The belated dismissal of murder charges against the eight Special Forces personnel in Vietnam throws into glaring relief what has been the least noticed aspect of an utterly regrettable war — the general incompetence of those charged with achieving that fata morgana, victory, or even a tolerable peace.

The scandal itself will, no doubt, have been all but forgotten by the time these words appear, though leaving, to be sure, a residue of heightened mistrust of an Administration which could not foresee the public consequences of its actions, misjudged its own courage, and was guilty, moreover, of intolerable hypocrisy. Not to understand that the very climate of Vietnam, the violence, the suspicion, the tangled intrigues joining Americans to South Vietnamese, produced the casual murder of a double agent is to understand nothing at all of the consequences of the American intervention in this luckless corner of the world.