A Rumor of War

Growing up in a sheltered suburb outside of Chicago, Philip Caputo would spend his summers mowing grass, eating barbeque and fishing in the Salt Creek for bullhead, catfish and carp. He was an all American teenager without a care in the world. Caputo would daydream of the nomadic natives who once lived and hunted in the Cook and DuPage County forest. He had little to worry about; this made him yearn for further excitement in his life. He was tired of living a cookie cutter life of the suburbs. Caputo wanted more action in his life; like the kind he would watch in John Wayne war movies. Later in life, when Caputo was attending Loyola University, the Marine recruiting team was there to present their literature on becoming a Marine. He was awe-struck with what the Marines had to offer, he thought to himself:

Reading down that list, I had one of those rare flashes of insight: the heroic experience I sought was war; war, the ultimate adventure; war, the ordinary man's convenient means of escaping from the ordinary.

Caputo joined the Marines in hopes to find the excitement he desired in his life. He was a self-confident, arrogant soldier and proud to be an American. Caputo was with one of the first battalions to go to Vietnam; he was stationed in Danang. He began by revealing his overoptimistic expectations he has of his soldiers:

They were to a man thoroughly American, in their virtues as 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.

He was given the idea that the war was going to be won quickly, "A Splendid Little War", they were wrong. He was pompous, bored, and impatient for the fighting to begin and when it did come, it was infrequent and tedious. It became obvious that the Vietnam War was not going to be the same kind of war Americans fought in the previously. It was a mental and physical war, a war where anxiety of the unknown always haunted Caputo and the other soldiers, a war where the elements were as dangerous as the invisible insurgents, a war where men began to question their own purpose and the purpose of the war. By the end of his tour, Caputo explains:

My mind shot back a decade, to that day we had marched into Vietnam, swaggering, confident, and full of idealism. We had believed we were there for a high moral purpose. But somehow our idealism was lost, our morals corrupted, and the purpose forgotten.

The Vietnam War changed Caputo from an eager and willing soldier to a disillusioned man. The psychological effects the war had on Caputo made him question the precise purpose for which the Marines fought. Caputo became a savage who only cared about killing the Viet Cong. He did not care how the Viet Cong died, just that they were dead and the body count was high to impress his superiors. He saw the progressive violence of the war, going from an organized struggle, to all out survival of the fittest. During his involvement in Vietnam, Caputo faced ambushes, booby traps, continual fighting and most of all death. Death was so common to him and his soldiers they could kill an enemy without a blink of an eye. By the end of his tour in Vietnam Caputo had what he called, combat veteranitis(sic): an inability to concentrate, a childlike fear of the darkness, chronic nightmares and an intolerance of loud noises.

Caputo was very opinionated about his views of the Vietnamese. In the beginning he felt sorry for the villagers that had to endure the Marines searching their villages for VC contraband. He tied to harden his heart against the villager's cries as they destroyed their homes and villages that aided the VC. He pitied the Viet Cong at times and thought the bombing was unjust. At the beginning of the fighting he patrolled with the idea of capturing the VC, but by the end of his tour all he wanted to do was kill the VC. This is when Caputo realized he was learning how to hate. It was challenging to trust the Vietnamese