Exercise of Power

TO WHAT END by Ward S. Just. 209 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $4.95.

Most of the books fathered by the Viet Nam war and mothered by anxious publishers have been either captious collections of preconceptions or argumentative exercises in polemics. In Viet Nam, says Washington Post Reporter Ward Just, who covered the war there for 18 months, "it was no trick to find the facts to back up the impressions, or the preconceptions: facts were everywhere, and with suitable discrimination could be used to support almost any argument." To his credit, Just does not argue. To What End is an almost apolitical and unusually successful attempt to convey a sense of Viet Nam's violent confusion.

Just examines the now familiar ambiguities of the war with detail that is not often found in books of this kind. The language barrier, he notes, is so great that neither English nor Vietnamese can be successfully translated one into the other. He points out that since Vietnamese verbs do not change tense, the Vietnamese sense of time is indefinite. More important, perhaps, is the absence of the personal pronoun "I." Because Vietnamese speak of themselves in the third person, "a man's identity, his sense of himself, is always in relation to something, or someone else--usually something, or someone, having to do with the village, which is one reason the village is so important in Vietnamese life."

The Whisper. The war became unequivocally real for Just when in June 1966 he joined an elite unit of the 101st Airborne Division for a reconnaissance mission. His description of the ordeal contains some of the best combat narrative to come out of Viet Nam. After a daylong fight, in which the 40-man patrol was whittled down by the North Vietnamese, Just found himself trapped in a vulnerable com mand post. It was filling up fast with wounded. Suddenly, the enemy began to lob grenades at them. Suddenly, Just was seized by the realization that there was no way to stop them:

"I was thinking about being thirty, and holding an automatic pistol I didn't know how to fire, when Washburn leaned over and very quietly, very precisely, whispered 'grenade.' He probably yelled it, but I was switched off, half-dead from the pounding of the artillery and the 500-pound bombs and it seemed to me that the warning came in a whisper. Then he gave me a push. There was a flash and a furious burst of fire; the grenade had landed a yard away." The attack was repulsed by a radioman with a grenade launcher, but Just was badly gouged by the shrapnel.

Just's detached and determinedly accurate assessment belongs to a tradition of war reporting that traces back to Thucydides, the ancient historian whose account of the Peloponnesian War is depressingly relevant today. Thucydides was no polemicist either, but his message was clear: the exercise of power, however necessary it may seem, can lead a city-state--or a nation--into unforeseen danger.

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