Books: VIET NAM IN PRINT

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> THE NEW LEGIONS by Donald Duncan (Random House, $1.95), has emotional authenticity. Duncan has killed. A professional soldier, he served 18 months in Viet Nam with the Green Berets and then quit to join the antiwar chorus. His account of deadly jungle hide-and-seek by Special Forces "Sneaky Petes" in the Viet Cong's midst throbs with veracity. But it was not the killing that made Duncan change his mind about war, or scenes of murder and torture, or simply the mind-numbing training that preceded his Viet Nam hitch. The crisis came instead deep in Viet Cong territory when he was cut off and surrounded, sure he was about to die. With luck, he got out alive and the go-go editors of the anti-almost-everything magazine Ramparts hired him as military editor. The book says as much about the author's state of mind as about Viet Nam.

> THE VILLAGE OF BEN SUC by Jonathan Schell (Knopf, $3.95), a 24-year-old Harvard graduate student, unreels an unemotional chronicle of how Americans evicted Ben Sue's 3,500 peasants at gunpoint last January and demolished their homes in an effort to clear the area of guerrillas. He flew in with the G.I.s to Ben Sue, on the edge of the Viet Cong's Iron Triangle stronghold 30 miles northwest of Saigon; then he followed the uprooted villagers to a bleak camp behind barbed wire. He paints a picture of unremitting misery inspired by wanton cruelty—but he elects to omit details that would have colored it differently. For example, he has admitted to knowing that Propagandist Le Khanh Trung, one of the highest-ranking Viet Cong ever to fall into American hands, was found in Ben Sue; but he does not deem it worth mentioning in his book. Nor does he tell how Ben Sue's farmers were given new land and homes elsewhere, nor that the village was destroyed as part of an operation to deny the Viet Cong use of a jungle sanctuary where 720 guerrillas were killed, thousands of secret documents uncovered and hundreds of tunnels and bunkers destroyed. But all that might have spoiled his story.