Bedtime Stories Governments Tell During Wartime

On January 11 th, 1967, three days after the start of Operation Cedar Falls, the New York Times published its first reports on the mission, which was the “largest…of the [Vietnam] war” to that point. There were two articles, both written by anonymous stringers.* The first provides a dry overview of what was happening and why; the objective of Operation Cedar Falls, according to the Times, was to seize control of a jungle about “60 square miles about 25 miles northwest of Saigon”. It was known that there were likely to be few Vietcong soldiers in the region, but the U.S. military believed that the area, known as the Iron Triangle, was a base of operations for the Vietcong. The purpose, then, was preventive, to render the Iron Triangle unusable to the Vietcong for future operations. The means of accomplishing this were threefold: 1.) invade the jungle and destroy whatever infrastructure – i.e. tunnels and trenches – the Vietcong had built; 2.) bulldoze a perimeter around the jungle and broad avenues through it to deprive guerillas of easy cover; and 3.) relocate all the peasants of the four villages bordering the Triangle and then raze the villages (which had been under Vietcong control for some years, and were considered at the very least passively sympathetic to them).

The second article was about Ben Suc, the largest of these soon-to-be nonexistent villages. “For years,” it begins, “this quiet, ill-kept village…has been a haven for the Vietcong….Within two weeks the more than 3,800 residents of Bensuc will be living in a new refugee settlement 20 miles to the southeast and it is likely that the tattered huts and small shops will be flattered [sic] by bulldozers.

Jonathan Schell, who was in Ben Suc covering the war for the New Yorker, also begins his report, later published in book form as The Village of Ben Suc, with a description of the village. He writes that “Up to a few months ago, Ben Suc was a prosperous village of some thirty-five hundred people….In recent years, most of the inhabitants…were engaged in tilling the exceptionally fertile paddies bordering the [Saigon] river.”

The facts of the two descriptions broadly correspond. When Schell and the stringer arrive in Ben Suc, the village is tattered and ill-kept. The villagers are in the process of being re-located, and the structures of the village will soon be bulldozed. But the differences in the descriptions, however slight, are significant and characteristic. According to the Times, Ben Suc was “ill-kept…tattered…small….[and] chronic illness is widespread.” Also, “Vietcong villages are typically found in disrepair.” And while the villagers are “reluctant” to leave their homes, the piece notes that “new land would be given to them along with frame, tin-roofed homes that will be ‘a lot better than what they have now.’”

In Schell’s narrative, Ben Suc had a “recorded history going back to the late eighteenth century,” and if it was now in a state of disrepair, this was the result of American bombs and had nothing to do with the city management skills of the Vietcong. And chronic illness was not widespread. In fact, “A young American medic…remarked on the exceptional good health of the Ben Suc villagers.” And the tin-roofed homes, as it turns out, are non-existent, entirely hypothetical.

The Times reports that 41 people were killed in and around Ben Suc on the first day of the assault, and notes that “There was little question that the men fleeing on bicycles, crawling through rice paddies and thrashing in the murky river were Vietcong.” Schell writes in detail of a number of these deaths – including one he witnessed – and makes clear that no one knew whether any of the victims were Vietcong. One man, who had “already run a long gantlet of American soldiers” on his bicycle, was shot by two jittery soldiers who identified him as V.C. on the basis of his black, pajama-like outfit, which was traditional Vietnamese peasant garb. A couple was shot while having a picnic; they were identified as V.C. because they ran when a U.S. helicopter flew over them.

If the Times got it wrong, and it’s apparent that they did, then it’s a half-forgivable offense. These first few articles were written very soon after the incident, and not even by their own people. The Times was, in fact, publishing some of the best reporting on Vietnam, and if Schell did a better job in this instance, some of that can be attributed to the luxuries afforded him as the correspondent for the New Yorker. He didn’t have to file as often, and was allowed to sacrifice breadth of coverage for depth. The Times was trying to cover the entire war. The New Yorker, and Schell, were free to cover whatever they wanted.

Still, the real story of Ben Suc – the horror of what the U.S. was doing to South Vietnam – should have been apparent to anyone with eyes to see the peasants forced from their homes and onto cargo trucks. When Times reporter Tom Buckley arrived in Phucong on January 15 th, and saw the relocated villagers, he got it. He saw the “canvas-topped sheds thrown up on a wasteland” for the abomination they were, and recognized that the “6,000 Vietnamese, all but a handful of them women, children and old people, were trying…to put together the pieces of suddenly shattered lives.”

And yet it was Buckley who had published, in the previous day’s Times, a favorable – if tortured – profile of A.R.V.N. Major Luong Dinh Bay. In this case, the story that Buckley was sold by the government was one of a new breed of South Vietnamese soldier/bureaucrat, the kind of man who would, presumably, rescue the South Vietnamese from their own corruption and incompetence and therefore enable the U.S. to withdraw at some point from Vietnam without sacrificing the country to the communists. Buckley writes that many A.R.V.N. political bosses “have failed to show aptitude for the assignment, and some have been inefficient and corrupt. But there are reasonably efficient and honest men filling this impossible position…One such is Maj. Luong Dinh Bay.”

Buckley was fed a story, and it was probably too late to find another story before deadline. He’s as skeptical as he could have been. He quotes the good major on the question of graft – “I don’t take it,” says Bay – but makes sure to note that Bay “is believed to have inherited a rubber plantation north of Saigon.” An American captain confirms that Bay was “doing all right” for money.

The point is not that the Times in particular screwed up, but rather how easy it is for anyone to screw up when he relies on the official story provided by the U.S. government, which, then as now, is likely to be true only in the most narrow sense. Ben Suc was “ill-kept”… because U.S. planes were bombing it. The villagers eventually got their tin-roofed huts… but they would have preferred their own homes. Some of those killed in and around Ben Suc were likely Vietcong…many almost certainly were not. Major Bay may have been an honest man…but if so, he represented not a trend, but an exception to the rampant corruption. The truth of all of this was that we were fighting a war we could never win, because the people we were ostensibly fighting for liked us less than their ostensible enemies, and the country we were fighting to preserve was a fiction.

The games the government plays with the truth – as a cover for the games they play with human lives – should frighten us as citizens. As journalists, however, we should be grateful for the opportunity thus provided. Conspiracy theorists get it wrong; they give the people running our country far too much credit for subtlety. The politicians lie and spin for obvious reasons – to further their own interests and the interests of their policies and parties – and they lie and spin in predictable patterns. And they do so with the greatest frequency in matters of foreign policy, where we as citizens and journalists have the least access to alternative sources of information, and also the deepest desire to believe that our government is acting justly. The storylines are boilerplate: our allies are always honest and democratic; our bombs always strike with great accuracy; we do everything possible to avoid hurting civilians; we fight not for ourselves but for the cause of freedom; everybody loves us, except those who hate freedom and democracy.

It’s easier, as a writer, to buy these storylines. They come ready-made with a narrative arc, snappy quotations and apposite statistics (graciously provided by the press office), and we don’t have to do any real reporting. The good news, as Jonathan Schell demonstrates, is that it’s not that hard to do real reporting either: ask questions; report thoroughly; trust your own eyes; listen to everything everybody says with an eye to the interests they’re representing, and if those interests aren’t immediately apparent, keep reporting until they are. The truth is out there, we just have to find it for ourselves.

*The stories were identified as “Special to the New York Times.”