The Village of Ben Suc

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. [10], 132, [2] pages Map, DJ has some wear and edge chips and is in a plastic sleeve. Jonathan Edward Schell (August 21, 1943 - March 25, 2014) was an American author and visiting fellow at Yale University, whose later work primarily dealt with campaigning against nuclear weapons. Schell wrote The Village of Ben Suc when he stopped at Vietnam in 1966, en route back to the United States from Tokyo. The book started as a series of articles in the New Yorker] At just 24, he managed a press pass to Saigon from The Harvard Crimson, whose correspondents helped him to cover the war. His next book, The Military Half: An Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin, published in 1968, also drew a graphic picture of the devastating effects of American bombings and ground operations on Qu ng Ngãi Province and Qu ng Tín Province in South Vietnam, as he was a witness to Operation Cedar Falls, writing particularly on the destruction of Ben Suc. His work appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, and TomDispatch. The Fate of the Earth received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other awards, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Critics Award. From 1967 until 1987, he was a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as the principal writer of the magazine's Notes and Comment section. He was a columnist for Newsday from 1990 until 1996. He taught at many universities, including Princeton, Emory, New York University, and the Yale Law School. At the time of his death he was a visiting lecturer at Yale College. Ben Suc was a relatively prosperous farming village thirty miles from Saigon, on the edge of the Iron Triangle, the formidable Vietcong stronghold. It had been "pacified" many times, but because of security leaks no Vietcong were ever captured, and it always reverted to them. Therefore on January 8, 1967, American forces launched a surprise assault kept secret even from their South Vietnamese allies. The plan was to envelop the village, to seal it off, to remove its inhabitants, to destroy its every physical trace, and to level the surrounding jungle. Jonathan Schell accompanied the operation from its beginning to its successful but dismal end, and reports it in depth as he saw it. This time no one slipped away. The story of the bewildering task of separating the V.C. from ordinary villagers is the dramatic core of the first part of this book. The 3,500 villagers were moved to a refugee camp in Phu Loi, a barren, treeless "safe" area, with only what possessions they could carry. The bulldozers went to work and flattened every building. For security reasons no advance preparations had been made, and the move became a human and administrative nightmare. The people of Ben Suc were farmers, and there was nothing for them to do at Phu Loi, Mr. Schell offers vivid portraits of one individual after another—women, children, old men—as they are pacified and sink into apathy and despair. Here is an overwhelmingly affective narrative of American skill and good intentions squandered in a cause made hopeless by misunderstanding, by resistant traditions, and by cultural gaps not only between ourselves and the villagers, but between them and the Saigon government. Mr. Schell's report is devastating.