Traveling to Vietnam?First book I'd take. | A Rumor of War

Tremendous Insight into American History | A Rumor of War | Philip Caputo

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	• A Rumor of War Philip Caputo Holt Paperbacks, 1996 - 356 pages average customer review:based on 113 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Must Read

Wow. I was born in the summer of 1967. I have had Vietnam in my mind from my earliest memories and then my studies of history. If you have any interest whatsoever in your country, where we've been, what men endured over there, buy this book today. I can't do this book justice with my words. Just read it and find out for yourself.

Traveling to Vietnam?First book I'd take.

I have been to Vietnam twice in the last 14 months. Seventy percent of the population has no direct memory of U.S. soldiers fighting in their villages. Sometimes for the American traveler, unless he/she searches for the remnants of the war, it is hard to envision the violence, the bombing, the suffering....Caputo's book let's you pull back curtain of Vietnam today, allowing you to feel the stress he encountered from 65-75. It is frankly the best Vietnam book I have ever read.

I have visited many of the major battle sites in Vietnam and Cambodia and museums and interviewed soldiers from both countries.

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Tremendous Insight into American History

It's been a few years since I read this book, but I still remember it vividly. This autobiographical rememberance of one man's service in Vietnam is quite memorable. Anyone who thinks the U.S. should be sending soldiers to fight in the Middle East and Asia should definitely read this book for perspective. One of the main things I got out of this book was that there are just some wars that not are winnable. When your enemy has so much more to lose, you can never defeat them. The North Vietnamese were fighting to unite a country. The Americans were fighting to divide a country. The war in Vietnam is one of the first modern wars where we learned as a country that our powerful military has limitations. Usually the goal in war is take territory and secure it. But when you are fighting an enemy who employs guerrila tactics, they don't care about taking territory. They care about only breaking your spirit and your willingness to fight. There's so many realizations that I came to reading this book and others on the Vietnam War. I could go on for days, but I would rather you spend your time reading this book instead of my thoughts!

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one of the best war memoirs ever written

this is quite simply one of the best war memoirs i've ever read. i would include it in the same last as tim o'brien's the things they carried. honest, powerfully written, looks into the depths of the human soul.

Caputo Under Fire

A Rumor of War is a good book. It's well written and easy to read. It's visceral, but not necessarily educational. It was probably much more significant when it was first published. The book provides a very clear look at Marines during the early days of the Vietnam War. It's autobiographical, written from Caputo's own experiences. The author's military training, life in Danang, and actions in the field are described in detail. His attitudes and opinions take a decided turn for the worse as the war drags on, wears him out, and wastes his brothers in arms. (Caputo comments on the appropriate usage of the term "waste" in his book.) The foot soldier, slogging through the paddy fields with sniper fire whining overhead, is put front and center. Historical development and the political situations in Washington and Vietnam are hardly mentioned. The environment is given a starring role: heat, humidity, monsoon rain, mud, insects, jungle trails, water-filled fox holes, cold wet nights, darkness, and nearly impenetrable elephant grass. Death is also given center stage... sudden, brutal, undesirable death... and its cousin, serious injury. Caputo dedicates his book to two of his fallen comrades. That's where his heart is. Good men, gone too soon, with loved ones left behind.

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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.

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