War Guilt

A Rumor of War.
by Philip Caputo.
Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 320 pp. $10.00.

The Vietnam war, a tragedy in the history of the Republic second only to the Civil War, has been a subject of continuing commentary, but few of the many books and articles about it have focused on the details of fighting the war. For this reason Philip Caputo’s first-person narrative about preparation for battle, battle itself, and the aftermath of battle, which offers a vivid sense of what it was like to fight in Vietnam, grips the reader in a way that more general works do not. The book, indeed, has been highly acclaimed, but less for its compelling narrative than for the moral Caputo draws concerning responsibility in this war and others, a moral that is highly questionable.

The narrative begins in the late 1950’s. Bored with college, Caputo is inspired to join the Marine Corps in 1960 by John F. Kennedy’s rhetoric of Camelot, by fantasies of John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima, by a fervent desire to prove his own manhood, and by a need to escape the “dullness” and the depressing “security, comfort, and peace” of his suburban neighborhood. After arriving at Quantico for basic training, Caputo begins to think as a Marine. He learns to see the Virginia countryside not as he would have a year earlier—“through the eyes of an English major who enjoyed reading the Romantic poets”—but as terrain of “tactical rather than aesthetic value.” He learns that “all Marines have an ineradicable streak of machismo bordering on masochism.” This fits well with Caputo’s own self-generated obsession with an ideal of supermasculinity, a “hunger” for violence, and a driving desire not to fail or to seem “inadequate.”

Lt. Caputo is sent to Danang in the first landing of the American Marines. His first assignment, guarding an air base, is (like his former life) boring. Caputo regards Vietnam as a “phony war”; he “lusts” to be in the field against Vietcong. Finally he gets his chance in a series of search-and-destroy missions. In his first mission, he is scolded by senior officers for not exercising “fire discipline” when he allows his men to shoot randomly into the trees and bushes, wasting fire and endangering other Marines. Later, Caputo is reprimanded for waving his arms about in a combat situation in a manner sure to draw enemy fire.

But apart from these mistakes, Caputo says he learns how to fight a war, and how to think about this one. Thus, after a few weeks of patrols which take only light casualties, he reports a change in himself and his men; they grow “more professional, leaner and tougher”; “a callus began to grow around our hearts”; “We are learning to hate.” A “new” consciousness begins to emerge for Caputo. To a tough field sergeant, he reads aloud Kipling’s line: “a Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East”; the sergeant, on whom the “irony” is lost, answers by singing verses from “Rye Whiskey.”

Caputo is ordered back to Japan to train as an assistant adjutant. Upon his return as a staff officer, he becomes responsible for reporting casualties. Caputo hates the colorless bureaucracy of this task and is offended by the euphemisms he must use for the ugly wounds and injuries he sees. “If I had been an agent of death as a platoon leader, as a staff officer I was death’s bookkeeper.” Yet while he despises his tasks and the suffering he is forced to witness, Caputo continually tries to get transferred back to a line company: “My convictions about the war had eroded to almost nothing; I had no illusions, but I volunteered for a line company anyway.” He lists his reasons as boredom and the “magnetism” of combat, the “headiness” of living under fire, a fear for his own sanity and “a hatred for the Vietcong”: “Revenge was one of the reasons I volunteered for a line company. I wanted a chance to kill somebody.”

The book’s most exciting, dramatic, and disturbing parts come after Caputo’s return to battle. Leading his platoon on a scouting mission, Caputo comes upon a group of Vietcong near a village. “The platoon became as excited as a predator,” and its excitement is no less than that of its lieutenant, who “wanted to level the village” and “tear [the Vietcong’s] guts out with bayonets.” In his elation Caputo feels an unparalleled pleasure, “an ache as profound as the ache of orgasm.”

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Following another attack on a Vietcong-controlled village, using all the bombs, napalm, and foot soldiers that can be mustered, Caputo’s men gain access to the village, but in taking it the men break ranks. Caputo confesses to losing control of his men “and even of myself.” The platoon “rampages” through the village, becoming an “incendiary mob”; Caputo comes across an old man in the village who tugs at him and asks him “Why, why?” but Caputo angrily throws him to the ground. On hearing of the platoon’s behavior, Caputo’s superior officer becomes “rightfully furious” and warns that Caputo will be summarily relieved of command if anything like it happens again.

It does. Caputo awakens one night with an overwhelming desire “to retaliate,” and he remembers being given a report that two villagers, identified as Vietcong, have been allowed to slip away following the assault. Caputo becomes obsessed with “murder.” He gathers five of his riflemen around him and tells them he wants them to find the two Vietcong: “You get those goddamn V. C. Snatch ’em up and bring ’em back here but if they give you any problems kill ’em.” When his men object that they are not supposed to be in the village, Caputo tells them to lie. During this mission two men are grabbed and killed by Caputo’s men, but neither is Vietcong. After a series of complaints from villagers, Caputo and his five men are tried for premeditated murder.

Throughout his trial, which concludes with a form of plea-bargaining and a reprimand to Caputo on the additional charge of lying, Caputo thinks mainly about himself and what he can do to get out of it. Upon reflection, however, he becomes more philosophical and insists that the trial itself is “absurd” and “insane.” It is absurd and insane, Caputo says, because it has been conceived “much as if we had murdered two people in the course of a bank robbery during peacetime.” He concludes that his proper plea in the trial should have been extenuating circumstances, the extenuating circumstances being the war itself: “It [the killing] was a direct result of the war.” He rejects as beside the point the claim of the prosecution “that five . . . marines, following unlawful orders of their . . . platoon leader had cold-bloodedly murdered two civilians whom they then tried to claim as confirmed Vietcong.” Rather, “the war in general and U.S. military policies in particular were ultimately to blame. . . .” Upon his release, Caputo begins to proselytize for his anti-war views in headquarters, and shortly afterward is sent home where he drifts into the anti-war movement.

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Much of the first half of this book is overwritten, and the neat, consecutive recall of the raising of Caputo’s consciousness is more likely an invention after the fact than a report. Nevertheless, there is no denying the vividness of much of the story and of the impact of Caputo’s realization of the horrors of war, especially in the last parts of the book. The sound, shape, and feel of battle captured in certain passages recalls Peter Bowman’s Beach Red, and Caputo’s awe at war is reminiscent of Glenn Gray’s excellent study, The Warriors.

Caputo makes no political claims for his book. He writes in a prologue that his book “has nothing to do with politics. . ., national interests, or foreign policy; nor is it an indictment of the great men who led us into Indochina.” It is, he says, “simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to them.” Yet it is precisely in terms of politics, American foreign policy, the responsibility of American leaders, and the guilt of the nation as a whole that Caputo’s book has been received by critics.

Thus, Theodore Solotaroff, in the New York Times, not only thought the book was more than “simply a story about war,” he thought it was nothing less than the troubled conscience of the entire country, “speaking passionately, truthfully, finally.” Peter Ognibene in the Washington Post, found Caputo’s book “the story of a nation passing inexorably from ‘missionary idealism’ to insensate brutality.” “It is the book for Americans to read,” Ognibene wrote, because “We had pushed Vietnam from our collective psyche.” In the New York Review of Books William Styron (in a “review” that was more a collection of Styron’s own war stories than an account of Caputo’s) buried Caputo’s tale in a mess of words about America’s role and motivation in “a vicious and self-serving intrusion” into Vietnam. (Styron does not say how the Vietnam war served us.)

Each of these reviews placed more emphasis on America’s “guilt” in the war than does Caputo himself, but the truth is that Caputo lends himself all too readily to such an interpretation of his purpose. A Rumor of War is the story of one man’s brutalization in Vietnam, linked to a denial of any personal responsibility for his own actions in that war. Caputo does confess to his own murderousness, but I believe he does so only to prove that he is not guilty, that he is a victim of malign forces, namely, the government and the military, whose patsy he supposedly was in Vietnam. But where he regards himself as a victim, his reviewers go him one step further and call him a hero. Ognibene: “In this powerful book [Caputo] does what most of us have yet to do: face the enemy within and overcome the wounds.” Solotaroff views Caputo as a good soldier and a working-class embodiment of America’s silent conscience. Styron calls the book a story of a “decent man sunk into a dirty time,” and Caputo “a brave man who fought well” but who was “dragged downward.”

But who is this hero? Contrary to his reviewers’ attempts to paint him as a typical blue-collar American boy, Caputo comes from the suburbs; he is a highly literate, somewhat precious young man, overresponsive to his emotions, with a distinct sense of superiority to his fellow Marines, both officers and enlisted men. In addition, he is a young man incessantly driven by fantastic notions of sexual potency and masculinity. He is drawn to war and violence before he ever thinks of the Marine Corps. Once in the Marines, he volunteers again and again for on-line action and “lusts” to kill Vietcong.

This desperation for combat is not universal in war, as Caputo would have us believe. Many officers when sent back from the lines report a sense of guilt at being separated from their men, but admit as well to being glad to be out of combat. Further, Caputo is not a particularly good soldier or officer. He proves rash and headstrong in combat, and has to be warned explicitly to exercise better control of his men, a warning he does not heed.

In short, the evidence out of his own mouth suggests that Caputo sought and furthered his own “de-humanization” in the Marines. To do so, moreover, he had to violate the Corps’s own norms of conduct. His is the sort of behavior that, when it is perpetrated by the likes of William Calley, earns nothing but expressions of pious contempt; Caputo, with his self-serving confessions of guilt and no less self-serving indictments of the “system,” has received the applause of critics. Among the many corruptions of the Vietnam era, this corruption of the meaning of individual moral responsibility is not the least insidious.

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