The Widening Lens
Jonathan Schell and the Fate of the Earth
By
Tom Engelhardt
“Up to a few months ago, Ben Suc was a prosperous village of some thirty-five hundred people.” That is the initial line of
The Village of Ben Suc,
his first book, a copy of which I recently reread on a plane trip,
knowing that he was soon to die. That book, that specific copy, had a
history of its own. It was a Knopf first edition, published in 1967 in
the midst of the Vietnam War, after the then-shocking text had appeared
in the
New Yorker magazine. An on-the-spot account of an
American operation, the largest of the Vietnam War to that moment, it
followed American troops as they helicoptered into a village controlled
by the enemy about 30 miles from the capital, Saigon. All its
inhabitants, other than those killed in the process, were removed from
their homes and sent to a makeshift refugee camp elsewhere. The U.S.
military then set Ben Suc afire, brought in bulldozers to reduce it to
rubble, and finally called in the U.S. Air Force to bomb that rubble to
smithereens -- as though, as the final line of his book put it, “having
once decided to destroy it, we were now bent on annihilating every
possible indication that the village of Ben Suc had ever existed.”
I had read the piece in the
New Yorker when that magazine devoted a single issue to it, something it had not done since it published John Hersey’s
Hiroshima in
a similar fashion in 1946. I never forgot it. I was then 23 years
old and just launched on a life as an anti-Vietnam War activist. I
would not meet the author, 24-year-old neophyte reporter Jonathan
Schell, for years.
To look at that first edition some 47 years later is to be reminded
of just how young he was then, so young that Knopf thought it
appropriate in his nearly nonexistent bio to mention where he went to
high school (“the Putney School in Vermont”). The book was tiny. Only
132 pages with an all-print orange cover that, in addition to the
author and title, said: “The story of the American destruction of a
Vietnamese village -- this is the complete text of the brilliant report
to which the
New Yorker devoted almost an entire issue.”
That was bold advertising in those publishing days. I know. As an
editor at a publishing house as the 1980s began, I can still remember
having a fierce argument about whether or not it was “tasteless” to put
a blurb from a prominent person on a book’s cover.
The year after
Ben Suc was published, he wrote
The Military Half,
his second great book on that horrific American war, in which he
widened his lens from a single devastated village to two provinces where
almost every hamlet had been destroyed, largely by American air
power. To report it, he rode in tiny forward observation planes that
were calling down destruction on the Vietnamese countryside. He then
went to work as a staff writer for the
New Yorker and in 1975 widened his lens further in his book
The Time of Illusion,
taking in the history and fate of a single administration in
Washington as it waged “limited war” abroad in a nuclear age and
created constitutional mayhem at home, bringing yet more violence to
Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, as well as to the American
political system.
In 1982, with his globally bestselling book
The Fate of the Earth,
whose first chapter, looking directly into a future of annihilation,
was memorably entitled “A Republic of Insects and Grass,” he trained his
lens on the threat of violence against all humanity. He memorably
explored what was then known as “the nuclear predicament,” the way we
had fully taken over a role previously occupied by God and, in the midst
of the Cold War, were threatening the extinction not of a village, a
couple of provinces in a distant land, or a political system, but the
planet itself.
I was by then working at Pantheon Books, where in 1988 I re-read his
two Vietnam reports and republished them in a single volume as
The Real War.
Its cover copy read: “The classic reporting on the Vietnam War,” which
couldn’t have been more accurate. And then, some years later, I
evidently stumbled across that first edition in New York’s great used
bookstore, the Strand. My copy is dated 8/93 on a little yellow tag
inside the front cover and cost me $4. I doubt I read it a third time
when I bought it. I can only imagine that I wanted to have that
memorable first book by someone I already considered one of the greats
of our age.
As it happened, at another publishing house in 2003, in an even grimmer century, I put out his book
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.
His lens by then couldn’t have been wider. In it, he appropriated a
hollowed-out term from the war in Vietnam, the hopeless American
effort to “win hearts and minds,” celebrating instead the untamed
“rebellious hearts and minds” across the planet that might find new
sources of people power and alter a world headed for destruction. It
was a book
so far ahead of its time that, in the invasion-of-Iraq moment, almost no one noticed.
He was then perhaps the only person who imagined that, in our future,
lay an Arab Spring, an Occupy Movement, and
whatever-is-still-to-come. He may have been the first to see that this
planet, careening toward disaster, might no longer be controllable in
any of the usual ways. (“Fifty-eight years after Hiroshima, the
world has to decide whether to continue on the path of cataclysmic
violence charted in the twentieth century and now resumed in the
twenty-first or whether to embark on a new, cooperative political
path... In our age of sustained democratic revolution, the power that
governments inspire through fear remains under constant challenge by
the power that flows from people’s freedom to act in behalf of their
interests and beliefs.”)
His final great work on climate change, on which he spent years of research, provisionally titled
The Human Shadow,
will sadly never be written. In the end, the lens simply grew too
wide for a single lifetime -- and we will all be the poorer for it.
He died on the night of March 25th of a cancer spurred on by an
underlying blood condition that just might have been caused by Agent
Orange, the poisonous defoliant chemical so widely used by U.S. forces
in Vietnam. There is, of course, no way of knowing, but the Veteran’s
Administration website does
list
his condition as one that might have been Agent Orange-induced. In
life as in death, Vietnam may have defined, but never confined, him. He
was a figure in my life and at
TomDispatch -- as a friend, a
writer, an
interviewee, and for me a source of constant inspiration. I mourn him.
Given the role Vietnam played in his life, in mine, and in this
country’s, I thought it might be appropriate to look not to his last
words, but -- in a sense -- to his first words. So, today, I’m
returning us to the young Jonathan Schell, the boy who, knowing so
little but so terribly open, landed in Vietnam in 1966 and during that
nightmarish war that seemed never to end, later at the
New Yorker, and finally at the
Nation magazine,
as well as in his many books, helped shape our thinking and our
world. Here, then, is an interview that historian Chris Appy did with
him for his remarkable 2003 oral history of the Vietnam War from all
sides,
Patriots.
It catches the sensibility both of the youthful Jonathan Schell and
of the man I later came to know. I thank Appy and his publisher,
Viking Penguin, for letting me remember and honor him in this way.
“The More We ‘Won,’ The More We Lost”
An Interview with Jonathan Schell on America’s Vietnam Debacle
By Chris Appy
[The following interview from Chris Appy’s 2003 book Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides is used with the kind permission of his publisher, Viking Penguin, and is posted at TomDispatch.com as a memorial to Jonathan Schell, who died on March 25th, and to his work, which will long outlast him.]
Rushing into the magazine’s office, his cheeks flushed, he flops
down on a couch looking impossibly burdened by the distractions of a
journalist’s life. The odds seem slim that much of value will be gained
by dredging up a 30-year-old topic. As soon as the subject is
mentioned, however, the present evaporates. It’s as if the middle-aged
man has entered a time machine dated 1966.That was the year he went to
Vietnam on a whim, at age 23, hoping to write “something” about the
war. On the basis of that trip, and another in 1967, he wrote two
book-length articles for The New Yorker that were later published as The Village of Ben Suc and The Military Half.
I wasn’t very political in college but I do remember noticing that
this Vietnam War seemed to be a sort of unsolvable problem. At the time,
I didn’t see how we could pull out and I suppose I bought into the
domino theory. But I didn’t see how we could win. It just looked bad.
When I graduated from college in 1965, I went to Japan to study and
spend a year abroad. On the way back from Japan I had a round-the-world
ticket that permitted me to stop anywhere I wanted. I had a certain
ambition to be a writer of factual pieces so I decided I would go to
Vietnam. I remember reading Bernard Fall’s latest book on the plane,
which was my little crash education. When I landed in Vietnam I was the
very definition of a pest -- a graduate student who had no knowledge
and who vaguely thought he might like to write something.
Somehow or other it occurred to me that François Sully might be in Vietnam working for Newsweek. He was a French reporter I’d met at Harvard when he was a Nieman Fellow so I called up the Newsweek office and, lo and behold, he was there and invited me over.
It was a loft-like office with a back room full of the
pseudo-military gear that journalists wore. When I greeted Sully I had
Bernard Fall’s book under my arm and mentioned that I had been reading
it. There was another fellow at a desk who said, “Could I see the book?”
So I went over and gave him the book.
He opened it up and signed it. It was Bernard Fall!
So here were these two ebullient, life-loving Frenchmen, brave and
brilliant journalists, both. And just out of sheer high spirits, they
took me up -- this nuisance, this pest, this ignorant graduate student.
They used their connections to perform a kind of miracle. They persuaded
the military to give me a press pass on the somewhat deceptive basis
that I was there for the Harvard Crimson. I had actually written for the Crimson, and very possibly they would have wanted me reporting for them, but we made up that little tale.
Well, 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. It gave a fantastic freedom to see what you
wanted to see. I think the reason was the cooperation between the press
and the military during the Second World War, and the Korean War had
carried over for a while to Vietnam. So just a day or two later Fall and
Sully called me up at my ratty hotel and said, “Something is going to
happen. It’s all secret, but you can go and see it if you want. Come
over to such-and-such a place at four-thirty A.M. and there’ll be a
bus.” These two wonderful journalists, both of whom later lost their
lives in the war, gave me this one-hundred-and-eighty-degree
life-changing gift, which set me on the journalistic path I’ve been on
ever since.
We
got on a bus and were taken out to an airstrip where we were flown off
in a C-5 to a big dusty field in the jungle. A spiffy major with an
easel told us we were there for Operation Cedar Falls -- the largest
military operation of the war to that date. The idea was to clear out
the infamous Iron Triangle [a 40-square-mile patch of jungle with its
southernmost tip just a dozen miles north of Saigon], which had been the
source of so much woe for the South Vietnamese army and a revolutionary
stronghold since the war against the French. The American military
wanted to clear it out once and for all. On the major’s easel there was a
great menu of things they were going to do. One of the items on the
list was a helicopter attack on the village of Ben Suc. When we got to
that item on the list, I asked, “What’s going to happen to the village
after it’s attacked?” The major said, “Well, we’re going to destroy it
and move the people out.”
“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. It didn’t feel like a singularly adventurous or bold thing
to do. And I do recall one little act of cowardice. When they asked
which of the 60 helicopters we wanted to go on, many of the journalists
were clamoring to be on the first or second helicopter. I was delighted
to be on helicopter number 47. You could say that the operation came off
beautifully. It worked exactly as planned. The helicopters flew in,
moved the people out, destroyed the village. Mission accomplished. But
to what end? Most of the reporting about Operation Cedar Falls told you
how many Viet Cong were captured or killed, and those may have been true
facts. But they left out what I believed was fundamental -- that we
were destroying villages and throwing people off their land.
The unmistakable fact was that the general population despised the
United States and if they hadn’t despised it before we arrived, they
soon did after we destroyed their villages. Our whole goal was to build
up a political system that would stand after we left, with a functioning
government supported enough by its people so it could fight on its own.
But our policies were destroying whatever support that government might
ever have had, which was probably about zero to begin with. The more
we’d win on the battlefield -- and we did just about every day in just
about every battle -- the more we lost the political war.
The more we “won,” the more we lost. That was the paradox of Vietnam.
American soldiers went over thinking they were freeing an enslaved
people from their oppressors. I do think the Communists were pretty
oppressive. However, it just so happened that they were the
representatives of national dignity and that seemed to trump whatever
oppression they dealt out. Whatever the reason, the people by and large
supported them and they were the de facto government of a very
considerable part of South Vietnam. So the idea that the Viet Cong were a
sort of mysterious band of people that could be rooted out and
separated from the population at large just didn’t have a basis in
political reality.
One thing that struck me very powerfully was the capacity of both the
officer corps and the press corps to see things in terms of a story
they had brought with them to Vietnam and not to see what was actually
going on under their noses. For example, when I came back to Vietnam in
the summer of 1967 I went up to Quang Ngai Province and saw that the
place was being leveled by American bombing. But when I got home, I
remember reading a story in the New York Times about how the
marines had built a hospital in this area. Apparently the Hiroshima-like
devastation that was around that hospital was not visible to the
reporters of the New York Times because they weren’t telling about that.
And it wasn’t a subtle thing. The fire and smoke was pouring up to
the heavens. You didn’t have to be a detective or do any investigative
journalism. The flames were roaring around you. I mapped it all out and
seventy, eighty percent of the villages were just dust -- ashes and
dust. But that was not the story. The story was still how we were going
to help the South Vietnamese resist the attack from the North. In
Vietnam I learned about the capacity of the human mind to build a model
of experience that screens out even very dramatic and obvious realities.
When I first went back to Vietnam that summer I joined the
journalistic pack, the “boys on the bus.” What they were covering at the
time was this fraudulent election, a completely farcical election. One
day we were all taken to a village for a campaign rally, but the
candidates somehow didn’t make it. Apart from the journalists, the only
person who showed up was an ancient guy going around with a bullhorn
shouting that there was going to be an election rally. This was supposed
to be democracy in action and we were the only people there.
To report on that as if it was something real would have been
absolutely absurd so I just took the next helicopter out and somehow
decided to begin covering the air war in the South -- the air slaughter,
really. People had been writing about the bombing of North Vietnam, but
the air war in the South was far more devastating and not getting much
attention.
So in Quang Ngai I started going up in forward air control (FAC)
planes -- little Cessna two-seater spotter planes that would direct the
pilots to their targets. These little planes were constantly turning and
twisting, in part to avoid enemy ground fire. That and the overwhelming
heat made me constantly nauseous. But I had my notebook right there in
the plane and the setup was unbelievably perfect for reporting. It was
as if it had been designed for reporting. It gave you this fantastic
perch. You could sit over the scene of the action, witness it, and you
were conveniently supplied with earphones in which you heard
conversations among the pilots, the forward air controller, and the
ground. The quotes were coming right into the earphones and I wrote them
down as if it were a lecture at Harvard. It was an amazing stroke of
journalistic luck.
The idea that the U.S. military was operating under constraints in
South Vietnam is ridiculous. We pulverized villages from the air if we
merely imagined that we received hostile fire. I witnessed it with my
own eyes and I saw the leaflets we dropped which said, “If you fire on
us, we will destroy your village,” and then a follow-up leaflet that
said, “You did fire on us, and we did destroy your village.” And U.S.
planes were actually bombing churches. They would see the church, target
it, and blow it up. I saw that happen.
And sometimes they cracked jokes about it. They were trying to
imagine that the war was something like World War II. When you were in
the air you could try to forget about all the paradoxes of policy that
made your very successes counterproductive. But I sensed a deep
uneasiness and regret among the pilots. They sometimes sang rather
brutal ditties that seemed to me like confessions in a way:
“Strafe the town and kill the people,
Drop napalm in the square,
Get out early every Sunday
And catch them at their morning prayer.”
I wasn’t inclined to blame the people doing it so much as the people
ordering it. I got along well with the soldiers and their officers. I
liked them very much. Maybe that was a defensive thing. It would have
been very uncomfortable for me to be in a position of feeling fury at
the people doing it. Those are deep questions. You know, just following
orders is no excuse. These were atrocities -- bombing villages from the
air, just pulverizing houses, attacking people on the basis of little or
no information. And there was this absurd supposition that if someone
ran away from your attack, they automatically belonged to the Viet Cong.
It was a massacre from the air that was going on every day and I was a
part of it in a way. I was kind of doing it. That was the feeling. The
FACs were equipped with phosphorous rockets. They were used as markers
for the bombers, but phosphorous rockets are particularly horrifying
weapons -- worse than napalm. It’s something that burns that you can’t
put out. The rocket would blow up the house and then people would run
out. I was witnessing from a distance, but I had a real feeling of
complicity. I mean I didn’t push the button, but I was there.
When I got back from Vietnam I met Jerry Wiesner, provost of MIT and a
friend of my parents. He had been Kennedy’s science adviser and knew
Secretary of Defense McNamara. We had lunch and when I told him about
what I’d seen in Vietnam he said, “Would you be willing to go and talk
to McNamara about this?” I said, “Yeah, sure,” and the meeting was
arranged. So I went down to the Pentagon, where I’d never set foot, and
was ushered into the secretary of defense’s office. It’s the size of a
football field -- a proper imperial size. And there was McNamara, all
business as usual, with that slicked-back hair of steel. I began to
tell my story and he said, “Come over to the map here and show me what
you’re talking about.”
Well, I truly had my ducks in a row. I had overflown the entire
province of Quang Ngai and half of Quang Tin. And so I really had
chapter and verse. After a while he interrupted and asked, “Do you have
anything in writing?” I said, “Yes, but it’s all in longhand.” So he
said, “Well, I’ll put you in General so-and-so’s office -- he’s off in
South America -- and you can dictate it.” And so for three days I sat in
the general’s office dictating my longhand, book-length New Yorker article
on the air war in South Vietnam. Up from the bowels of the Pentagon
would come typed copy. It was a dream for me, probably saving me a
month’s work because this was long before word processors.
Three days later, stinking to high heaven because I had no change of
clothes, I reappeared in McNamara’s office. I handed it to him, he took
it, and that was the last I heard about it from him. But I learned later
that a foreign service officer in Saigon was sent around Vietnam to
retrace my steps and re-interview the pilots and the soldiers I had
quoted. He even read back to the pilots the gruesome ditties they had
sung for me at the bar. The foreign service officer had to admit that my
book was accurate but he added, “What Schell doesn’t realize is what
terrible circumstances our troops are in. He doesn’t realize that old
ladies and children are throwing hand grenades because the people are
against us.” Hence, the Vietnam War makes sense because the South
Vietnamese are against us!
So why couldn’t we get out? When it became clear that the costs were
so much greater than anything at stake on the ground in Vietnam itself,
then why couldn’t we just withdraw? None of the official war aims made
much sense. It was hard to maintain that we were fighting for freedom or
democracy in South Vietnam since the government we were defending was
so obviously corrupt and dictatorial. Nor could we honestly claim to be
preventing aggression when the only foreign combatants in Vietnam were
Americans or soldiers paid for by the United States like the South
Koreans. Even the domino theory seemed to fall apart in the face of
intense nationalism, support for reunification throughout Vietnam, and
the historical conflicts between Vietnam and China.
But the one justification that proved most durable was this idea of
credibility. Fighting for American credibility was not a tangible goal;
it was the defense of an image -- an image of vast national strength and
the will to use it. According to the doctrine of credibility, the
United States was engaged in a global public-relations struggle in which
a reverse in any part of the world, no matter how small, could
undermine the whole structure of American power.
Part of the concern with maintaining credibility stemmed from a kind
of psychological domino theory. In other words, policy makers worried
that if the United States did not prevail in Vietnam, it would cast
doubt on our determination to prevail anywhere. If the United States
lost in Vietnam, then countries and revolutionaries all over the world
would see that we were a paper tiger who couldn’t win wars and they
would be emboldened to resist our will. So what was at stake in Vietnam
was the ability of the United States to maintain control all over the
world on a psychological basis.
But there was another component of the doctrine of credibility that
is in a way the most subtle and the least noticed, but I think the most
important. It was nuclear policy. In nuclear strategy one of the crucial
facts is that you can’t actually fight a nuclear war. The moment that
you fight the war you’ve lost it because everybody loses in a nuclear
war. The purpose of deterrence is to prevent a nuclear war from
happening. It depends entirely on producing a psychological impression
in the mind of the enemy that you are a very tough guy -- so tough
you’re ready to commit suicide and drag the enemy down with you.
Well that is a kind of crazy proposition. It doesn’t have a lot of
inherent credibility. Why would you commit suicide to defend yourself?
So it’s a real strain to keep producing an impression of toughness. All
you could do in the arena of nuclear confrontation was build up your
arms and talk tough. You couldn’t prove your toughness by actually using
the weapons. 'Round about the end of the 1950s there were a number of
thinkers, including Henry Kissinger, who began to say, well, okay, we’re
paralyzed in the nuclear arena, but we can go out and win a few on the
periphery. Here’s a place where we can actually fight wars and show how
tough we are. At the same time [Soviet Premier]
Khrushchev began to talk
about the necessity of fighting wars of national liberation in the
Third World so the Soviets were making their own contribution to the
rhetorical battle. Thus, the model for Vietnam was actually
created before we ever went directly into that war. Because the
so-called peripheral wars were supposedly winnable, and since they
occurred in a context of a very shaky credibility based on nuclear
weapons that you couldn’t use, these limited wars came to bear an
additional burden.
It was as if World War III were being fought in Vietnam. In the
nuclear age, the whole structure of credibility and deterrence seemed to
depend on winning these wars out there on the periphery. This was the
sort of theoretical trap that the policy makers found themselves in.
They thought they were not only preventing the toppling of dominoes but
total war itself. And if you believed the assumptions, then almost no
cost was too high to pay in Vietnam.
The above interview is from Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides
by Christian Appy, copyright (c) 2003 by Christian G. Appy. Used by
permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.
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Copyright 2014 Tom Engelhardt and Christian Appy
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