Product Description

When it first appeared, A Rumor of War brought home to American readers, with terrifying vividness and honesty, the devastating effects of the Vietnam War on the soldiers who fought there. And while it is a memoir of one young man’s experiences and therefore deeply personal, it is also a book that speaks powerfully to today’s students about the larger themes of human conscience, good and evil, and the desperate extremes men are forced to confront in any war.

A platoon commander in the first combat unit sent to fight in Vietnam, Lieutenant Caputo landed at Danang on March 8, 1965, convinced that American forces would win a quick and decisive victory over the Communists. Sixteen months later and without ceremony, Caputo left Vietnam a shell-shocked veteran whose youthful idealism and faith in the rightness of the war had been utterly shattered. A Rumor of War tells the story of that trajectory and allows us to see and feel the reality of the conflict as the author himself experienced it, from the weeks of tedium hacking through scorching jungles, to the sudden violence of ambushes and firefights, to the unbreakable bonds of friendship forged between soldiers, and finally to a sense of the war as having no purpose other than the fight for survival. The author gives us a precise, tactile view of both the emotional and physical reality of war.

When Caputo is reassigned to headquarters as “Officer in Charge of the Dead,” he chronicles the psychological cost of witnessing and recording the human toll of the war. And after his voluntary transfer to the frontlines, Caputo shows us that the major weapons of guerrilla fighting are booby traps and land mines, and that success is measured not in feet but in body counts. Nor does the author shrink from admitting the intoxicating intensity of combat, an experience so compelling that many soldiers felt nostalgic for it years after they’d left
Vietnam. Most troubling, Caputo gives us an unflinching view not only of remarkable bravery and heroism but also of the atrocities committed in Vietnam by ordinary men so numbed by fear and desperate to survive that their moral distinctions had collapsed.

More than a statement against war, Caputo’s memoir offers readers today a profoundly visceral sense of what war is and, as the author says, of “the things men do in war and the things war does to men.”

This edition includes a twentieth-anniversary postscript by the author.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8970 in Books
• Published on: 1996-11-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 356 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780805046953
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
20th-anniversary edition of Caputo's memoir of fighting in Vietnam.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
“To call it the best book about Vietnam is to trivialize it . . . A Rumor of War is a dangerous and even subversive book, the first to insist—and the insistence is all the more powerful because it is implicit—that the reader ask himself these questions: How would I have acted? To what lengths would I have gone to survive? The sense of self is assaulted, overcome, subverted, leaving the reader to contemplate the deadening possibility that his own moral safety net might have a hole in it. It is a terrifying thought, and A Rumor of War is a terrifying book.”—John Gregory Dunne, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Caputo’s troubled, searching meditations on the love and hate of war, on fear, and the ambivalent discord warfare can create in the hearts of decent men, are among the most eloquent I have read in modern literature.”—William Styron, The New York Review of Books

“Every war seems to find its own voice: Caputo . . . is an eloquent spokesman for all we lost in Vietnam.”—C. D. B. Bryan, Saturday Review

“A book that must be read and reread—if for no other reason than as an eloquent statement against war. It is a superb book.”—Terry Anderson, Denver Post

“This is news that goes beyond what the journalists brought us, news from the heart of darkness. It was long overdue.”—Newsweek

“Not since Siegfried Sassoon's classic of World War I, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, has there been a war memoir so obviously true, and so disturbingly honest.”—William Broyles, Texas Monthly
-- Review

. . . the troubled conscience of America speaking passionately, truthfully, finally. -- The New York Times Book Review, Theodore Solotaroff

Review

Customer Reviews

What Vietnam Was Really Like
For anyone who has ever asked, "What was Vietnam really like," Marine Lieutenant Philip Caputo's book, "A Rumor of War," is a must read. In this autobiographical account of his time as an infantry officer in, "the `Nam," he describes the experience in authoritative terms enhanced by collegiate English studies and time spent as a combat journalist. The result is the most well written account of life in an infantry platoon in Vietnam that I have ever read.

Phil Caputo could have been virtually anyone in America in the early `60's. A young, idealistic, all-American boy who joined the Marines in search of adventure, and out of a patriotic desire to answer John Kennedy's challenge to, "Ask not what your country can do for you. . ." He and his platoon marched off to war to find glory and honor. What they found was, "death, death, death."

Caputo takes you into the muddy foxhole with him, making you feel the heat and annoyance of the ever-present insects, and the sniper shots that all united to deprive you of the precious commodity of sleep. He takes you on patrol with them down, "Purple Heart Trail," where the main enemies were the heat, the insects, and endless mines and booby traps. The reader can feel the rage of the infantrymen who fought endless battles with an enemy that was everywhere, yet nowhere. Gradually enthusiasm turned to pessimism; pessimism to despair; and despair to rage; rage that ultimately vented itself in mindless violence against anything Vietnamese. They were then left with the heat, the insects, and guilt borne of actions taken that they would never have dreamed of a few short months before.

Caputo and his enthusiastic, young, Marines could have been anyone who has ever fought: the patriots at Lexington and Concord, who later found themselves half starved and freezing at Valley Forge; or any number of Union or Confederate soldiers from Bull Run to Appomattox. They could have been "Doughboys" who went, "Over There," to "Make the World Safe for Democracy," only to find themselves "fighting" immersion foot and mustard gas in the trenches of France; or perhaps even soldiers serving under, "Ol' Blood and Guts" himself, George S. Patton; "Our blood, his guts," as the GI's said. Their stories all verify Gen. Robert E. Lee's famous quote: "War seldom avails anything to those unfortunate enough to have to fight it."

A Rumor of War ranks up there with Gen. Harold Moore's, "We Were Soldiers Once and Young," and Col. David Hackworth's, "About Face." All three show how debates that raged in Washington, Paris, Saigon, and Hanoi were ultimately scored. Whether you were a "hawk or a dove," a liberal or a conservative, a professor or student, you will benefit from reading this book that answers the question authoritatively: "Hey! What was Vietnam really like?"

Should be a mandatory reading in every high school
Caputo describes "the splendid little war" as his road from an enthusiastic idealist poisoned by the romanticized view of war as a chivalrous and noble enterprise to the dehumanized and desensitized wreck that he becomes during his tour in Vietnam. The book is an amazing testimony about the true nature of war with all its atrocities and horrors. Caputo brilliantly captures the endless despair of being strained in the jungle with no clear reason for being there, the hopeless madness of chasing the guerillas and the agony of loosing friends. But the most important aspect of this book is that it shows how a normal mentally healthy person can be turned into a thoughtless killing machine in the course of a few months, fast on the trigger, without any remorse for his victims. Caputo uses very strong and vivid images such as "pigs eating napalm-charred human corpses" to force the reader into his story and feel what Caputo has felt. Very realistic book that cannot leave you indifferent, definitely up there with Remarque's "All quiet on the Western front." If you want to know what fighting the Vietnam War was really like, I can't imagine how any book can possibly be better than Rumor of War.

"WAR IS HELL," and you are right there!
To anyone who thinks of war as a glorious enterprise or some kind of Nintendo game, they should read Caputo's book. THe author himself was once an idealistic, glory seeking young man eager to participate in "a splendid little war,' but by book's end he has become an unfeeling, unremorseful and scared shell of a human being. THis may have been what kept him alive, but Caputo is angry over the deep emotional damage done to many men like himself who were thrust into a civil war and cultural revolution in a country and place we had little understanding of. Caputo manges to show us how this transformation took place. Its not a pleasant read or ride, but in the process we discover why the war was unwinnable at a price America was willing or should have paid, and what damage we inflicted on men like Caputo in putting them in such a difficult position. BUt don't read the book for any lengthy history or diatribe on Vietnam or America's policies toward it. First and foremost its a memoir of war and preparing for war. From boot camp thru training, to Vietnam and back home, Caputo keeps you riveted with descriptions of crawling through leech filled swamps, nights in the sticky jungle being consumed by insects, and witnessing the irony of pigs eating charred human corpses. When not focusing on battles, we are privy to the insanity of body counts and body bags and the tense downtime between jungle patrols, as well as the dynamics of a Marine platoon. Caputo's insights and ability to reflect back upon the events and physical and emotional carnage he inflicted upon himself and others is what makes this memoir special. There is also no small irony that Caputo was part of the first marine unit to go to Nam, and that as a journalist some 10 years later, he was one of the last to leave. Anytime I think of war as a glorious enterprise, I need only pick up this book and read a few sections. Should be required reading in war history courses! If you liked Dispatches by Michael Herr, this book is even better.