Schell decided not to write in his article about Lyndon Johnson and Ho Chi Minh and whatever they might have believed or felt. He wrote exclusively about what he saw in and around a single military operation centered on a single village, the village of Ben Suc, which once had had a population of around 3,500. It turned out that Schell had a remarkable affinity for telling his tale in a quiet, deliberate, orderly manner that fit perfectly into the pages of The New Yorker of that era, patiently laying down one fact after another, without drawing any particular attention to himself or to what it felt like to report the story, without making any obvious attempt to attract or charm his readers or grab them by the throat, and without pandering to whatever depraved interest they might happen to have had in irrelevant but lurid material appealing to their sadistic or prurient instincts.
And yet despite the calm and gentle surface of his prose, the story he told his readers in “The Village of Ben Suc” was grotesque, though perhaps the grace and lucidity of his sentences made its impact particularly shocking. Ben Suc was in an area that the Americans believed to be dominated by the revolutionary guerrilla forces, and so the American soldiers understandably saw everyone who lived in the area as a possible threat, but there were no reliable techniques available to the soldiers for distinguishing those in the area who might be trying to kill them from those who simply happened to live there. It was rumored and believed that the enemy guerrillas wore black clothing. That was often true, but it was also the typical clothing of a great number of Vietnamese peasants.
The American operation in Ben Suc killed perhaps twenty-five people, maybe several more; it was very hard to say. But in any case, apart from those who died, all the people who lived in Ben Suc at that time—they were mostly women, children, and the elderly, because many of the men were fighting in the war—were forced out of their homes and their land by the American soldiers, who then proceeded to drench the grass roofs of their houses with gas and light them on fire. Finally the Americans crushed all the buildings with bulldozers, and then the entire area—buildings, fields, and trees—was bombed to rubble, to nothingness.