Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War

Philip Caputo's reasons for writing A Rumor of War

To illustrate how war is both repulsive and compelling

To explain the similarity of impulse that lies behind going to war and writing about it.

To explain the ways in which war is inevitable regardless of historical circumstance.

To explain why the specifics of the war were inevitable given the emotional, cultural and political aftermath of WWII.

To explain to those who have not been soldiers how powerless armed soldiers can feel.

To celebrate the stories of working-class American men. War transforms everyone who lives through it - the soldiers and those whose land is taken over by the carnage. Those who wait for telegrams at home. The children who grow up without parents. The parents who grow old without children. The country that wins and the one that loses.

And yet, obviously not everyone is changed enough by war, because if they were, then wars would no longer be fought. We would have come to an end of that part of human history in which the most important thing about a culture is how many sophisticated weapons it can build and how many young bodies it can afford to sacrifice in the name of one (often legitimately noble) cause or another.

Philip Caputo's novel about his own experiences in Vietnam -- A Rumor of War - is one of the finest books written about the military conflicts in this century, for he combines the ability to glorify personal bravery while disparaging the real results and effects of war. He

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ly want to be There? There is the place I will find adventure, excitement, true love, knowledge, fame, glory, riches, escape from the humdrum. All that is never Here; it's always There, over the hill and around the bend (Broyles, 1991, p. BR1). Caputo's parents pushed him to be the first in the family to graduate from college, counseled him to avoid risk, to stick to the straight and narrow and, he predictably, rebelled against this caution. And so to war he went, over and over, pushing himself, pushing his luck, pushing out to the front lines of experience and beyond. He was there at the October War between the Arabs and Israel, the fall of South Vietnam, the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, and Beirut. As a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, he could purge his guilt of having gone to war as a "soldier of darkness" in Vietnam. Reincarnated as a "soldier of light," he opened his soul to the siren song of adventure, stoked on adrenaline, marinating himself in the next war, the next wilderness of the spirit, the next new experience. Testing, testing. To beat that fear of risk once, twice, a dozen times, wasn't enough. It returned the next morning, staring back at his face in the mirror. And so off he went again, not the jaded foreig

Category: Literature - P