Democracy. This is one of the reasons that Caputo seems to return again and again in his writing to the subject of war û to force the rest of us to take a much more critical look at this human activity and to consider alternatives û but his reasons for writing are much more complex than this, having roots deep within his upbringing, the culture of his times, his own personality, and the changing nature of war in the second half of the 20th century. This paper examines the reasons that Caputo wrote this book.
Caputo tells us in this book as well as in the his other fictional and non-fictional (and semi-fictional) works that he has written about the hypnotic pull of war, about the ways in which it draws both old and young soldiers back again and again, about what it promises as well as what it ravages. This is one of his goals in writing, this desire to show us the evil of war but also its appeal, and by elucidating this duality to provide some measure of explanation as to why war seems inevitable, as to why we can never seem to get beyond it www.bn.com. If Caputo were only telling us that war is a bad thing, his work would be much less valuable, for we all already know that war is terrible, and no matter how eloquent his descriptions of the terrible things that he has seen and the terrible things that he has done are, they would simply be one more set of wartime recollections. It is his ability to understand and convey what pulls us towards war at the same time that we are repulsed by it that makes him so valuable as a writer, and the clarity of his understanding in what makes war attractive to some young men (and some young women) is clearly one of the compelling forces behind his desire to write about war (Bausch, 1996).
Caputo can best be understood as a war correspondent rather than as a soldier-turned-writer, although this is also what he is. But in examining his life one can see that the impulses that led him to war and th...