A Rumor of War

Philip Caputo’s 1977 memoir, A Rumor of War, depicts Caputo’s true experiences serving as a Marine during the Vietnam War. Lieutenant Caputo arrived in Vietnam in March 1965, with the first fighting troops assigned to combat there, and soon learned that his romantic notions of war bore no resemblance to the bloody brutality he and his men confront in fighting the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. As well as acknowledging the dehumanizing brutality of war, Caputo’s memoir also considers the complex psychology of a culture that taught its young men that war and sacrifice make a man out of a boy, glorifying adventure and bloodlust, manliness and killing rage. As Caputo writes, his memoir exposes “the things men do in war and the things war does to men.”

Caputo was raised in a middle-class haze of apple pie, baseball, and fishing in a town near Chicago. Bored with safety and comfortable living, Caputo hungered for the violence and action that he believed would grant him manhood and heroic status. Caputo volunteered for the Marine ROTC program in college and entered the military as a second Lieutenant after graduation. The causes Caputo believes in mirror his transformation from an inexperienced twenty-year-old soldier to a man driven to maniacal violence in his quest to revenge his fallen comrades.

Dropped into the mountainous jungle of Vietnam, his small infantry company—Charlie Company of the 2nd platoon, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines—attempts to seek and destroy the enemy. The weather and terrain alone are murderous: relentless heat and a green jungle of elephant grass and trees, thick and impenetrable. The Viet Cong ambush the American forces at will from the jungle; soon, none of the men are able to bear the psychological stress. Driven to madness by the conditions and their sense of being unable to protect themselves from the Viet Cong, the men take trophies from fallen Viet Cong soldiers, including ears, and they murder wounded Viet Cong soldiers without a second thought. Wanting only to protect his men and meet his superior’s expectations, Caputo’s reason and judgment desert him, as he experiences murderous rages followed by guilt and remorse.

Removed to a desk position at headquarters for a few months, Caputo obsesses over the American body counts, has hallucinations involving the faces of dead men, and learns to resent the trivial decisions and priorities of the administrators and leaders of the war. The ethical distinction drawn between the wholesale destruction of villages by napalm and the slaughter of those same villagers by Caputo’s men erodes Caputo’s belief in the justness or integrity of the war. As he grows more emotionally numb, he becomes even more enraged. He longs for death—the ultimate stage of dissociation from reality.

Sent back to his men at his own request, the summer monsoon season’s relentless heat and rain make a mockery of fighting on the ground. The war is reduced to butchery, tempered only by the men’s tender concern for each other and the random acts of kindness they dole out to the civilian population, as when a soldier puts salve on a baby’s jungle sores after the company has set fire to an entire village.

With his company decimated, Caputo resorts to any means of finding and killing the enemy. When a boy brings him the news that two Viet Cong soldiers are hiding in a nearby village, Caputo sends his best snipers in the hope that they will kill rather than capture the enemy soldiers. His snipers kill two men and bring back the bodies, but one of them is the boy who brought them the information. Caputo faces a court-martial for the murder of these two men. He is exonerated, but his belief that they are fighting a just or honorable war is shattered. Soon after, he receives an honorable discharge.

Nearly ten years later, Caputo returns to Vietnam, as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, to report on the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese. His emotions in turmoil, Caputo reflects on the war—the loss of humanity and the waste of human lives and resources. He leaves Vietnam on April 29, 1975.

Ultimately, this memoir indicts both the public’s indifference to the war and the generals’ and the politicians’ indifference to the suffering of American soldiers in Vietnam. Considered a modern classic on the costs of war, in the literary tradition of Homer’s Iliad, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Caputo speaks as America’s conscience, his legacy enduring in a truthful, unsparing portrait of the American war machine.