To What End: Report From Vietnam

by Ward Just

In December 1965 Ward Just went to Vietnam as a correspondent for the Washington Post. In his eighteen months there he would earn a citation from the Overseas Press Club and a Combat Infantryman's Badge—and discover a time, place, and subject that would fuel many decades of writing and many acclaimed, best-selling novels.
The experience also inspired To What End, 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, it was the very first book on Vietnam to pose 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 string of truth. "The war hypnotized," Ward Just 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 profoundly moving foreword to this new edition, Just reflects on the legacy of 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

179 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Ward Just was a war correspondent, novelist, and short story author.

Ward Just graduated from Cranbrook School in 1953. He briefly attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He started his career as a print journalist for the Waukegan (Illinois) News-Sun. He was also a correspondent for Newsweek and The Washington Post from 1959 to 1969, after which he left journalism to write fiction.

His influences include Henry James and Ernest Hemingway. His novel An Unfinished Season was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005. His novel Echo House was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1997. He has twice been a finalist for the O. Henry Award: in 1985 for his short story "About Boston," and again in 1986 for his short story "The Costa Brava, 1959." His fiction is often concerned with the influence of national politics on Americans' personal lives. Much of it is set in Washington, D.C., and foreign countries. Another common theme is the alienation felt by Midwesterners in the East.

Reviews

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Written in 1968 after returning from 18 months in Vietnam where he covered the war for the Washington Post, and republished in 2000, Ward Just was the first journalist to declare that American adventure in Vietnam was doomed. This is not a novel but it reads like one. Just shows that what Graham Greene prophesied in The Quiet American had indeed become true only 10 years later, and we all know that what Just prophesied in To What End in turn had become true in another 10 years. That is not, however, what gives power to the book. Rather, it is complexity of the war and its competing emotions that Just paints so well. I had read (and liked) many of Just's novels before I read this book. Now I understand where his voice comes from. Finally,this book couldn't help but make me think of where we are in Iraq and Afghanistan and realize that we have learned very little from our experience in Vietnam.