Schell wrote "The Village of Ben Suc" when he stopped at Vietnam in 1966, en route back to the United States from Tokyo. The book started as a series of articles in the "New Yorker". At just 24, he managed a press pass to Saigon from "The Harvard Crimson", whose correspondents helped him to cover the war. He wrote: "Faithful to the initial design, Air Force jets sent their bombs down on the deserted ruins, scorching again the burned foundations of the houses and pulverizing for a second time the heaps of rubble, in the hope of collapsing tunnels too deep and well hidden for the bulldozers to crush—as though, having decided to destroy it, we were now bent on annihilating every possible indication that the village of Ben Suc had ever existed."