These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent.

I think it's interesting to really try to unravel what his ties.

There's this sort of country city divide for their inconvenient, and then it's not clear where it goes next.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production

of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. We're presenting today a remarkable story

that appeared in the New Yorker 50 years ago,

the village of Ben-Suk, a first-hand account of the Vietnam War by Jonathan Schell.

Inside the Chinook, many of the prisoners held their ears. Up front, on each side, a gunner

wearing large earphones under a helmet scanned the countryside.

The gunner's weapons pointed out.

There was no guard inside the helicopter.

A few of the prisoners, some bold and some just young, stood up and looked out the small portholes in the back of their seats.

For the first time in their lives, they saw their lands spread below them like a map,

as the American pilots had always seen it.

The tiny houses in the villages, the green fields along the river pockmarked with blue

water-filled bomb craters, some blackened by napalm, and the dark green jungles splotched with long lines

of yellow craters from B-52 raids. The trees around each crater splayed out in a star,

like the orb of cracks or on a bullet hole in glass.

When we talk about the Vietnam War, it still comes loaded with so many associations.

It's the first war that America really lost.

We talk about the atrocities committed by our soldiers at Milan elsewhere and the problem of nation building,

...