A RUMOR OF WAR, by Philip Caputo.



This is a RE-read for me. I first read Caputo's Vietnam war memoir more than 35 years ago, in a mass market paperback edition, when it was still a pretty new book. Then it was just a very popular and bestselling book. This time I read it in a 1996 Holt Paperback edition, with a front cover caption calling it "The Classic Vietnam Memoir." And it has certainly earned this title, still in print, still much-read. One of the lines I remembered was a comment from a seasoned Korean War veteran, who told the young Lieutenant Caputo - "Before you leave here, sir, you're going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy." And in the madness and heat of combat, young Caputo learned this to be too true. Indeed, he even discovered some of that brutality in himself.



One especially affecting section of the narrative depicts the time that Caputo spent as "Officer in Charge of the Dead," and the fevered, too-real nightmares that went with that job. Another is the unsettling, inebriated feeling he experiences during R&R in Saigon, a feeling that he suddenly realizes is no more than freedom from fear. Similarly, near the end of his tour, he feels it again when he becomes, at least temporarily, indifferent to death.



"It was not a feeling of invincibility; indifference, rather. I had ceased to fear death because I had ceased to care about it. Certainly I had no illusions that my death, if it came, would be a sacrifice. It would merely be a death, and not a good one either ... There were no good deaths in the war."



The real insanity of the war is perhaps best illustrated in Caputo's being brought up on murder charges for a patrol and 'snatch' of suspected VC's he helped to plan. By that time he was not simply indifferent, he was angry, and he could no longer stomach the war.



The flat numbness that was felt by so many veterans of the Vietnam war is well summed up with the final lines of Caputo's story as he takes off on a flight out of Vietnam, bound for home -



"None of us was a hero. We would not return to cheering crowds, parades, and the pealing of great cathedral bells. We had done nothing more than endure. We had survived, and that was our only victory."



Philip Caputo is a fine writer, and yes, this is "The classic Vietnam memoir." Very highly recommended.



- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA