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| November 30, 2014 Best of TomDispatch: Jonathan Schell, Seeing the Reality of the Vietnam War, 50 Years Late
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: A small reminder -- after reading Jonathan Schell on Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam in this “best of” TD post, you can get your own signed, personalized copy of that already classic book with a $100 contribution to this site. (My own new book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World, is similarly available, as are other works.) Check our donation page for the details. Tom]
Introduction, Sunday, November 24, 2014: When I scanned the front page of the New York Times one recent morning and spotted this headline, “In a Shift, Obama Extends U.S. Role in Afghan Combat,” I instantly wanted to pick up the phone. It was an urge I had to repress by reminding myself that no one would be at the other end. A lost friend is like a phantom limb. The remarkable Jonathan Schelldied eight months ago and yet there are still mornings like that one when I feel an almost overwhelming desire to talk to him about the latest developments on this strange planet of ours. I may no longer be able to do that, but he still speaks to me through the body of unforgettable work he left behind, including, of course, his variouspath-breaking books. In this spirit, on a Thanksgiving Sunday when our longest war -- not Vietnam but Afghanistan -- is extending itself unendingly into the future, it seems appropriate to remember him by reposting the last piece he wrote jointly for this website and theNation magazine. Its focus was TomDispatch Managing Editor Nick Turse’s bestselling, award-winning Kill Anything That Moves. That I can write either “bestselling” or “award-winning” in front of a no-holds-barred book on American war crimes in Vietnam still stuns me. I edited Kill Anything That Moves at Metropolitan Books (where I co-run the American Empire Project series) and in the years it was being written, I regularly told its author that, important as his work was, he should expect it, on publication, to fall off the edge of the Earth. How wrong I was. It’s useful for all of us to be reminded -- especially in grim times -- that the future is largely unknowable, that it regularly makes fools of us all, and that that’s the good news, not the bad news. Reading Kill Anything That Moves, Jonathan Schell was transported into his past and taken aback by the full picture offered of the American war he had covered so memorably. He told me so at the time and then used the book, soon after its publication, to look back on his own Vietnam experience, and ours as well. Reposting his piece seems like an appropriate way to mark the extension of our present Afghan war yet further into the future. Tom Original Introduction: 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, Saigon. It had long been supportive of the Vietcong. Now, in what was dubbed Operation Cedar Falls, the U.S. 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. Schell’s remarkable and remarkably blunt observations on this grim operation were, no less remarkably, published in the New Yorkermagazine 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 U.S. 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 TomDispatch post. From that came another New Yorkerpiece and then a book, The Military Half, which offered (and still offers) 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 flying in front of them. The relevant stanza went: “Strafe the town and kill the people, Drop napalm in the square, Get out early every Sunday And catch them at their morning prayer.” If Afghanistan is the war we somehow haven’t managed to notice most of the time, even while it’s going on, Vietnam was the war Americans couldn’t forget and have never been able to kick, possibly because we never managed to come to grips with just what it was and what we did there. Now, so many years later, in a monumental essay appearing in print in the Nation magazine and online here atTomDispatch, Schell returns (via Nick Turse’s new book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam) to the haunted terrain he last visited so many decades ago. All of us, whether we know it or not, still live with the ghosts of that moment.Tom How Did the Gates of Hell Open in Vietnam? |
