Description:
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
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