Customer Reviews

To What End: Report From Vietnam

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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.

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.