a rumor of war ~ Philip Caputo

Well, I thought this book was a good read. It wasn't great but it was very interesting. Having little knowledge of the workings of military I felt a little lost with some of the terms he freely uses without explanation. I was able to figure things out as I went along but this book can't claim to make anyone understand the military. I would say the point was to share his personal experience of being an officer on the line and a staff officer in the beginnings of Vietnam.

This autobiography was a small expose on the realities of warfare in the "splendid little war." The minds of the soldiers and the attitudes and position of the military body was discussed. The politics of the war was deemed irrelevant. The argument was made that lives lost in the Vietnam war were wasted lives because of the pure futility and senselessness of this war. And also that the very nature of the war brought a change in the individual man that brought unintended results while producing intended results. Confusing? It wasn't really. (That's just me.)

First Officer Caputo covers what led him into the military and his excitement for war service along with the tedium involved in the training. After a short time as an officer his battalion in the Marines is the first to be sent to Danang South Vietnam to protect American installations. There is an eagerness among the men to fight but he details the amount of waiting and inactivity there was involved in getting there and then the misery of the work involved once they did arrive. He tells of his own observations of the US military becomming engaged in full war with the VC.

HE was on the lines in C Company at the start. He talked about what the fighting was like, how it began, how the "war" (that wasn't really a war at this point) was fought and how miserable it was. (He really wanted to drive home to the reader the MISERY). Then he gives account of the gradual disillusionment that comes to the soldiers who are experienced; in essence, what the war "does to them" psychologically. It's not even that the war is making the changes happen but it's the way the military goes about doing certain things that enacts certain feelings and results that are contradictory. (Um. I don't know if I'm making sense.

Caputo has to spend dreaded "down" time as an "officer of the dead" counting casualties and bodies in headquarters. Body counts are how the military tracks success. Then he goes back on the lines again and deals with death and fear of mines which leads to rage and hatred and their training leads to actions and finally he is court marshalled but we can guess what happens there, right?

I recommend this book not because I have a knowledge of books about Vietnam and can compare, I really don't know anything about the war, but because I trust the professor at my college who recommended this book to me. Ten years later I am finally reading it and I'm glad I did. It gives me some better understanding of what the soldiers fighting in the Desert nations might feel a bit of, without all of the jungle and mosquitoes and torrential rains and impetigo, immersion foot, and all night sniping, and so on....but still.

I give it a four stars.