Letter from London

soldiers do not identify, or feel the empathy with the Vietnamese they would feel with Americans. The Vietnamese easily became people beyond the pale. For some this means that one can do to Vietnamese what one could not do to Americans; one need not feel guilty about it. In the words Jonathan Schell puts in the mouth of one of his protagonists in The Military Half:

“When we got here, we landed on a different planet. In Germany and Japan, I guess there was a thread of contact, but even when a Vietnamese guy speaks perfect English I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.”