To What End: Report From Vietnam [Paperback]

Ward Just (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2000

As a young man, Ward Just spent eighteen months in Vietnam as a correspondent for the Washington Post. The experience would earn him both a citation from the Overseas Press Club and a Combat Infantryman's Badge awarded by the commander of the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, and would serve as subject matter for decades of writing and many acclaimed, bestselling novels. The experience also inspired his very first book: a vivid, personal evocation of the atmosphere, the politics, and the moral dilemmas of Vietnam at the height of American involvement. Neither a polemic nor an apologia, To What End was the very first book published to ask the question: What are we doing here? It offers a morally ambiguous view of the war that was radical in its day and still bears the sting of truth: "The war hypnotized," he writes, "and those whose business it was to observe it came to regard it as a drama whose characters and plot were only dimly perceived. "In a foreword to the new PublicAffairs edition, Just reflects on Vietnam, on himself as a young man, and on how his views have and haven't changed since he wrote this sharply observed, sad, beautiful, and still disturbing book. * A rediscovered classic of the Vietnam War, published for the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon * For veterans of the war and of the times--and for readers of Michael Herr's Dispatches, Neil Sheehan's A Bright and Shining Lie, Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, and Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War * Readers of Just's novels will be fascinated by his journalistic treatment of the subject that became his lifelong preoccupation in fiction

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This reportorial classic on the Vietnam War, rereleased on the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, is a concise and atmospheric account of the war-torn country in 1966 and 1967. A writer for The Washington Post, Ward Just pumped out this slender volume in a few weeks following his journalistic tour of duty. Vietnam, he says in a new foreword, "was the war where you sympathized with your countrymen even as you doubted the wisdom of their actions, and the cause for which they fought (and the anti-war protestors were not much admired, either, at least by me)." To What End has no linear narrative; it is rather a series of loosely connected essays and anecdotes, full of dazzling insights. Just turns a comment on Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, into a sharp observation of Vietnamese culture:

The city held little of the symbolic value for the Vietnamese that Rome does for the Italians or London for the British.... Educated Vietnamese, when they thought about it at all, regarded Saigon as a synthetic city dominated by foreigners and ruled by a junta of generals... a non-capital, unrepresentative, artificial. The center of Vietnamese political life was the village; everything else was bureaucracy.

After To What End, Just went on to write several well-received novels (Echo House, A Dangerous Friend). This is no ordinary history of the war, but for a powerful sense of it, Just is hard to beat. --John J. Miller

From Library Journal

"This book should be read because it is neither dovish nor hawkish; it has a pragmatic realism, having been realized by a man who went down to the rice-paddy level of the war to find out what indeed is happening," said LJ's reviewer of this volume, one of the best of the first crop of books written about the Vietnam War while it still raged. The book was praised for its even-handed reporting, which, "while sympathetic to the United States objective, is more than passingly critical of the manner in which we carry out our military and pacification efforts" (LJ 3/15/68).
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 179 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs; First edition edition (April 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1891620770
• ISBN-13: 978-1891620775
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,303,811 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

WARD JUST is the author of fifteen previous novels, including the National Book Award finalist Echo House, A Dangerous Friend, winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for fiction from the Society of American Historians, and An Unfinished Season, winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award and a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More thoughtful than most Vietnam books, April 28, 2000

By 

D. C. Carrad "augustabookman" (Augusta, GA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: To What End: Report From Vietnam (Paperback)

This is really one of a quartet of books by Just about Vietnam. The others are Military Men (shamefully out of print), Stringer (ditto) and his most recent Dangerous Friend. Vietnam also appears in flashes in his other books. It is too bad he does not have a wider following; he is an excellent writer on American politics and Americans abroad.

I disagree completely with his politics and his perceptions of the Vietnam war, but still enjoy reading his work. His prose style is easy and flawless and he has a lot to say. These are all valuable works about a subject that has had more misinformation published about it that any other three topics combined. This book shows the marks of haste (it was written in a few weeks as noted) but is still well worth it. Buy it fast before it goes out of print again as it has been for several years.

2 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Conventional Wisdom, circa 1967, November 22, 2001

By 

Eric T. Dean (Hamden, CT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: To What End: Report From Vietnam (Paperback)

TO WHAT END is a highly cliched book, pretty much encapsulating the conventional wisdom circa 1967, i.e. (1) the Vietnam War as muddy and morally ambiguous; (2) the war as a theater of the absurd; (3) the war as an endless play, leading from nowhere to anywhere; (4) American involvement as a perversion and a distortion; (5) that the VietCong would have won by 1964 in a "fair test of arms and ideas", etc., etc., etc.

What Ward Just willfully overlooks is the MASSIVE aid which the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong received from China and the Soviet Union. What particularly struck me was how little Just knew (or cared to know) about the South Vietnamese themselves. On p. 100, he mentioned that there were some earnest and committed South Vietnamese who believed in their cause, but then he dismissed them as a meaningless minority. The whole book was more about American observations and feelings, mostly by people who hadn't been in the country for much more than 1 year (if that), and a desire to wallow in the absurd, or participate in our own cultural revolution of the late 1960s--in which one's bona fides were defined by whether one was "against the war."

For some perspective on the Vietnam War, check out Michael Lind's THE NECESSARY WAR.