A Rumor of War

“So, when we marched into the rice paddies on that damp March afternoon, we carried, along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions that the Viet Cong would be quickly beaten and that we were doing something altogether noble and good. We kept the packs and rifles; the convictions, we lost.” 

Here, Caputo foreshadows the lost innocence and disillusionment that the war brings all soldiers of his generation.

“The discovery that the men we had scorned as peasant guerrillas were, in fact, a lethal, determined enemy and the casualty lists that lengthened each week with nothing to show for the blood being spilled broke our early confidence. By autumn, what had begun as an adventurous expedition had turned into an exhausting, indecisive war of attrition in which we fought for no cause other than our own survival.” 

All of Caputo’s deeply-held beliefs about his role in the war are broken by his experiences in Vietnam. One significant theme of his memoir is the disillusionment and useless destruction brought about by war, aptly described here.

“Once in a while, I found flint arrowheads in the muddy creek bank. Looking at them, I would dream of that savage, heroic time and wish I had lived then, before America became a land of salesmen and shopping centers.

That is what I wanted, to find in a commonplace world a chance to live heroically. Having known nothing but security, comfort, and peace, I hungered for danger, challenges, and violence.” 

Caputo describes his rationale for joining the Marine Corps. Full of youthful idealism, and wanting a chance to distinguish himself as a hero, Caputo rejects the safety and plenty created by his parents.

“It was glorious and grand, like an old-fashioned Fourth of July. Bugles, drums, and flags. Marching across the field in battalion mass, with that stirring, soaring hymn blaring in our ears, we felt invincible, boys of twenty-one and twenty-two, all cheerfully unaware that some of us would not grow much older.” 

Caputo’s nostalgic description of the romance and pageantry of the Marine Corps graduation from advanced training school captures a more innocent and carefree time, before his service in Vietnam. His reference to that fact that so many of his fellow graduates would be killed in that terrible conflict points to their naivety and his own subsequent disillusionment.

“The essence of the Marine Corps experience, I decided, was pain.” 

During Officer Candidate School and advanced training, Caputo watches lesser men flunk out of the course, never to return. These weaker, more fragile men terrify Caputo, lest he be judged to be one of them. Eager for recognition from his superiors, Caputo determines to survive all the pain that they throw at him.

“They were to a man thoroughly American in their virtues and well as flaws: idealistic, insolent, generous, direct, violent, and provincial in the sense that they believed the ground they stood on was now forever a part of the United States simply because they stood on it.

Most of them came from the ragged fringes of the Great American Dream, from city slums and dirt farms and Appalachian mining towns. With depressing frequency, the words 2 yrs. high school appeared in the square labeled EDUCATION in their service record books, and, under FATHER’S ADDRESS, a number had written Unknown.”

Here Caputo describes the men who fought the Vietnam War; their general characteristics, background, and attitudes. Most of these men do not come from the type of stable, comfortable home in which Caputo grew up. This fact explains some of the distance between Caputo’s men and himself, which he tries to bridge by being the most gung-ho Marine in the Corps. Earning the trust and respect of his men comes hard for Caputo, partly due to the large socioeconomic gap between them.

“It was an ugly face, but it had the dignity that is conferred upon those who have suffered the bodily and emotional aches of war. The colonel had paid his dues under fire, and so belonged to that ancient brotherhood to which no amount of money, social pedigrees, or political connections can gain a man admittance.” 

Here, Caputo describes Colonel Bain, a man whom all of the men respect. Caputo and his men soon understand that such respect for their commanders would not be common within the infantry. This quotation indicates that a real soldier recognizes and understands his own kind, and that brotherhood of shared deprivation, danger, and survival creates an unbreakable bond.

“I guess we believed in our own publicity—Asian guerillas did not stand a chance against U.S. marines—as we believed in all the myths created by that most articulate and elegant mythmaker, John Kennedy. If he was the King of Camelot, then we were his knights and Vietnam our crusade. There was nothing we could not do because we were Americans, and for the same reason, whatever we did was right.” 

Here, Caputo explains the arrogant self-confidence that characterized the American troops’ perspective on fighting the war in Vietnam. Convinced of their superiority, the American Marines believed that they would quickly defeat the Viet Cong, in another demonstration of American might and power. Such beliefs foreshadow the loss of innocence and confidence that follows, as Charlie Company and the rest of the American fighting forces come to understand their expendable nature and single purpose—kill VC before they kill you.

“Third recon was a band of self-styled swashbucklers whose crest was a skull and crossbones and whose motto proclaimed them to be CELER, SILENS ET MORTALIS—swift, silent and deadly. Slow, noisy and harmless would have been more like it because about all they ever did was get themselves surrounded or ambushed, or both, and then call for someone to rescue them.” 

In a rare moment of sarcasm and humor, Caputo recounts his opinion of the 3rd recon Marines and by extension all pretentious, arrogant troops, who vastly underestimated the skill and determination of the Viet Cong as a fighting force.

“‘All the poet can do today is warn,’ Owen wrote. Colby and the other platoon sergeants were not poets but that is what they had been trying to do the night before—to warn me, warn all of us. They had already been where we were going, to that frontier between life and death, but none of us wanted to listen to them. So I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war, doomed to repeat the same experiences, suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.” 

Caputo, as the narrator reflecting back on the events of his youth, despairs for the next generation. He did not listen to the warnings of more experienced men, so he was doomed to learn the lessons of war the hard way, on his own.

“Riding back to the company area in Miller’s jeep, I think, we’ve lost a man, not to the enemy, but to the sun. It is as if the sun and the land itself were in league with the Viet Cong, wearing us down, driving us mad, killing us.” 

In this quotation, the terrain and the weather become symbolic weapons of destruction, just as powerful as the Viet Cong guerillas. The motif of the land and sun as killers is carried throughout the novel.

“Like many inexperienced soldiers, I suffered from the illusion that there were good ways to die in war. I through grandly in terms of noble sacrifices, of soldiers offering up their bodies for a cause or to save a comrade’s life. But there had been nothing sacrificial or ceremonial about Sullivan’s death. He had been sniped while filling canteens in a muddy jungle river.” 

Sergeant Sullivan was the first casualty of C Company. His death, apart from the fact that he would be missed, brought the reality of the war into the company for the first time. Now they have been touched by death and cannot escape their knowledge of it. Clearly a theme in the novel, the randomness and suddenness of death, particularly when caused by mines or snipers, establishes a pattern of fear in which their enemy seems to be invisible. The Marines cannot fight straightforward battles as they have been trained to do; instead, they must adopt piecemeal, guerilla strategies in which their often superior numbers are no advantage. In fact, when grouped together, the Marines are even more vulnerable to the Viet Cong’s tactics. Additionally, Caputo’s romantic notions are blown away as Sullivan’s lifeless body is described by Sergeant Lemmon. Images of blood, bones, and wounds begin to haunt Caputo.

“Sometime that year, Lieutenant Colonel Meyers, one of the regiment’s battalion commanders, stepped on a booby-trapped 155-mm shell. They did not find enough of him to fill a willy-peter bag, a waterproof sack a little larger than a shopping bag. In effect, Colonel Meyers had been disintegrated, but the official report read something like ‘traumatic amputation, both feet; traumatic amputation, both legs and arms; multiple laceration to abdomen; through-and-through fragment wounds, head and chest.’ Then came the notation ‘killed in action.’ ”

Colonel Meyer’s fatal wounds, as described by Caputo, are explained in detail, as are the wounds of many other soldiers. As the officer responsible for keeping the accurate official records of the deaths and wounds of the Marines in the regiment, it was Caputo’s daily job to read and verify, at times by viewing the body, the reports for all deaths and injuries. In giving such details, Caputo forces the reader to acknowledge the terrible pain—emotional, psychological and physical—caused by war. He could not turn away from this knowledge, and he ensures that his readers cannot turn away either.

“They came in twos and threes, and that is how they died and how our own men died—in twos and threes. We fought no great battles, there was no massive hemorrhaging, just a slow, steady trickle of blood drawn in a series of ambushes and fire-fights.” 

Caputo’s description distinguishes the character of the Vietnam War from many others, such as WWII. Because there were no massive battles, the slow loss of men seemed more acceptable to the high-ranking staff officers and the folks at home, than the mass killings perpetrated, for example, at Dunkirk. However, as Caputo was reminded by a chaplain, every loss is a severe loss for that family.

“It was the nakedness of Bryce’s left calfbone that bothered me. Every strip of flesh and muscle had been torn away, so that the splintered bone looked like a broken ivory stick. The doctor said something like ‘Traumatic amputation, left foot and compound fracturing, left tibia with massive tissue loss,’ and the corpsman made more checkmarks.

‘We found his boot with the foot still in it,’ Gunderson said. ‘But we left it there. We didn’t know what to do with it.’”

As the “officer in charge of the dead,” Caputo recounts the deaths of all the men he knew during his time at regimental HQ. Among them is Bryce, whose maiming seems to break Caputo.

“I could not bear any more mutilation.” 

Caputo is overcome by the severe mutilation and death of men he knows. After this night, Caputo begins hallucinating and dreaming of dead men; he has reached his limit.

“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 dead except me, the officer in charge of the dead.” 

Pushed to breaking point by his job recording the hideous deaths of Marines in his regiment, many of whom he knew personally, Caputo begins dreaming of the dead.

“Suddenly. I saw them [platoon of dead men] and then I did not see them. In their place, I saw Mora and Harrisson prefigured in death. I saw their living faces across from me and, superimposed on those, a vision of their faces as they would look in death. It was a kind of double exposure. I saw their living mouths moving in conversation and their dead mouths grinning the taut-drawn grins of corpses. Their living eyes I saw, and their dead eyes still-staring.”

The trauma of battle and of witnessing so many broken bodies, many of them his comrades and friends, overwhelms Caputo’s ability to cope. From this point on in the memoir, he regularly sees dead men when he is asleep and living men as dead when he is awake.

“I had acquired a hatred for the scoreboard, for the very sight of it. It symbolized everything I despised about the staff, the obsession with statistics, the indifference toward the tragedy of death; and because I was on the staff, I despised myself.” 

Caputo recounts why he loathes staff work. From this point, Caputo strains to get back to “his” men in the field. Eventually, he volunteers to return to line duty with an infantry company.

“I was both charmed and saddened by their innocent enthusiasm, charmed because I wished I could be that way again, saddened because they didn’t really know what they were getting into. I did. I was the regiment’s resident statistician. I knew I would be writing a lot of their names on my mimeographed forms, because I knew they were marching into a different war than the one we had fought between March and August. It was not really a guerilla war any longer. Our patrols were still encountering guerrillas, but we were fighting more and more actions against main-force regulars and, in some instances, against North Vietnamese Army units.” 

Watching new troops arrive, Caputo mourns for his lost illusions of noble victory. The war grows even more brutal as the newly arriving Marines will face the full force of the North Vietnamese troops. Caputo returns to line duty, at the same time as the war intensifies.

“Wasted. In that war, soldier’s slang for death was ‘wasted.’ So-and-so was wasted. It was a good word.” 

Recording the death of a friend from their Quantico days, Walter Levy, breaks through Caputo’s numbness. Levy was the first of the class of 1964 to die in Vietnam. However, it also brings awareness of the tremendous loss Walter Levy’s death is for the world: Columbia educated, with a well-off and loving family, a decent and intelligent man with a “high sense of duty” (221), he died because he enlisted when it was not required of him. Caputo, as the narrator and author, also means to allude to the tremendous loss of all the men damaged or killed by the Vietnam War; their lives were wasted in pursuit of relatively trivial geo-political goals.

“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 of 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.” 

Though C Company does not murder the villagers, they do destroy the village’s housing, leaving most of the village on fire in their wake. This scene provides us with an insight into the psychological strain that the men are under and the devastating consequences that can result from it.

“Retaliate. The word rang in my head. I will retaliate. It was then that my chaotic thoughts began to focus on the two men whom Le Dung, Crowe’s informant, had identified as Viet Cong. My mind did more than focus on them; it fixed on them like a heat-seeking missile fixing on the tailpipe of a jet. They became an obsession. I would get them. I would get them before they got any more of us; before they got me. I’m going to get those bastards, I said to myself, suddenly feeling giddy.” 

After nearly a year of fighting and seeing hideous death and destruction in Vietnam, Caputo loses his ability to reason clearly. Following this breakdown, he orders his best shooters to find the two accused VC in the nearby village. The unspoken command is to kill them, which Caputo’s men do. However, one of the men killed was not VC; he was the innocent informant, Le Dung. Caputo’s Vietnam tour ends abruptly when he and his men are charged with the murder of the two Vietnamese men.