The Village of Ben Suc - The other half

[At Ben Suc, the day it was invaded.] "With most of the populace assembled in one place, the Americans launched two projects that were a source of intense pride to the men in the field--a mess tent and a field hospital, both for the villagers. It is a cliché among the American military in Vietnam that 'there are two wars in Vietnam': the military war, to provide security against the enemy, and what is usually called 'the other war'--the war to win the 'hearts and minds of the people.' On the one hand, resolutely destroy the enemy; on the other hand, rebuild and reform. To the soldiers at Ben Suc, the hospital and the mess tent represented an essential counterweight to the killing and destruction. They saw the two installations as 'the other half' of what they had done that morning." (p46).

[Given the identity of the local government and the NLF, given the inability of the soldiers to distinguish 'VC's amongst the population, given that the whole village was considered 'hostile', who was the enemy? US high-level planners created a fiction 'South Vietnam invaded by the North' to justify their presence. When this is pushed to the bottom level, the absurdities become gruesome and mind-numbing.]

"As one soldier put it, with astonishment, 'Our hospitals are full of V.C. at forty dollars a day. Just this morning, there was a woman who got shot up real bad. Both her legs were broken. A real mess. And they dusted her off in a chopper to the military hospital. We dusted off another little V.C. this morning." (p46).

"Treatment was available not only to those wounded during the attack but to anyone, whatever his ailment. A team of Vietnamese doctors was to be airlifted in later in the day to treat the patients--again in order to give the villagers the impression that this was a Vietnamese project, not an American one. A young American medic …said that between ten and twenty villagers had been brought in for treatment--most of them children with minor skin diseases. He remarked on the exceptional good health of the Ben Suc villagers, but when on to say that earlier a distraught woman had brought a sick baby to a Vietnamese Army Doctor, who had diagnosed the disease as malaria and had immediately administered an anti-malaria shot. They baby's condition had declined rapidly, and within two hours it had died. The American medic speculated that the baby had been allergic to the shot." (p47)

"The mess tent was operated entirely by Americans. At noon, the villagers were offered a lunch of hot dogs, Spam, and crackers, served with a fruit-flavored beverage called Keen. Again, however, the turn-out was less than a hundred." (p47)

[Later he mentions that the rice given to the Vietnamese from America was fed to the pigs by the villagers, who are very discerning about rice. Schell likened it to giving Americans dogfood: recognized as having nutrition, but disgusting to eat]