around the world. So I decided that I would go to Vietnam. And with the idea of trying to write something,

you know, I was the very definition of a pest, a graduate student who had no land, language there who had no knowledge and who vaguely thought he might like to write something. You know, just the definition of a nuisance. But I called up somebody that I'd met at Harvard called Francois Sully, who was a Frenchman and a reporter and was working for Newsweek at that time. And I called up the Newsweek office and lo and behold he was there invited me over. Anyway, Sully and Bernard Fall were just these two,

the bullion, life-loving Frenchmen, you know, brilliant journalists both. And just out of sheer high spirits, they sort of took me up. This ignorant graduate student who scarcely said a word to paper, and eventually they performed a kind of miracle, which was they used their connections. to persuade the military to give me a press pass on the somewhat deceptive basis

that I was there for the Harvard Crimson. So anyway, they got me this credential, an amazing gift from them. And then one day they called me up at my ratty hotel with lizards crawling on the ceiling and said, well, you know, something is going to, to happen. And it's all secret what it is, but you can go and see it if you want.

So, okay. So Jonathan Shell ended up a witness to Operation Cedar Falls, the largest ground operation of the Vietnam War. It brought overwhelming force to bear in stamping out Viet Cong control of an area known as the Iron Triangle. And a very spiffy major, who had, as I recall, a kind of an easel with a board on it, disclosed to us that what we were there for was Operation Cedar Falls. And so there was this great menu of things, I mean, these things that they were going to do, they're going to bulldoze this for us, go in here, attack this, do that, and the other. But one of the items on that list was the helicopter attack on the village of Ben-Suk.

So it occurred to me, when we got to that item on the list, I said, well, what's going to happen to the village after it's attacked and so on? He said, well, we're going to destroy it and move the people out, not a Mi-Lah, of course, but move the people out. And then what? I said, well, we're going to bulldoze it and bomb it. So I thought, okay, I'll just follow that particular story from start to finish. The New Yorker devoted the better part of an entire issue to Jonathan Shell's article, the village of Ben-Suk. Strings of nine and ten helicopters

with tapered bodies could be seen through the treetops, filing across the gray early morning sky like little schools of minnows. In the distance, the slow beat of the engines sounded soft and almost peaceful, but when they rushed past overhead,

the noise was fearful and deafening. By seven o'clock, 60 helicopters were perched in formation on the airstrip, with seven men assembled in a silent group beside each one. I do recall one little act of cowardice when they asked which helicopter would I like to be on, and many of the journalists were clamoring to be on the first helicopter or the second helicopter, and I was delighted to be on helicopter number 46.

It's okay with me to get there 10 seconds later. When I arrived at the helicopter assigned to me, number 4,000, 47, three engineers and three infantry men were already there, five of them standing or kneeling in the dust checking their weapons. One of them a sergeant was a small, wiry American Indian who spoke in short, clipped syllables. The sixth man, a stocky infantry man with blonde hair and a red face, who looked to be about 20 and was going to action for the first time, lay back against an earth embankment with his eyes closed, wearing an expression of boredom, as though he wanted to be able to. He was going to to put these wasted minutes of waiting to some good use by catching up on his sleep.

There was terrible heat, I remember. I was awful to say it, but somehow I just remember that I was on this constant search for soft drinks. This terrible, overwhelming heat, which I don't do well in. The Huey flies with its doors open, so the men who sat on the outside seats were perched right next to the drop. They held tightly to the ceiling. straps as the helicopter rolled and pitched through the sky like a ship plunging through a heavy sea. Below, the faces of scattered peasants were clearly visible as they looked from their water buffalo at the sudden ear-splitting incursion of 60 helicopters charging low over their fields.

So this combination of this terrific heat and, of course, the helmet and everything, and then this roller coastering that was going on made you, me physically sick. All at once, helicopter 47 landed, and from both sides of it, the men jumped out on the run into a freshly turned vegetable plot in the village of Ben-Suk, the first Vietnamese village that several of them had ever set foot in. The houses were unusually set apart by hedges and low trees

so that one house was only half visible from another, and difficult to see from the road. They were not unlike a wealthy American suburb in the logic of their layout. Three or four soldiers began to search the houses behind a nearby copse. Stepping through the doorway of one house with his rifle and firing position at his hip, a solidly built, six-foot-two Negro private came upon a young woman standing with a baby in one arm and a little girl of three or four holding her other hand.

The woman was barefoot and dressed in a white shirt and rolled up black trousers. A bandana held her long hair and a coil at the back of her head. She and her children intently watched each of the soldier's movements. In English, he asked, where's your husband? Without taking her eyes off the soldier, the woman said something in Vietnamese in an explanatory tone. The soldier looked around in the inside of the one-room house and pointing to his rifle asked, You have same same? The woman shrugged and said something else in Vietnamese.

The soldier shook his head and poked his hand into a basket of laundry on a table between him and the woman. she immediately took all the laundry out of the basket and shrugged again with a hint of impatience as though to say, it's just laundry. The soldier nodded and looked around, appearing unsure of what to do next in this situation. Then, on a peg on one wall, he spotted a pair of men's pants and a shirt hanging up to dry. Where's he? he asked, pointing to the clothes. The woman spoke in Vietnamese. The soldier took the damp clothing down and for some reason carried it outside.

where he laid it on the ground. After a minute, the private came back in with a bared machete at his side and a field radio on his back. Where's your husband, huh? He asked again. This time, the woman gave a long answer in a complaining tone

in which she pointed several times at the sky and several times at her children. The soldier looked at her blankly. What do I do with her? He called to his fellow soldiers outside. There was no answer. Turning back to the young woman who had not moved since his first entrance,

he said. Okay lady, you stay here and left the house. Well, I got along very well with the soldiers and their officers, and I like them very much. And you have to bear in mind that at that time there wasn't the sort of endemic suspicion that later grew up. And if you had a press pass in Vietnam, it was a free travel ticket all over the country. You could hitchhike rides on helicopters and transport planes wherever you wanted. It was a meal ticket. It was a hotel reservation anywhere.

And there was a fantastic, not only support, but freedom at that time, to see what you wanted to see. The sky, which had been overcast, began to show streaks of blue and a light wind stirred the trees. The bombing, the machine gunning from helicopters and shelling. and the rocket firing continued steadily. Suddenly a Vietnamese man on a bicycle appeared, pedaling rapidly along the road from the direction of the village. He was wearing the collarless, pajama-like black garment that is both the customary dress of the Vietnamese peasant

and the uniform of the National Liberation Front. And although he was riding away from the center of the village, a move forbidden by the voices in the helicopter, he had, it appeared, already run a long gauntlet of American soldiers without being stopped. But when he had ridden about 20 yards past the point where he first came into sight, there was a burst of machine gun fire from a copse 30 yards in front of him, joined immediately by a burst from a vegetable field to one side,

and he was hurled off his bicycle into a ditch, a yard from the road. The bicycle crashed into a side embankment. The Vietnamese in the ditch appeared to be about 20, and he lay on his side without moving, blood flowing from his face, which, with his eyes open, was half buried in the dirt at the bottom of the ditch. The two men, both companions of mine on number 47, stood still for a while with folded arms

and stared down at the dead man's face as though they were giving him a chance to say something. Then the engineer said, with a tone of finality, that's a VC for you. He's a VC all right, that's what they wear. He was leaving town. He had to have some reason. I didn't have preconceived ideas.

when I arrived in Vietnam, and my understanding of the war really came out of the shock of experience and initially seeing that on the ground and in the details it was not making sense. You see, at home, the reporting was conditioned by the story as it had been understood in Washington and in the United States. and therefore the American public was not acquainted with the fact that we were destroying villages and clearing the people out of there because that hadn't been considered a fact worthy of notice. At about 9 o'clock, people from the outlying areas of the village

began to appear on the road, walking toward the village center and bringing with them as many pieces of furniture, bicycles, pots, chickens, pigs, cows, ducks, and water buffalo as they could carry or hurt along. One woman carried a shoulder pole with her belongings balanced in a basket hanging on one end and a baby sitting in a basket on the other end.

This procession, like the appearance of the houses, made it plain that Ben Sook was a wealthy village. Most of the villagers wore clean, unpatched clothing. The children had rosy cheeks and stout limbs. The cows were fat and sleek, and a great number of pigs and chickens were left rooting and pecking in the deserted yards. At 3.45, the male captives between ages 15 and 45 were marked to the edge of the helicopter

pad, where they squatted in two rows with a guard at each end. They hid their faces in their arms as the Chinook double-rotor helicopter set down, blasting them with dust. The back end of the helicopter lowered to form a gangplank, leading to a dark, square opening. Their captive cards flapping around their necks, the prisoners ran, crouching low under the whirling blades into the dim interior. Immediately the gangplank drew up, and the fat-bent banana shape of the Chinook rose slowly from the field.

The women and children brave the gale to watch its rise, but appeared to lose interest in its flight long before it disappeared over the trees. It was as though their fathers, brothers, and sons had ceased to exist when they ran into the roaring helicopter. The whole thing, as I say, was, was a kind of superimposition of an alien and fictitious reality on the real situation of Vietnam. And so we would do something to somebody and then they would become that thing. I mean, starting with the fact that a VC could be identified by the fact that we had killed

it. If we attacked a population and maybe weren't killing them or we're going to destroy their village and move them onto a dusty field, then by definition, they were a hostile population. At least we were hostile to them, that was for sure. So when you have that kind of power, it's like a power of definition. Just beyond the border of the 50-yard demolition, a number of tiny huts still stood in a grove of tall trees slopping down to the rice fields along the river. The little girls appeared to be sisters, about nine and 12 years old. They were barefoot, or simple, short, beltless dresses and had their black hair and long braids. A few yards away from them,

a very old man and a woman watched us approach. When we arrived, no one seemed quite sure how to deal with the situation. Then the two little girls took charge. Speaking slowly and clearly and repeating everything several times, they informed a major who had attended six weeks of language school that their parents had been taken away in a truck and that they now wish to load their rice and furniture into a truck and go themselves. They laughed freely when the major failed at first to understand them. Without waiting for a response, they beckoned to us to follow them. One of the officers muttered, better watch it.

Could be a trap. But the others followed the little girls. Upon reaching one of the huts, the girls hoisted onto their shoulders, sacks of rice that I thought would surely crush them and pointed to things for us to carry. One of the almost full bags of rice was open at the top. The younger sister gave me a handful of straw indicating that I was to tie it closed. She watched me fumble for a minute, and then took the straw from my hands and expertly twisted it around the top of the bag in a way that made it secure.

They insisted on bringing a large jar full of rice that could be carried only when it was suspended by its wire handles from a pole, and there was a person at each end to man the pole. I took one end, and the sisters took the other. and we had just started toward the Jeep when the pole snapped and the jar fell without overturning on the ground. The little girls burst out laughing and it was a full 15 seconds

before the elder sister ran back for another pole. One of the officers said that he had found a rowboat and wanted to blow it up with a hand grenade. While he was performing this mission, the other Americans loaded the rice on the truck and hoisted up the girls and the aged couple who had fetched a few bundles themselves by this time. holding their sleeves over their mouths against the dust,

they set out down the road for Fulai. The officer who had gone to attend to the rowboat returned after an explosion had sounded from the woods and reported that, to his surprise, the hand grenade had blown only a six-inch hole in the bottom of the skiff. I can tell you one thing that happened when I went back in the summer of 67, that the village of Ben-Sook was coming out in the New Yorker, And they faxed the whole damn thing over to Vietnam,

and I was spewing out while I was there the second time. People were reading it and commenting to me. And they were pleased with it. And I met some of the people who were described in it, and they felt it was an accurate representation, and they were very happy with what I'd written because they felt it did accurately reflect what was going on there. Of course, back in the United States,

that same article was profoundly shocking to a lot of people. You know, one thing that struck me very powerfully was the capacity both for not so much the enlisted man, but for the officer corps and the press corps, to see things in terms of a story that they brought with them and not to see what was actually going on of the story. on the ground under their noses. At Fulai, truckloads of villagers from the north end of the triangle and from Ben-Suk continued to arrive

in front of the little row of huts in the huge field. On the first day, over a thousand people were brought in. When they climbed slowly down from the backs of the trucks, they had lost their appearance of healthy villagers and taken on the passive, dull-eyed, waiting expression of the uprooted. It was impossible to tell, whether the deadness and discouragement had actually replaced a spark of sullen pride in their expression and bearing, or whether it was just that any crowd of people were moved from the dignifying context of their homes

and places of labor, learning, and worship, and dropped, tired, and coated with dust in a bare field, would appear broken-spirited to an outsider. At the moment that the Ben-Suk villagers got off the trucks at Fulai, the military plan that had started with the attack on Ben-Suk, and had proceeded precisely on schedule, came to an end. I mean, what you could say about the village of Ben-Sukh is that the operation came off beautifully.

It worked exactly as planned. The helicopters flew into the village. They land there. They quickly quelled the resistance, moved the people out, destroyed the village. Mission accomplished. But to what end? Did that advance any goal

that the United States had in mind. No, it set us back. I mean, the more we won there, the more we lost. That was the paradox of Vietnam. So the more we'd win on the battlefield, and we did just about every day and just about every battle. The more we lost the political war, because the more helpless that society was

to the North and to the NLF. The demolition teams arrived in Ben Suke on a clear, warm day after the last boatload of animals had departed down the river for Fugong. G.I.'s moved down the narrow lanes into the sunny, quiet yards of the empty village, pouring gasoline on the grass roofs of the houses and setting them a fire with torches. Columns of black smoke boiled up briefly into the blue sky as the dry roofs and walls burned to the ground, exposing little indoor tableaus of charred tables and chairs, broken cups and bowls, and occasional bed and the ubiquitous bomb shelters.

Before the flames had died out in the spindly black frames of the houses, bulldozers came rolling through the copses of palms, uprooting the trees as they proceeded, lowering their scoops to scrape the pack mud foundations bare. When the bulldozers hit the heavy walls of the bomb shelters, they whined briefly at a higher pitch, but continued to press ahead unchecked. There were very few dwellings. and Ben Sucke to make a bulldozer pause. When the demolition teams withdrew,

they had flattened the village, but the original plan for the demolition had not yet run its course. Faithful to the initial design, Air Force jets sent their bombs down on the deserted ruins, scorching again the burn foundation of the houses, and pulverizing for a second time the heaps of rebel and hopes of collapsing tunnels too deep

and well hidden for the bulldozers to crush. As though, having once decided to destroy it. We were now bent on annihilating every possible indication that the village of Ben Suk had ever existed. The village of Ben Suk. It appeared in the New Yorker in July of 1967. Noah Aberback Katz read the excerpts from Jonathan Schell's article. Shell went on to a long career at the New Yorker and became a leading advocate for nuclear disarmament. He died in 2014. The interview that we heard was Shell talking to historian Christian Opi. They spoke in 1999, and the tape was provided to us in connection with LBJ's War,

an oral history produced by PRI. I'm David Remnick. And for today, that's it. Thanks for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed the show, and I hope you'll listen next week as well. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.