Why did caputo write a rumor of war

Tank stuck in the mud during the Vietnam War 7. Why did Caputo believe the entire court marshall process he went through was absurd? How did the conduct of the trial reveal that the US government continued to cling to myths and ignore reality? Finally, did you think the book was effective? How can the experiences of one soldier shed light on the entire US experience in Vietnam?

About the Author: American author and journalist. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. Follow Following. Sign me up. Already have a WordPress. Log in now. But it's a start in the right direction on the road of understanding So much was lost with you, so much talent and intelligence and decency.

You were the first from our class of 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. View all 3 comments. Caputo writes about his experiences that led him to enlist in in order to satisfy his romantic ideals about war. His experiences vary as his company defends an airstrip then engages in search and destroy missions before being put in charge of the dead at a base camp. Then he joins another rifleman unit for search and destory missions.

The apex occurs in which a couple of civilian noncombatants are killed and he faces court martial and is eventually cleared of the charges. But throughout these experiences Caputo loses his illusion and romantic ideals and begins to question the validity of the war and the reasoning that fuels the war.

But the beauty of the book lies in the details: the stifling heat, the insects, the fatigue, constant worry about snipers and booby traps, an enemy that is indistinguishable from the noncombatant general population, inept officers caught up in the bottom line of kills, lack of the basic joys of life, and so on.

My only criticism is that it would have been nice to have put his operations in perspective with the general strategies of the American forces, but it is a minor fault. View 1 comment. This was a really interesting memoir. The author was a newly minted US Marine Corp 2nd Lieutenant whose unit was transferred to Na-dang to take over defence of the base from the ARVN who were departing on a counter offensive.

His view is naturally that of a small unit commander with the largest body of men under him a platoon of infantry.

He describes in detail what it was like to go out on patrol, and the effect the body count process had on the psychology of himself and his men. Over his tour This was a really interesting memoir.

Over his tour he initially commanded a line platoon, worked at Regimental HQ then took command of a line platoon again. This is his personal account so it focuses on about how he felt about what he saw did himself and ordered others to do. It contains details of his experiences on patrol, in ambush, assault, time on base and on leave.

At times this is very direct and graphic. Well worth the time reading 4 stars. Like "Dispatches", by Michael Herr, it is a gripping first person narrative of what it was like to be in Vietnam- but Herr was there as a war correspondent, and the worst action he sees is brief visits to forward camps. Caputo, on the other hand, is a Second Lt.

Months spent sleeping in foxholes deep in VC territory, dozens of fellow soldiers "A Rumor of War" is a deeply disturbing book.

Months spent sleeping in foxholes deep in VC territory, dozens of fellow soldiers killed in the bloodiest ways imaginable right in front of him, and finally, participation in obscene war crimes. But it isn't the facts of his experience that make this book so disturbing. Caputo's strength is that he forces you to stand in his shoes, and by the end, you come to realize that you would have probably comported yourself in much the same way he did.

And that erases any sense of moral superiority you might feel towards soldiers, and leaves you with the very uncomfortable feeling that as a citizen, you bear direct culpability for these things terrible things our country makes them do. Caputo begins describes his indoctrination into the Marines. He is the real deal— deeply courageous, committed to his job, and unquestioning about the larger issues at play in the war: "Napoleon once said that he could make men die for little pieces of ribbon.

By the time the battalion left for Vietnam, I was ready to die for considerably less, for a few favorable remarks in a fitness report. I never answered truthfully, afraid that people would think of me as some sort of war-lover. The truth is, I felt happy. A brief respite in the rear command base, tallying the numbers of MIAs and KIAs and WIAs just makes him feel worse, and soon, like many of his fellow soldiers, Caputo is on the edge of losing his mind.

He asks for a return to forward command, and quickly finds himself even deeper in the shit. What follows is the most gruesome and strangely beautiful series of scenes I've ever read in literature. For instance, regarding courage in battle: " His blind rage then begins to focus on the men who are the source of the danger- and of his fear. It concentrates inside him, and through some chemistry is transformed into a fierce resolve to fight until the danger ceases to exist. But this resolve, which is sometimes called courage, cannot be separated from the fear that has aroused it.

Its very measure is the measure of that fear. It is, in fact, a powerful urge not to be afraid anymore, to rid himself of fear by eliminating the source of it. This inner, emotional war produces a tension almost sexual in its intensity. It is too painful to endure for long. All a soldier can think about is the moment when he can escape his impotent confinement and release this tension. All other considerations, the rights and wrongs of what he is doing Nothing matters except the final, critical instant when he leaps out into the violent catharsis he both seeks and dreads.

The men are duly killed, and it turns out that they weren't VC at all, but instead, loyal South Vietnamese citizens. He and his men are then put on trial for war crimes. In his own mind, he is clearly guilty, but despite his guilt, and a number of other shocking incidents that he has been involved in torching villages, shooting civilians , he finds himself acquitted and returned home. As I said, deeply disturbing stuff, all the more so because Caputo is such a skilled writer after the war he became a Pulitzer prize winning journalist and war correspondent.

He clearly suffered deeply in the war, and is haunted by his experiences. It's impossible not to feel sympathy for him and his fellow soldiers. It's easy to forget now, but sympathy for Vietnam vets was in somewhat short supply after the war— as a country we were embarrassed by the loss and ashamed of the atrocities we committed at places like My Lai and Hue. So Caputo's book was deeply revolutionary, and led to a whole-scale reconsideration of the war by many readers, as well as a flood of similar books and films.

In his preface, Caputo writes "This book ought not to be regarded as a protest But I don't think so. For a liberal, it makes you feel a sympathy for soldiers you might have never experienced before. For a conservative, it might make you question the high price of war, and reconsider if war is justified for anything short of existential threats to the country.

And for all Americans, it will make you feel a deep sense of shame and responsibility for what we put these soldiers through, and the terrible damage we inflicted on Vietnam. The record of the last forty years has proved that we or the leaders we elect haven't learned much from the experience- our tribulations in Latin America, Iraq, and Afghanistan continue to be bloody and largely pointless. But there is always time to change, and that's why "A Rumor of War" and books like it will always remain timely and important reads.

View 2 comments. 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. I read the book largely to learn more about my dad's experiences as a young marine in training and in com This memior of a marine lt in Vientam was hard for me to rate.

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 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. 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.

He says something about the generals sending better men than themselves to go die. Better men? 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. View all 14 comments. To me, Philip Caputo inarguably wrote its best memoir.

Unlike more recent attempts in the genre, Caputo's account of combat is never blinkered, gung-ho, or glamourised. Blunt as a boulder, vivid, and unforgettable, I rate it higher than even Michael Herr's Dispatches. Shelves: vietnam-and-other-wars. Caputo's book doesn't need another review. I will offer mine anyway, if nothing else to contrast it with Wolff's "In Pharoah's Army," an inferior book.

Not even after a couple years of college in , when I camped on the mall with 1, other Vietnam Vets Against the War including John Kerry. Caputo had the advantage of education on me. Not just that, I need Caputo's book doesn't need another review. Not just that, I needed a lot more time to experience other things and gain a broader perspective. But he made it all perfectly clear when he had a dialogue in the officer's mess with the chaplain and the doctor, "The chaplain's morally superior attitude had rankled me, but his sermon had managed to plant doubt in my mind, doubt about the war.

Much of what he had said made sense: our tactical operations did seem futile and directed toward no apparent end. Twelve wrecked homes. The chaplain's words echoed.

That's twelve wrecked homes. The doctor and I think in terms of human suffering, not statistics. If you want to know what the BS about body counts was--that ended up in a lawsuit by General Westmoreland against Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes, if you want to know what Vietnam was like because you are too young to have learned about it during that time in America and the world's history, read this book.

If you want to know how it relates to more recent events, try my own memoir, Waiting for Westmoreland , that finally came out so many years later. Easy read. He had some good points on war that of course never having been through a war - I would never have thought about.

It wasn't as philosophical or even maybe horrific as I needed. He didn't sell me on why exactly did the Vietnam war effect men's psyches more than other wars. I guess that's what I was looking for. To understand their psyche. He only would delve into that a few times. I guess I felt this book was a good overall view on the Vietnam war.

But really it didn't make me feel a wh Easy read. But really it didn't make me feel a whole lot and didn't make me think a whole lot either. View all 4 comments. I must say this is even a stronger book than Dispatches by Michael Herr, which I must have read last year or so. Herr's perspective is that of what we nowadays probably would call an embedded journalist. He accompanied the Vietnam war as a journalist for the Esquire, and while his account is disturbing in it's own way A Rumor Of War is even harder on the reader in that respect, as Caputo signed up for the USMC and was amongst the first US troops to be deployed.

So you're not only confronted with I must say this is even a stronger book than Dispatches by Michael Herr, which I must have read last year or so. So you're not only confronted with the sheer brutality of war itself, but you get an account of someone who not was in place, but actively engaged in doing morally ambiguous and I'd argue even outright wrong actions.

Recommended for: Everyone who needs a brief reminder why you shouldn't go to war. Caputo's incorporation of sensationalism in this work betrays him miserably.

It seems as if someone like a producer or agent may have whispered into this guy's ear, listen don't be afraid to ham it up a little. You want this book to sell, right? Follow this pattern, etc. Notwithstanding the undeniable factual events he shares with the reader, Caputo's sense of sincerity is clearly and unfortunately diluted with his zealous ambition to be more skilled at the craft of writing than he actually is.

Honestly and plain talk would have served him so much better. The facts of what happened to him are incredible enough. We don't need all the superfluous drama Philip. Dec 06, Kurt Reichenbaugh rated it really liked it. A detour from Oz into another world of confusion, frustration, boredom and terror that so uniquely describes a tour of duty in wartime.

I bought this book in paperback many years ago when I was still in high school, not long before I joined the Air Force.

Of course that was during piece time, so I had none of the apprehension and anticipation of heroics that the author had when he joined the marines in the early days of the Vietnam war. I didn't get around to reading it back then in because A detour from Oz into another world of confusion, frustration, boredom and terror that so uniquely describes a tour of duty in wartime. I didn't get around to reading it back then in because it got lost somewhere in my confused moving around and disintegration of my family back home.

Reading it now I thought it was a compelling narrative of another time, far removed from today's wars and military life. Yet things haven't changed much in how wars are managed for political means. And of course there is no longer a draft to pull young men and women from their lives at home into the war machine. Just "forever wars" for the few volunteers who go while the rest of the country pursues the latest iPhones and America's Got Talent back home.

I don't mean to sound bitter, because it's a good book for anyone interested in a personal perspective of duty in a war. After reading it, I am glad I waited. Philip Caputo divides his memoir into three distinct sections. The first covers his reasons for enlisting in the Marine Corps prior to the war and his initial deployment as part of the first ground combat unit of the Vietnam War. The final section follows Caputo as he left the desk job and returned to the front where he experienced many horrific events and countless deaths of his comrades.

Caputo was able to describe the feelings and experiences he faced in dramatic fashion. Together with the nightmares, Caputo also manages to describe the conditions which resulted in so many men going mad.

He piles on with the never-ending heat and humidity of the dry season with the incessant downpours and winds of the wet. He describes the suffocating jungle that has become so synonymous with Vietnam as follows p. It was the inability to see that vexed us most. No VC. On the way out, his men were hit by a mine and enemy gunfire resulting in heavy casualties.

About one severely injured man in his unit, Caputo writes p. They were the hurt, dumb eyes of a child who has been severely beaten and does not know why. It was his eyes and his silence and the foamy blood and the gurgling, wheezing sound in his chest that aroused in me a sorrow so deep and a rage so strong that I could not distinguish the one emotion from the other. In this lies the true greatness of A Rumor of War. How would I react in a situation like that?

Would I be able to last the month tour in those hellish conditions? What would I be like after a terrifying deployment like this? Would I lose my ability to feel emotions as many of these men did? To what lengths would I have gone to ensure my men and I would survive? It is easy to sit back and judge the actions of others. It is more difficult, however, to listen to their stories and imagine yourself in their position — to face the unbearable heat and rains, to patrol a jungle and see no farther than a foot in front of you, to constantly be under the threat of an ambush, to not get any serious answers from the locals, to see another one of your friends cut down every day, knowing it could very well be you next.

Although I'm giving this book 5 stars, it's a little hard for me to simply say that I enjoyed it. It's not a pleasant read. It's dark. It's ugly. It's war. And this book throws you right in the midst of it. Caputo started the war with a lot of field work including jungle expeditions and shooting escapades, and eventually was sent to keep track of the everyday deaths occurring during the war and all the paperwork associated with such a job.

Later he was put back in charge of a platoon which eventually lead to his downfall following an unethical order he gave his men that resulted in the killing of a couple Vietnamese pedestrians believed to be part of the Viet Cong. Caputo was acquitted of all charges and was given a letter of reprimand from the general. About ten years later he continued his Marine endeavors as he reported to Vietnam and witnessed the surrender of the Saigon Government to the Communist North Vietnamese.

Caputo's war experience was plagued by I believe the fact that he became mentally unstable and ended up killing innocent people is wrong, but I also believe it wasn't his fault.

The war was at fault for Caputo's downfall, the war was at fault for the depletion of all the soldier's mental stability, and the war was at fault for every casualty the United States was forced to deal with. My thoughts after reading this book are that war can really take a toll on someone and war can bring out the worse in everyone. Works Cited: Caputo, Philip. A Rumor of War. Get Access. Good Essays.

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