This memior of a marine lt in Vientam was hard for me to rate. On a technical score, this book earns three stars. It is well-written and readable. In terms of content and message, however, I could not say that I certainly liked it. Caputo was about 6 months ahead of my dad on the Quantico-to-Vietnam trajectory. Many of the officers mentioned in the book were men my dad also knew/served with. I read the book largely to learn more about my dad's experiences as a young marine in training and in combat. Caputo was just so whiny and hystrionic that he lost a degree of credibility with me. For one small ex, he makes a big deal about the coppermouth snakes living in the swamps of Quantico. He acts like the marines' lives were on the line from that mortal enemy even before arriving in Vietnam, which is simply laughable. My dad said that he supposed the snakes were there, but that absolutely nobody made an issue of it, and that includes the 12 year old girls from our church who recently went camping there. The bigger problem with the book, though, had to do with his moralizing and arguments against our involvement in Vietnam. First, he claims to have realized as a 22 year old kid in 1965 that the war was a lost cause. He doesn't really give any support to that claim other than to remark that American soldiers were being killed, but it is just not truthful to say that anyone could have known at that stage what the outcome of the war was to be, particularly when the loss took place on campuses of America's colleges rather than in the jungles of Vietnam. Second, he argues that America should not have been in Vietnam at all. That is a perfectly legit proposition, but his supporting arguments are not. His reasoning is, essentially, that because men died, sometimes in horrible ways, we should not have fought. Of course, death (and horrible death) is a part of war and an objection to it is simply an objection to all wars, not just Vietnam. But Caputo does not object to all wars. His argument is just not logical. He also argued that because a small minority of soldiers in Vietnam committed brutal, illegal acts (himself included) the war was wrong. Well, there is an element of the soldiering population in all wars that react in a crazy way and do brutal or illegal things. A marine in WWII ripped out the gold teeth of a wounded but conscious Japanese soldier for the value of the gold. Americans also murdered a couple hundred German POWs upon learning that a troop of German SS had shot a regiment of US soldiers who had surrendured (the Germans claimed to not have had the manpower to take the US soldiers to any sort of camp so they had to just shoot them). All of those things are horrible, but are they an argument to have not resisted Nazi occupation of Europe? I am a little tired of the much-touted bit of misinformation based purely on anecdote that Vietnam held a disproportionate number of war crimes as compared to other wars and that most of the soldiers there were a bunch of murderers. Vietnam just happens to be a war it is popular to villify; WWII, on the other hand, is the hero's war and therefore you will not often hear about the cruel or illegal acts committed by those soldiering it, even though such acts did take place.While only a small minority of soldiers were guilty of war crimes, Caputo was one of them. (I suppose his order would not have *technically* been improper had there not been a tragic, tragic case of mistaken identity). Rather than take responsibility for his own actions, he choses to blame American foreign policy. From start to finish, Caputo is a whiner who credits himself with a prescience about the war's outcome that no one in any position of authority had and shifts blame for a lynching off of himself and onto generalized America. while I enjoyed his appreciation for the best soldier-writers of the WWI generation (Sasson and Owen), he mistakenly appropriates some of their feelings of bitterness about their military leaders. He says something about the generals sending better men than themselves to go die. Better men? The generals in Vietnam were the same guys who were soldiers in WWII and Korea. While there was a lot of reason to disparage the generals directing the men in WWI to be mowed down by the hundreds of thousands to earn a few square feet, there just was not that cause for bitterness against the military personel in Vietnam. At least, Caputo didn't show me one. Maybe I shouldntbe giving this book 3 stars . . .
I've talked before about a class I took in high school that didn't feel completely worthless the way a lot of my other classes did. I took that class because one of my brothers took it the first year it was offered and I remember thinking, "Man, when I'm a Senior, I hope that class is still offered." Because there was a tradition of my brothers getting to take cool classes (like Latin) or having cool teachers (and I'd get the crazy assholes) and then the classes and teachers not existing by the time I get there a couple years later. The US/Vietnam Experience was still offered when I was a Senior and it was a heart-breaking and hard class to take. But I will never forget it.A Rumor of War was a book I took from my brother's shelf some time after we were both in college and he no longer had any need for it. He read this book for the class when he took it, and I was the sort of person who liked to read all the books my older brothers were reading. Even if, as in this case, it's years later.This is not an easy book to read. The book is split into three parts: the first details Caputo's reasons for joining the Marines in the first place and his training. The second part focuses on the unfortunate desk job Caputo held recording casualties. I will now probably forever think about that position any time (like every day) when I whine about my own job which is more in line of helping keep people alive rather than having to write down the disturbing details of young people killed in action. The third part is about Caputo's reassignment to a rifle company.This last section is, not surprisingly, the most difficult to read. Not only is it bloody and honest, there are also bureaucratic frustrations that I'm aware the conflict was rife with. Reading about bureaucracy is about as much fun for me as watching it go on around me.I'm glad to have finally read this book. I remember my brother being greatly affected by it when he read it in high school, and I can see why, especially considering he's a bit more sensitive than even I am (which is saying a lot). In many ways I'm glad I waited until now to read this book; had I read it in high school I would likely have not understood as much or had the right amount of focus to give to it. Now as an adult I read it and think this is one of those books that more people should read so they have a better understanding as to what happened in Vietnam. Yes, this is one man's memoir of his experiences which, I learned from that class in school, is not universal. But it's a start in the right direction on the road of understandingSo much was lost with you, so much talent and intelligence and decency. You were the first from our class of 1964 to die. There were others, but you were the first and more: you embodied the best that was in us. You were a part of us, and a part of us died with you, the small part that was still young, that had not yet grown cynical, grown bitter and old with death. Your courage was an example to us, and whatever the rights or wrongs of the war, nothing can diminish the rightness of what you tried to do. Yours was the greater love. You died for the man you tried to save, and you died pro patria. It was not altogether sweet and fitting, your death, but I'm sure you died believing it was pro patria. You were faithful. Your country is not. As I write this, eleven years after your death, the country for which you died wishes to forget the war in which you died. Its very name is a curse. There are no monuments to its heroes, no statues in small-town squares and city parks, no plaques, nor public wreaths, nor memorials. For plaques and wreaths and memorials are reminders, and they would make it harder for your country to sink into the amnesia for which it longs. It wishes to forget and it has forgotten. But there are a few of us who do remember because of the small things that made us love you—your gestures, the words you spoke, and the way you looked. We loved you for what you were and what you stood for.(p 223-4)
What do You think about A Rumor Of War (1999)?
I've read quite a bit about Vietnam now, and while this is not my favorite book on the subject (Joe Haldeman's "1968", an early entry in the sub-genre is still my favorite) Caputo is a hell of a writer who is honest about the good and evil he did while serving his tour as a second lieutenant in "The Crotch."This memoir is a novel read for me, in that it is the account of an officer's service (most of the books about Vietnam I've read prior to this are the stories of enlisted grunts who have nothing but contempt ((and the occasional fragmentary grenade)) at the ready for their hapless leaders.In darkly poetic prose, reminiscent of Joseph Conrad and the old Bard Bill Shakespeare himself (yes, Caputo has some glorious moments), the reader finds out what it's like to go to officer candidate school, how it feels to lie helpless as death rains down from the sky above, and how the fear can build up inside a man until he finds himself committing atrocities.Indeed, not to give too much of the story away, but Caputo was tried for murder at one point in a court martial. For me, the most fascinating (and most painful) part of the man's story involved his rotation out of a field unit, into the rear. Caputo makes us understand his shame, as he sits around watching fat cat officers play horseshoes while he has no choice but to sit and wait for the bodies of men from his old platoon stream into the base, minus limbs and faces.There is a deeply fatalist, and religious quality to the work, and Caputo's philosophical digressions are never pretentious, always profound, but more important, honest.
—Joseph Hirsch
Recommended by my brother-in-law Aaron - this was a powerful book. While there there certainly parts that grip you powerfully and hold you - the real strength of this book is in its timelessness. The issues to an infantryman in Vietnam are no different than the issues of an infantryman in Iraq. It's a war whose purpose is questioned and human nature is human nature. Anger is anger. VietCong = Iraqi Insurgent. It begs the question, 'when will we learn our lesson?' America is about to lose it's next war.
—Martin
In January of 1961 the newly elected President John F Kennedy stood on the steps of the Capital building in Washington and famously challenged the youth of America to “Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country”.Away in windy Chicago a young student at Loyola University knew just how to answer that call; he would join the United States Marine Corp and play a man’s part in defending the new Camelot against all enemies, foreign and domestic. A Rumor of War is Philip Caputo’s frank and compelling memoir of his transformation from excitable undergraduate to experienced infantry officer amid the humid misery of South Vietnam.Raised in the suburban serenity of Westchester Illinois, where the lulling drone of lawn mowers sought to anaesthetise his youth, Caputo was like generations of young men before him; eager for adventure, eager to be tested and absolutely terrified of being found wanting. Indeed, this fear of failure, a fear that eclipses both fatigue and the terrors of combat alike, plays an important role in driving the young Caputo to endure the gruelling ordeal of officer training school and the boredom and terror of his service on the front line in Vietnam.From the beginning this book stands out in the crowded genre of the war memoir. For a start the man is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and a terrific writer; he’s clearly highly literate and populates the book with well-judged literary references; and crucially from where I was sitting he was also painfully honest. And I’m not just talking about the kind of ‘honesty’ that publishers routinely demand of combat memoirs. No, Caputo goes far beyond the usual confessions of fear and guilt; in A Rumor of War he writes with great frankness about the secret shared by many soldiers – that combat can be addictive, intoxicating and unbelievably exciting.In his description of the camaraderie he found within his unit he turns the reader into a willing confederate to his nostalgic prose; passages which for him are often underwritten by memories of almost unbearable tenderness. At the same time he evokes with enervating exactness the numbing boredom of static warfare, the deadening routine of manning fixed positions and the remote, pointless obsessions of those running the war at far remove front the front line.Only once did I feel this honestly thinning in the book, during those passages which deal with an incident in which men under his command shot and killed two suspected Viet Cong prisoners. I personally felt a shadow of reticence fall across the narrative and if reticence there was then I’d be willing to put money on it having being deployed in the protection of his soldiers and not in the defence of his own reputation. For Caputo honour and duty are sacred concepts and even though he had no part in the killings he took full responsibility for the actions of his men, who were brutalised by a war in a place, in which as Caputo himself puts it “a callus begins to grow around our hearts”.After his honourable discharge in 1967 Caputo got involved with the anti-war movement but found that he could not hate the war on the simplistic terms of those who had not experienced it. He built a successful career for himself as a journalist and the book ends poignantly with his eye witness account of the fall of Saigon in 1975.A Rumor of War is not only an outstanding account of war and the man, but also a touching reminiscence on the loss of innocence. In it he mourns for not only the dead, but also for the idealistic young man who gradually faded away, amid the heat haze and smoke of battle, in a land very far away from Westchester, Illinois.
—Alfred Searls
