Lessons of History: Vietnam and the Loss of American Goodness

Bamboo hut in flames, Ben Suc, Vietnam (January 1967)

I was eight years old in 1967, living an insular, middle-class existence in the suburbs of New Jersey, a thoroughly American life in a country I believed was the beacon of freedom and a light unto the nations. I was taught at an early age that we were a virtuous nation who welcomed the poor and those yearning to be free. We had come to the aid of Europe in World War II and defeated the Nazis in a war that took the lives of my dad’s oldest brother and over 400,000 Americans. We were the land of the free and home of the brave. We were the good guys. 

Like most Americans of that era, I believed in the general goodness of the United States and viewed our military forces with the sort of reverence I feel when I tour the campuses of West Point and Annapolis. Although I was vaguely aware of a war in a far-off land where the government had sent American troops to fight, it had negligible impact on my young life. My political consciousness came of age in 1968, when I saw images of body bags of dead American troops lifted from military planes on the nightly news and learned of my father’s growing questions as a Lutheran pastor about the justness and morality of America’s involvement in the war. Within a year, the son of my dad’s secretary would be one of the young men in those body bags, and a letter I had sent to him overseas, full of baseball clippings and updates, was returned as undeliverable.

What I did not understand at the time was just how wrong America’s leaders were about what motivated the revolutionary forces of Ho Chi Minh, why and how Ho had defeated the French colonial forces a decade earlier that resulted in the country being divided into North and South, and why Ho and the forces in the north were winning the support of the peasant population throughout the southern portion of the country that we called South Vietnam. President Johnson was to blame for expanding America’s troop presence in Vietnam, which by 1967 was approaching 500,000. But he was not alone in accepting the simplistic dogma that dominated the Cold War thinking of U.S. political and military leadership, which believed in the now discredited “Domino Theory”—that if one country in a region came under the influence of the Communists, then other nations would fall like dominoes and succumb to Communism. 

The more I learned about American involvement in Vietnam, the more disheartened I became. As a young American patriot, I assumed we supported the good people in the conflict, people who like us believed in democracy and freedom. But then I learned that the leaders of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem and his brutal brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were not so good, did not embrace democracy, and had no legitimacy among their own people. Then and later, I would ask questions. If America was not defending a vibrant democracy, why were we sending our young men there? Why were they dying in a land they knew nothing about, fighting for a cause they did not understand? Why did American war planes drop bombs and napalm on Vietnamese forests, destroy the countryside, and kill a million people, including many, many civilians? Why did American bombers drop more tons of explosives in Southeast Asia than had been dropped on Germany and Japan combined during all of World War II?

These were questions without satisfying answers. In looking back on the conflict more than fifty years later, at least two things are evident. First, as stated in The Vietnam War, the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary, the war began “in good faith, by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and cold war miscalculations. And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions, made by five American presidents, belonging to both political parties.” 

Second, the American war effort in Vietnam resulted from a fundamental failure of U.S. leadership and the American public to view the people of Vietnam as human beings and their land as a precious part of the Earth. Americans were not unique in failing to conceive of our perceived enemies as sub-human. If history is any guide, it is a fundamental flaw in the human condition. But for the first time since the start of the Cold War, the Vietnam War complicated our view of America as exceptional or special when compared to other nations.

This past week I read a reprint of The Village of Ben Suc (New York Review Books, 2024) by Jonathan Schell, originally published as a full-length article in the July 8, 1967, edition of The New Yorker. Schell was then a 24-year-old journalist who wrote a first-hand account of a single military operation in and around the South Vietnamese village of Ben Suc, which before American troops arrived was a prosperous village of around 3,500 people of mostly farmers who tilled the land bordering the Saigon River. The people of Ben Suc cultivated extensive orchards of mangoes and grapefruit and operated small shops run by merchants in the village marketplace. 

Schell embedded himself with a division of the U.S. military tasked with conducting search-and-destroy missions in the South. Their objective was to root out the Vietcong (people sympathetic to and supportive of the North Vietnamese forces), destroy their villages and tunnels, resettle the civilians who remained, and attempt to win their “hearts and minds.” American troops believed Ben Suc was in an area dominated by Viet Cong, and thus everyone who lived there was suspicious. Besides, one could not easily distinguish who among the civilian population was Viet Cong or simply happened to live there. The American troops did not speak the language and did not understand the culture, so simple things like what clothes someone wore were frequently interpreted as indicative of whether the person was Viet Cong or an “innocent” civilian. Not surprisingly, these clues could be unreliable indicators.

Schell described how, in January 1967, American forces attacked the village, killed two to three dozen people, and forced all the civilians, mostly women, children, and the elderly, from their homes and their land into a makeshift refugee camp. The American soldiers with which Schell was embedded then proceeded to torch the villagers’ homes, dousing the grass roofs with gas and lighting them on fire. As Schell described it:

The demolition teams arrived in Ben Suc on a clear, warm day after the last boatload of animals had departed down the river for Phu Cuong. G.I.s moved down the narrow lanes and into the sunny, quiet yards of the empty village, pouring gasoline on the grass roofs of the houses and setting them afire with torches. Columns of black smoke boiled up briefly into the blue sky as the dry roofs and walls burned to the ground, exposing little indoor tableaux of charred tables and chairs, broken cups and bowls, an occasional bed, and the ubiquitous bomb shelters. Before the flames had died out in the spindly black frames of the houses, bulldozers came rolling through . . . uprooting the trees . . . When the demolition teams withdrew, they had flattened the village . . . [and then] Air Force jets sent their bombs down on the deserted ruins . . . as though, having once decided to destroy it, we were now bent on annihilating every possible indication that the village of Ben Suc had ever existed.

The American operation, as Schell matter-of-factly described, destroyed the entire village to nothingness. U.S. forces would repeat this type of campaign in villages throughout the region with comparable results. 

Schell wrote mostly about the people involved—the peasants, now homeless, who were removed from the village and placed into camps, and the American soldiers who put them there. He described “the villagers crouched along the road with their bundles of belongings while American infantrymen ducked in and out of the palm groves behind them, some pouring gasoline on the grass roofs of the houses and others going from house to house setting them afire.” When he asked a captain why it was necessary to destroy the entire village and surrounding area, the captain explained that clearing out the area would allow them to see things more clearly. “From now on, anything that moves around here is going to be automatically considered V.C. and bombed or fired on. The whole [region] is going to become a Free Zone. These villages are all considered hostile villages.”

What to do with all the rounded-up civilians created problems of their own. Placing them in a confined area where shelter and facilities were yet to exist, caused sanitary and health issues. How exactly were American troops, now aided by the Army of Vietnam (ARVN), supposed to win over the “hearts and minds” of people who had just lost everything at the hands of the Americans who had destroyed their homes and way of life? Schell described what he saw at the Phu Loi refugee camp, where the villagers from Ben Suc were taken:

On the first day, over a thousand people were brought in. When they climbed slowly down from the backs of the trucks, they had lost their appearance of healthy villagers and taken on the passive, dull-eyed, waiting expression of the uprooted. It was impossible to tell whether deadness and discouragement had actually replaced a spark of sullen pride in their expression and bearing or whether it was just that any crowd of people removed from the dignifying context of their homes and places of labor, learning, and worship, and dropped, tired and coated with dust, in a bare field would appear broken-spirited to an outsider.

Villagers in the camp told Schell stories of their previous lives. “I was born in Ben Suc,” said an old man sitting on a mat, “and I have lived there for sixty years. My father was born there also, and so was his father. Now I will have to live here for the rest of my life. But I am a farmer. How can I farm here? What work will I do?” The man complained about the rice the Americans fed them, which was the same rice the villagers fed to their pigs. Schell explained that the Vietnamese, like most East Asians, were particular about the color, texture, and flavor of their rice, which went beyond taste and nutrition. To the victims of this conflict, even the trivial things mattered, something the American soldiers did not understand. How could they?

It is impossible to read The Village of Ben Suc and conclude that the Americans were the heroes in this story. And yet, Schell’s elegant, unemotional prose and nonjudgmental tone does not make you upset at the individual soldiers he describes and quotes in the book. These were mostly 19 and 20-year-old men caught up in a war they did not ask for, in a land they did not even know existed a few years earlier. They were interacting with people whose language and culture they did not understand. They did what they were trained to do, followed orders and commands they were required to follow, and performed their jobs as soldiers caught in a dangerous and morally ambiguous war. As described by Wallace Shawn in the book’s introduction:

They were fairly nice young men. The problem was only that they knew basically nothing about the place to which they’d been sent, they had no idea why they were there, and they didn’t really know 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 worthy of death.

When Schell asked a young soldier whether he was concerned with killing innocent civilians, he said, “What does it matter? They’re all Vietnamese.” It was a common feeling among the troops who perhaps needed to justify what they were doing, at least to the extent they gave it any thought.

I have discovered over the years that many Americans often give the Vietnam War perfunctory treatment because it does not fit the narrative of unambiguous American goodness. It may explain why our country never quite came to terms with Vietnam, and why we continue to struggle with discussing other troubling aspects of our history. 

U.S. armed forces in Vietnam destroyed entire villages and often shot civilians indiscriminately. Most Americans were shocked to learn in 1968 of the My Lai massacre, in which U.S. soldiers rounded up and murdered over four hundred civilians in a four-hour stretch in the Quang Ngai province of South Vietnam. U.S. soldiers shot groups of women, children, and elderly men at close range, raped Vietnamese women, and executed 150 civilians after herding them into an irrigation ditch.

As revealed in subsequent investigations into America’s role in the war, My Lai was not an isolated event. In late 1968, General Julian Ewell, who earned the nickname Butcher of the Delta during his time in Vietnam, led Operation Speedy Express, an effort to eliminate North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong in a show of overwhelming force within the Mekong Delta. A whistle blower reported having observed U.S. artillery indiscriminately attacking civilians, U.S. helicopter gunships shooting at frightened farmers as they ran away, and troops on the ground attacking and killing countless women and children. U.S. troops killed an estimated 7,000 civilians in the operation, equivalent to a "My Lai each month" as described by the whistle blower. Although General William Westmoreland ignored the report, an internal Pentagon investigation later confirmed the allegations. And yet, not a single American was ever held to account.

The young Americans who committed atrocities in the Vietnam War were not inherently bad or immoral people. Indeed, most were “fairly nice young men.” They performed the tasks their superiors ordered, and did so in a land and a war they did not understand. But they did so with a brazen indifference to the humanity of the Vietnamese civilians whom they killed. Thoughtlessness, complacency, and overconfidence in American goodness, not evil young soldiers, were the primary culprits. As Wallace Shawn explained:

At least until relatively recently, most Americans have liked to think of themselves as well meaning, friendly, basically decent people. That wasn’t an entirely false belief in 1966, and it’s not even entirely false now. But reading this book today, over half a century after it was written, over half a century since the village of Ben Suc was obliterated, and over ten years since Schell’s death, I feel Schell’s steady, questioning eye still staring at all the innocent people maimed and killed around the world by the possibly overconfident friendly Americans.

Nations that believe too much in their own exceptionalism and goodness can quickly suffer a loss of moral clarity, especially in times of conflict and war. And when belief in one’s goodness is combined with indifference to the humanity of the perceived enemy, there is a heightened risk that otherwise decent people will commit terrible deeds. 

It has always been more popular to divide people, groups, and nations into good and bad, moral and evil. This tendency is not a uniquely American trait, but it is nonetheless an American characteristic. Despite the American tendency to think of ourselves as always siding with goodness, our actions during the Vietnam War caused Americans to appropriately question the justness and righteousness of our cause. But the more we learn of America’s actions during the Vietnam War, the more we must conclude that Americans did not wear the white hats in that conflict. It is a lesson of history we should take to heart so as not to repeat past mistakes. 

Antiwar rally, Washington, D.C., 1971