Since my high school days, I have been a stanch advocate of magazines. Fashion, of course, at least back in the day. (Ah, Seventeen, you were a teen age dream.) But many others as well. Fought my way through many a Scientific American. Roamed the world with National Geographic. All the generic news magazines, (was definitely Team Time) as well as many of the more partisan sort, although many wussed out as years went by. But my one tried and true was The New Yorker. It was pricy, so I couldn’t always afford it, but it has always been at the top of my list. And just gotta say, it is fierce these days. It has always been a literary/political magazine above all, and they have been known, from time to time, to devote an entire issue to one story. Most famously, it was Hiroshima, by John Hershey, but this book was another example.
In 1966, when The New Yorker sent Schell over to cover the story, America had just started drafting soldiers and sending them to Viet Nam. The problem was that none of them quite knew why. As Wallace Shawn, Schell’s editor, put it,
they had no idea why they were there in Viet Nam, they had no idea of what they were supposed to do there, they had no idea what sort of danger these Vietnamese peasants could possibly pose to their own American families back home; they had no idea what their enemy was fighting for; and they had no idea why they were supposed to kill certain Vietnamese peasants but not others, and what exactly it was about those they were assigned to kill that made them worth of death. This applied to most of the officers as well as the ordinary grunts.
The village of Ben Suc, the operation that Schell was present for, was in a location that was apparently considered to be too attractive to the enemy, so the entire peaceful community was evacuated, relocated to land further down steam that was far less useful with absolutely no prep on the part of the rather confused American troops. The original village was bombed into oblivion, and needless to say, the entire operation was FUBAR beyond belief. Schell left after that, but as we all know, things were to get much worse. As pointless a war as there ever was.