Tom Dispatch: Jonathan Schell. Seeing the Reality of the Vietnam War

50 Years Late. Forty six years ago, in January 1966, Jonathan Schell, a 23 year old not quite journalist, found himself at the farming village of Ben Suc, 30 miles from the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon. It had long been supportive of the Vietcong. Now, in what was dubbed Operation Cedar Falls, the US military, with Schell in tow, launched an operation to solve that problem. The "solution" was typical of how Americans fought the Vietnam War. All the village's 3,500 inhabitants were to be removed to a squalid refugee camp, and Ben Suc itself simply obliterated, every trace of the place for all time. Shell's remarkable and remarkably blunt observations on this grim operation were, no less remarkably, published in the New Yorker magazine, and then as a book, causing a stir in a country where anti war sentiment was growing fast. In 1967, Schell returned to Vietnam, and spent weeks in the northern part of the country watching from the backseats of tiny US forward air control planes as parts of two provinces were quite literally blown away, house by house, village by village, an experience he recalls in today's Tom Dispatch post. From that came another New Yorker piece, and then a book, The Military Half, which offered an unmatched journalistic vision of what the Vietnam War looked like. It was a moment well captured in a mocking song one of the American pilots sang for him after an operation in which he had called in bombs on two Vietnamese churches, but somehow missed the white flag in front of them. Once upon a time, I was also in Vietnam, as an adviser to a military unit north of Kontum, and finally in Trung Lap, in the heart of the so-called Iron Triangle, just a few kilometers from Saigon, and my book is now available from Trafford, and I had it published there, to persuade more Americans to end all of our ridiculous wars, for the sake of our people. It opens with one of my poems: About war much has been written. More must yet be said by those who saw them die, so that the dead may rest, and sight be gained, to see war for what it was, and is. War is not fighting, though fighting's what we see, nor is it death, for death is but it's end. It is the rancor of disunited hearts, the death of love, the end of hope. The war around us echoes in our hearts and grants it life. Once, mortals dared to tame this ancient beast, and yet it thrives. Each age must fight this force again, or pay its price.