A Rumor of War

Acclaimed as a classic of war writing to rank alongside
All Quiet on the Western Front
and
The Naked and the Dead
.

“I cannot begin to tell you how much I was affected by A RUMOR OF WAR… To call it the best book about Vietnam is to trivialize it. Heartbreaking, terrifying and enraging it belongs to the literature of men at arms.”

John Gregory Dunne,
Los Angeles Times

“Caputo’s searing account of life for an American at the end of a barrel of a gun is a classic.”
Guardian

“A singular and marvellous book - a soldier’s-eye account that tells us, as no other book that I can think of has done, what it was actually like to be fighting in that hellish jungle.”

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt,
New York Times

“A RUMOR OF WAR arrived at 1:00 this afternoon and now, at 10:30, I’ve just finished it. I am deeply impressed. With discipline and finish, Caputo shapes his memoües into a profoundly instructive book. I hope everyone, including the President, reads it.”

Paul Fussell,
author of
The Great War and Modern Memory

“I had begun to abandon hope that a spokesman would emerge to tell the true story of the fighting man in the enigmatic Vietnam War. No longer. Philip Caputo has done it and done it brilliantly, providing at once an explanation of the exhilaration combat can bring and a searing indictment of the brutalizing effect of war on those condemned to experience it down where they do the dying.”

Charles B. MacDonald
, Deputy Chief Historian for Southeast Asia, U.S. Army Center of Military History, and author of
Company Commander

“Cruelly honest and powerfully written, it is a harrowing, tragic, paradoxical personal record; yet it casts a fierce glow on the whole war, and on America. It is overwhelming. It will endure.”

Stephen Becker
, author of
The Chinese Bandit

“A remarkable personal account of the war in Vietnam… One of the indispensable features of Caputo’s narrative is that he is never less than honest, sometimes relentlessly so, about his feelings concerning the thrill of warfare and the intoxication of combat. At least in the beginning, before the madness…‘

William Styron
,
New York Review of Books

”A superb macabre evocation of those aimless searches and the destruction not only of property but of men’s bodies and minds as well… At times it is hard to remember that this is not a novel.“

William Shawcross,
New Statesman

”This is a story of courage, comradeship, horror and corruption and at the same time a moving and bitter testimony… Vivid, real, searchingly honest, it’s war writing of a high order.“

Publishers Weekly

”Philip Caputo, a former American officer court-martialled for the cold-blooded murder of two innocent Vietnamese civilians, is undoubtedly a war criminal. He has also written the most cruelly honest book about the Vietnam war I’ve read… This simply but powerfully written book should occupy a place in any pacifist’s library.“

Clancy Sigal,
New Society

”A RUMOR OF WAR is the troubled conscience of America speaking passionately, truthfully and finally.“

Theodore Solotaroff,
The New YorkTimes Book Review

ARROW BOOKS

Arrow Books Limited

21 Conway Street, London wlp SHL

An imprint of the Hutchinson Publishing Group

London Melbourne Sydney Auckland Johannesburg and agencies throughout the world

First published by Macmillan 1977 Arrow edition 1978 Reprinted 1979, 1980 and 1981 © Philip Caputo

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Made and printed in Great Britain by The Anchor Press Ltd Tiptree, Essex

ISBN 0 09 917250 X

Dedication

To

Sergeant Hugh John Sullivan

C Company, First Battalion, Third Marines

Killed in Action, June and

First Lieutenant Walter Neville Levy

C Company, First Battalion, First Marines

Killed in Action, September

Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to thank the following who have kindly given permission for the use of copyright material: Jonathan Cape Ltd and the Executors of the Ernest Hemingway Estate for an extract from
Across the River and into the Trees;
Chatto & Windus Ltd and the Owen Estate for extracts from
Arms and the Boy
and
Apologia Pro Poemate Meo
by Wilfred Owen. Paul J Reynolds Inc for an extract from
April Morning
by Howard Fast. Mr G ‘I Sassoon for extracts from poems
Elegy, The Effect, Ease Details, Dreamers
and
Aftermath
from
Collected Poems
by Siegfried Sassoon.

A P Watt & Son on behalf of The National Trust for three lines from
The Ballad of Boh Da Thone
by Rudyard Kipling.

And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars, see that ye be not troubled, for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet… for Nation shall rise against Nation and Kingdom against Kingdom… then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted and shall put you to death… but he that shall endure unto the end, he shall be saved.

Matthew 24: 6

Contents

Prologue

Part One:

The Splendid Little War

Part Two:

The Officer in Charge of the Dead

Part Three:

In Death’s Grey Land

Epilogue

In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch’d And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars…

—Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part I

This book does not pretend to be history. It has nothing to do with politics, power, strategy, influence, national interests, or foreign policy; nor is it an indictment of the great men who led 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. More strictly, it is a soldier’s account of our longest conflict, the only one we have ever lost, as well as the record of a long and sometimes painful personal experience.

On March 8, 1965, as a young infantry officer, I landed at Danang with a battalion of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, the first U.S. combat unit sent to Indochina. I returned in April 1975 as a newspaper correspondent and covered the Communist offensive that ended with the fall of Saigon. Having been among the first Americans to fight in Vietnam, I was also among the last to be evacuated, only a few hours before the North Vietnamese Army entered the capital.

Although most of this book deals with the experiences of the marines I served with in 1965 and 1966, I have included an epilogue briefly describing the American exodus. Only ten years separated the two events, yet the humiliation of our exit from Vietnam, compared to the high confidence with which we had entered, made it seem as if a century lay between them.

For Americans who did not come of age in the early sixties, it may be hard to grasp what those years were like— the pride and overpowering self-assurance that prevailed. Most of the thirty-five hundred men in our brigade, born during or immediately after World War II, were shaped by that era, the age of Kennedy’s Camelot. We went overseas full of illusions, for which the intoxicating atmosphere of those years was as much to blame as our youth.

War is always attractive to young men who know nothing about it, but we had also been seduced into uniform by Kennedy’s challenge to “ask what you can do for your country” and by the missionary idealism he had awakened in us. America seemed omnipotent then: the country could still claim it had never lost a war, and we believed we were ordained to play cop to the Communists’ robber and spread our own political faith around the world. Like the French soldiers of the late eighteenth century, we saw ourselves as the champions of “a cause that was destined to triumph.” 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.

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.

Writing about this kind of warfare is not a simple task. Repeatedly, I have found myself wishing that I had been the veteran of a conventional war, with dramatic campaigns and historic battles for subject matter instead of a monotonous succession of ambushes and fire-fights. But there were no Normandies or Gettysburgs for us, no epic clashes that decided the fates of armies or nations. The war was mostly a matter of enduring weeks of expectant waiting and, at random intervals, of conducting vicious manhunts through jungles and swamps where snipers harassed us constantly and booby traps cut us down one by one.

The tedium was occasionally relieved by a large-scale search-and-destroy operation, but the exhilaration of riding the lead helicopter into a landing zone was usually followed by more of the same hot walking, with the mud sucking at our boots and the sun thudding against our helmets while an invisible enemy shot at us from distant tree lines. The rare instances when the VC chose to fight a set-piece battle provided the only excitement; not ordinary excitement, but the manic ecstasy of contact. 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, rippling bursts of automatic rifles.

Beyond adding a few more corpses to the weekly body count, none of these encounters achieved anything; none will ever appear in military histories or be studied by cadets at West Point. Still, they changed us and taught us, the men who fought in them; in those obscure skirmishes we learned the old lessons about fear, cowardice, courage, suffering, cruelty, and comradeship. Most of all, we learned about death at an age when it is common to think of oneself as immortal. Everyone loses that illusion eventually, but in civilian life it is lost in installments over the years. We lost it all at once and, in the span of months, passed from boyhood through manhood to a premature middle age. The knowledge of death, of the implacable limits placed on a man’s existence, severed us from our youth as irrevocably as a surgeon’s scissors had once severed us from the womb. And yet, few of us were past twenty-five. We left Vietnam peculiar creatures, with young shoulders that bore rather old heads.

My own departure took place in early July 1966. Ten months later, following a tour as the CO of an infantry training company in North Carolina, an honorable discharge released me from the Marines and the chance of dying an early death in Asia. I felt as happy as a condemned man whose sentence has been commuted, but within a year I began growing nostalgic for the war.

Other veterans I knew confessed to the same emotion. In spite of everything, we felt a strange attachment to Vietnam and, even stranger, a longing to return. The war was still being fought, but this desire to go back did not spring from any patriotic ideas about duty, honor, and sacrifice, the myths with which old men send young men off to get killed or maimed. It arose, rather, from a recognition of how deeply we had been changed, how different we were from everyone who had not shared with us the miseries of the monsoon, the exhausting patrols, the fear of a combat assault on a hot landing zone. We had very little in common with them. Though we were civilians again, the civilian world seemed alien. We did not belong to it as much as we did to that other world, where we had fought and our friends had died.

I was involved in the antiwar movement at the time and struggled, unsuccessfully, to reconcile my opposition to the war with this 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 emotional 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 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.