Firepower, air power, American tolerance of the slaughter of innocents—war in Vietnam has escalated even more things than these. In the spirit of the times the Saigon press corps has added to the press' own artillery, now often sending us the screeching statistic, the lachrymal adjective, the sentence that practically tears at readers' eyes and ears until we are cowed into one close corner of certitude. There are even reporters (and mind you, I don't imply they are wrong) who apparently deplane at Saigon with a soapbox as well as an Olivetti packed in their 44-pound allowance.

Not so Ward Just of the Washington Post. Finishing up a brilliant year as its correspondent in Saigon and in some of its scary environs and sitting down to write his Vietnam report [To What End: Report From Vietnam], he went to extreme lengths—he went, in fact, to Ireland—lest he let analysis escalate to advocacy and advocacy undermine his good faith. Mr. Just anticipated that on the shores of the Shannon, Vietnam's daily calamities and Washington's almost imbecile unawareness of them would be miles enough away to inform his prose without purpling it. Just was right. His book is beautifully restrained, innocent of all polemics and still irresistibly persuasive, a panorama of Vietnam's people, politics and meaningless disasters in a picture built of the most delicate of pointillist dots. Even as one began to think that the only alternative to passionate intensity was Washington's platitudes, one is recalled to gentle reason.

"Friends who have read the manuscript tell me it has the tone of a late-night confessional," says Mr. Just. Never does he raise his voice in writing it; neither does he allow himself the indulgence of irony, the stage-whispered shout. And quite remarkably, never does he write of anything so insufferable as refugee camps, Vietnamese corruption, napalm burns and senseless death. Let others tell of Vietnam's seamiest side—Just has recognized that the bright side of Vietnam's war is wretched enough. He accords a chapter to Ky's incorruptibility but only allows a footnote to his "business activities," and that suffices. While other writers rage at Vietnam's indifference to Vietnam's war and at Vietnamese as straddlers of electrified fences, in Just's compassionate chapter they are seen simply trying to fit their lives to their philosophies: to the Mandate of Heaven….

He must be the only reporter who doesn't do a set piece by going into the paddies with the Vietnamese army and writing of its incompetence, loud transistor radios, siestas, cowardice and stolen chickens, a catalogue that can be differentiated from one to another reporter's story only by the decibels of the reporter's snorts or the deliciousness of his cool understatement. Instead, Just passes an afternoon with the Vietnamese ruff-puffs or regional and popular forces, a jayvee army of "indifferent leadership, ancient weapons, inadequate pay, dreadful housing, and absolutely no motivation," an army, though, that no Pentagon press release has ever insisted was Asia's white hope. Clearly, Just isn't in a vast conspiracy to discredit the Pentagon's optimism when he writes of the ruff-puff company resting in a paddy, cooking half-a-dozen liberated chickens, laughing, ladling soup, and, as a sort of afterdinner entertainment, actually getting the American Air Force to shatter a quite inoffensive hamlet at the paddy's edge….

Just's method is the moral: eliminate everything that can shriek of the war's insanity, and what is left still moans of the war's futility. The only editorial comment is left to Thucydides' Peloponnesian War: "They endured no small sufferings, to no end."