To What End?

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