Sometimes Pulitzer prize winning authors are a little too snooty for me and can't get out of the way of themselves. But every now and then I find a real beaut. This is one of those. I can see how the topic, The Vietnam war, would not be for everyone but it intrigues me.
My favorites on the subject so far are The 13th Valley by Del Vecchio and Matterhorn by Marlante wonderful books don't miss this one either. A Rumor of War just shouldered it's way above these. It's an amazing read.
If you could wash the words off the page, they'd clog the drain, fat and luscious without being pretentious. What makes this book great is Caputo's unflinching description of his emotions, raw, innocent, and too real. View all 21 comments. Sep 22, Michael rated it really liked it Recommended to Michael by: howard.
Shelves: memoir , non-fiction , military , vietnam-war. The variety in these memoirs and fictional portrayals makes it clear how complex the issues are, both in the general topic of men at war and the situation of different people at different times and locations during the war.
Here we get a memoir from the early part of the war. Caputo grew up in a suburb of Chicago and was a student at Loyola University when he was recruited by the Marines in Slowly he gets jaded from the futility of long defensive duties, dangerous patrols with frequent small skirmishes, and rare pitched battles for territory often abandoned soon after securing. That conclusion may have been in the mind of the President and top advisors by , but Marlantes complained in the PBS documentary how he had to learn about that twisted outlook the hard way after he arrived in He also sees the beginnings of casual killing of civilians by a growing minority of soldiers.
Once a soldier has experienced the death of buddies from snipers or mines, the frustration of not being able to distinguish innocent peasants from Viet Cong was too much to put a governor on the outlet of violent action. The honesty of Caputo stands out where it comes to his own crossing of moral boundaries.
From small personal intuition and comments of one native under interrogation, he is sure at one point that he knows the identity of a couple of VC in the nearby village. Unfortunately, his men have a hair-trigger over resistance, and they end up killing two men, one of which turns out to be the informant. Long before atrocities like Mei Lai came to pass, we see in his arrest for murder a nice example of the military trying to do the right thing.
Needless to say, the charge soon gets reduced to minor infraction, but one that ends his service in combat. Caputo is forgiving of himself which some readers may object to. The calculus of morality is to him makes these accidental deaths on the same scale as deaths of civilians after a mortar attack or tactical bombing though different from the mindless slaughter of civilians with the massive bombings later in the war. In sum, this war memoir is a well written, accessible, and revelatory account of the early experience of regular combat soldiers in Vietnam.
It makes a perfect complement to watching the PBS series. View all 9 comments. I have just finished experiencing this book for the second time. The first time I read it in the standard book format six years ago although this book was first published in and was immediately hailed as a star of the then beginning of Vietnam as a popular topic. There are books about Vietnam in according to author Caputo in the post script to this book.
Six years after first reading it I have now almost totally moved into the Kindle and Audible world of book rating. This audible I have just finished experiencing this book for the second time. He was there for 16 months and left after a military murder case against him was dropped. I had forgotten that part of the book amazingly enough. He next return to Vietnam in as a journalist and was there when Saigon fell.
This book does not pretend to be history. It has nothing to do with politics, power, strategy, national interests, or foreign policy; nor is it an indictment of the great men who lead us into Indochina and whose mistakes were paid for with the blood of some quite ordinary men.
In a general sense, it is simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to them. In Vietnam it was called the American War. Two years is a short time for the healing of wounds so some of the wounds detailed in this book are still ugly and bloody. This is a personal story of a boy becoming a man, a boy who volunteered to become a Marine, seeing it as his patriotic duty, and became a man in the process. He came home from the war jaded and disillusioned and against the war.
I was involved in the antiwar movement at the time and struggles, unsuccessfully, to reconcile my opposition to the war with the nostalgia. Later, I realized a reconciliation was impossible; I would never be able to hate the war with anything like the undiluted passion of my friends in the movement.
Because I had fought in it, it was not an abstract issue, but a deeply emotionally experience, the most significant thing that had happened to me. It held my thoughts, senses, and feelings in an unbreakable embrace. I would hear in thunder the roar of artillery. I could not listen to the rain without recalling those drenched nights on the line, nor walk through woods without instinctively searching for a trip wire or an ambush. I could protest as loudly as the most convinced activist, but I could not deny the grip the war had on me, nor the fact that it had been an experience as fascinating as it was repulsive, as exhilarating as it was sad, as tender as it was cruel.
Ordinary men became crazed killers under the right conditions: Weeks of bottled-up tensions would be released in a few minutes of orgiastic violence, men screaming and shouting obscenities above the explosions of grenades and the rapid, ripping bursts of automatic rifles. He and Peterson try to stop the destruction, but it is no use: 3rd platoon seems to have gone crazy. They destroy with uncontrolled fury.
At last it is over. The hamlet which is marked on our maps as Giao-Tri 3 no longer exists. All that remains are piles of smoldering ash and a few charred poles still standing.
With the mud, heat, leeches, and clawing thorns, and the risk of a wounded VC lobbing a grenade from his hiding place, the mood of the company turned savage. This was especially true of 1st platoon; they had done the actual killing, and once men begin killing it is not easy to stop them. An enormous amount of blood had poured out of him and he was lying in it, a crimson puddle in which floated bits of skin and white cartilage. There was nothing on him, no photographs, no letters or identification.
That would disappoint the boys at intelligence, but it was fine with me. I wanted this boy to remain anonymous; I wanted to think of him, not as a dead human being, with a name, age, and family, but as a dead enemy. That made everything easier.
We were simply aware, in a way we could not express, that something significant had happened to us. Men were killed, evacuated with wounds, or rotated home at a constant rate, then replaced by other men who were killed, evacuated, or rotated in their turn. By that time, a loss only meant a gap in the line that needed filling. I like some books so much that I could quote the entire book and call it a review. This is one of those books.
One good paragraph after another, page after page. What could there possibly be about war that could make such good copy? How do you tell parents that all the years that they had spent raising and educating their son were for nothing? It was a good word. Author Caputo actually lived this book; it is nonfiction, a memoir. A memoir. That almost makes it sound literary rather than horrific. After some months in the rear, safe from bullets and booby-traps, Caputo asked to be sent back to the front line.
I was sure that another few months of identifying bodies would land me in a psychiatric ward. On staff, there was too much time to brood over those corpses; there would be very little time to think in a line company. That is the secret to emotional survival in war, not thinking.
Finally, there was hatred, a hatred buried so deep that I could not then admit its existence. I can now, though it is still painful. I burned with a hatred for the Viet Cong and with an emotion that dwells in most of us, one closer to the surface than we care to admit: a desire for retribution. I did not hate the enemy for their politics, but for murdering Simpson, for executing that boy whose body had been found in the river, for blasting the life out of Walt Levy.
Revenge was one of the reasons I volunteered for a line company. I wanted a chance to kill somebody. Can you dig it? Caputo tells it like it is. But organized or not, butchery was butchery, so who was to speak of rules and ethics in a war that had none? I said that I liked it very much.
It was a beautiful city when you compared it to the mess in the countryside. I think it is the war. And if you are writing a book about fighting in a war, you write about thinking about death.
Thousands of people died each week in the war, and the sum of all their deaths did not make any difference. The war went on without them, and as it went on without them, so would it go on without me. My death would not alter a thing. Walking down the trail, I could not remember having a felt an emotion more sublime or liberating than that indifference toward my own death. The men like Philip Caputo who write the books like A Rumor of War are the ones who live to tell the story.
How many likely authors die with war stories unwritten? How many war stories are untold by the thousands of men of come home damaged and remain mute for the rest of their lives? How many men can honestly tell of the atrocities they have themselves committed?
Then it happened. The platoon exploded. It was a collective emotional detonation of men who had been pushed to the extremity of endurance. I lost control of them and even myself. Desperate to get to the hill, we rampaged through the rest of the village, whooping like savages, torching thatch huts, tossing grenades into the cement houses we could not burn. In our frenzy, we crashed through the hedgerows without feeling the stabs of the thorns.
We did not feel anything. We were past feeling anything for ourselves, let alone for others. We shut our ears to the cries and pleas of the villagers. Tai Sao? This is what an ashamed Philip Caputo was to write when he had survived the rampage. After their time in Vietnam, soldiers voluntarily came to testify at public hearings and at the Winter Soldier Investigations to committing atrocities in the war.
A Rumor of War has something of a Hollywood conclusion. Caputo, a military officer, and five other soldiers are charged with murder for the killing of two young South Vietnamese men who were mistakenly thought to be Viet Cong.
He is guilty but the charges are eventually dropped and he leaves Vietnam having traveled the distance from being an patriotic idealist about the war to being an antiwar protestor.
I find I need to regularly remind myself that this story is nonfiction. I cannot give this book less than five stars. It makes it as clear as any book I have read that the American War in Vietnam made criminals of many young Americans who followed leaders down an immoral path.
A few days later, Neal told me and the other officers that he was adopting a new policy: from now on, any marine in the company who killed a confirmed Viet Cong would be given an extra beer ration and the time to drink it. Because our men were so exhausted, we knew the promise of time off would be as great an inducement as the extra ration of beer. That is the level to which we had sunk from the lofty idealism of a year before.
We were going to kill people for a few cans of beer and the time to drink them. Definitely five stars. View all 6 comments. 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.
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 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: " Clewis, R. Clewis, London: Bloomsbury , — Cochrane, T. The emotional experience of the sublime. Ekman, P. An argument for basic emotions. Eskine, K. Stirring images: fear, not happiness or arousal, makes art more sublime. Emotion Fingerhut, J. Wonder, appreciation, and the value of art. Brain Res. Gordon, A. The dark side of the sublime: distinguishing a threat-based variant of awe.
Griskevicius, V. Influence of different positive emotions on persuasion processing: a functional evolutionary approach. Hur, Y. Facing the sublime: physiological correlates of the relationship between fear and the sublime. Ishizu, T. A neurobiological enquiry into the origins of our experience of the sublime and beautiful.
Kant, I. Critique of the Power of Judgment , ed. Guyer, trans. Guyer and E. Matthews Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kearney, R. Keltner, D. Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Aesthetic trinity theory and the sublime. Today 55, 64— Mann, T. The Magic Mountain. McShane, K. Neosentimentalism and the valence of attitudes. Nicolson, M. New York, NY: W. Pelowski, M. Quantifying the if, the when, and the what of the sublime: a survey and latent class analysis of incidence, emotions, and distinct varieties of personal sublime experiences.
Piff, P. Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior. Quinn, P. Religious awe, aesthetic awe. Midwest Stud. XXI, — Rivera, G. Awe and meaning: elucidating complex effects of awe experiences on meaning in life.
Rudd, M. Sawada, K. Influence of positive and threatened awe on the attitude toward norm violations. Shapshay, S. Contemporary environmental aesthetics and the neglect of the sublime. Levinson, London: Palgrave-Macmillan , 84— Shiota, M. The faces of positive emotion. New York Acad. Beyond happiness: building a science of discrete positive emotions.
Zuckert, R. Awe or envy: herder contra kant on the sublime. Art Crit. Keywords : awe, positive awe, threat-based awe, sublime, aesthetic experience, fear, admiration. The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author s and the copyright owner s are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice.
No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. As a result of the constant sight of corpses and mangled bodies, Caputo grows less affected by the prospect of death and becomes a shell of a person, apathetic about death and even more callous toward the enemy. Caputo thus illustrates how war can kill the human spirit as easily as it does a human body.
A man saw the heights and depths of human behavior in Vietnam, all manner of violence and horrors so grotesque that they evoked more fascination than disgust. Once I had seen pigs eating napalm-charred corpses—a memorable sight, pigs eating roast people.
On the way back, I saw an example of the paradoxical kindness-and-cruelty that made Vietnam such a peculiar war. One of our corpsman was treating the infant with skin ulcers […] At the same time, and only a few yards away, our interpreter, a Vietnamese marine lieutenant, roughly interrogated the woman who had been tending the fire. The lieutenant was yelling at her and waving a pistol in front of her ravaged face […] This went on for several minutes.
Then his voice rose to a hysterical pitch, and holding the forty-five by the barrel, he raised his arms as if to pistol-whip her. I think he would have, but Peterson stepped in and stopped him. Crowds of children and teenage boys run alongside the convoy. Many of the children have distended bellies and ulcerous skin, decades of wisdom in their eyes and four-letter words on their lips […] The older people of the village remain aloof […] The whores are the only adults who pay attention to us […] The girls are pathetic to look at, dressed in Western-style pants and so heavily made up that they look like caricatures of what they are.
They make obscene gestures and signal prices with their hands, like traders on the floor of a commodities market. Stumbling forward, I almost tripped over the VC […] An enormous amount of blood had poured out of him and he was lying in it, a crimson puddle in which floated bits of skin and white cartilage.
There was nothing on him, no photographs, no letters or identification. That would disappoint the boys at intelligence, but it was fine with me. I wanted this boy to remain anonymous; I wanted to think of him, not as a dead human being, with a name, age, and family, but as a dead enemy. One photo showed the VC wearing their motley uniforms and striking heroic poses; another showed one of the guerrillas among his family.
There were also several wallet-sized pictures of girl friends or wives. The notes written in the corners of these were probably expressions of love and fidelity, and I wondered if the other side had a system, as we did, for notifying the families of casualties […] What we had found gave to the enemy the humanity I wished to deny him.
The horror lay in the recognition that the body, which is supposed to be the earthly home of an immortal soul, which people spend so much time feeding, conditioning, and beautifying, is in fact only a fragile case stuffed full of disgusting matter […] The sight of mutilation did more than cause me physical revulsion; it burst the religious myths of my Catholic childhood. Their flat, steady gazes had the same indifference I had seen in the eyes of the woman whose house I had searched in Hoi-Vuc.
It was as if they regarded the obliteration of their village as a natural disaster and, accepting it as part of their lot, felt no more toward us than they might feel toward a flood […] Americans would have done something: glared angrily, shaken their fists, wept, run away, demanded compensation. These villagers did nothing, and I despised them for it […] Confronted by disease, bad harvests, and above all by the random violence of endless war, they had acquired a capacity to accept what we would have found unacceptable […] Their survival demanded this of them.
Like the great Annamese Mountains, they endured. I now knew my early impressions had been based not on reality but on a boyhood diet of war movies and blood-and-guts novels […] I now realized that some of them were not so decent or good.
Many had petty jealousies, hatreds, and prejudices. The corps would go on living and functioning without him, but it was aware of having lost something irreplaceable. Later in the war, that sort of feeling became rarer in infantry battalions. Men were killed, evacuated with wounds, or rotated home at a constant rate, then replaced by other men who were killed, evacuated, or rotated in their turn. By that time, a loss only meant a gap in the line that needed filling.
The interesting thing was how the dead looked so much alike. Black men, white men, yellow men, they all looked remarkably the same. Their skin had a tallowlike [sic] texture, making them appear like wax dummies of themselves; the pupils of their eyes were a washed out gray, and their mouths were opened wide, as if death had caught them in the middle of a scream. That night, I was given command of a new platoon. They stood in formation in the rain, three ranks deep.
I stood front and center, facing them. Devlin, Lockhart, and Bryce were in the first rank, Bryce standing on his one good leg, next to him the faceless Devlin, and then Lockhart with his bruised eye sockets bulging.
Sullivan was there, too, and Reasoner and all the others, all of them except me, the officer in charge of the dead. I was the only one alive and whole, and when I commanded […] they faced right, slung their rifles, and began to march.
They marched along, my platoon of crippled corpses, hopping along on the stumps of their legs, swinging the stumps of their arms, keeping perfect time while I counted cadence. I was proud of them, disciplined soldiers to and beyond the end.
They stayed in step even in death. I wondered why the investigating officer had not submitted any explanatory or extenuating circumstances.
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