Summary Of A Rumor Of War By Philip Caputo

Philip Caputo’s narrative model of a “vicarious tour of duty” in his memoir A Rumor of War humanizes the American military in Vietnam by removing the reader from preconceptions, presenting a multifaceted account of combat, and describing the landscape and environment of the American War in Vietnam in vivid detail. As a Marine lieutenant and as a survivor of the war, Caputo’s account is limited by nature, but he maintains a broad representation of the American War through his descriptions of the environment and by reiterating the significance of his peers' deaths, especially as the American casualty rate increased. Caputo’s conclusion that the extent of suffering in combat cannot be described secondhand and his explicit goal of documentation

Caputo identifies the broadest source of American servicemen’s loss of moral stability and loss of life as the directives of the United States military; “Ethics seemed to be a matter of distance and technology…And then there was that inspiring order issued by General Greene: kill VC. In the patriotic fervor of the Kennedy years, we had asked, ‘What can we do for our country?’ and our country answered, ‘Kill VC.’ That was the strategy, the best our best military minds could come up with: organized butchery.” This farthest reaching placement of responsibility on U.S. military strategy elaborates on Caputo’s description of disillusionment from the number of people dying for no evident progress and provides one focus for his observation of what might be preventable about warfare. In describing his resistance to listen to more experienced officers, Caputo recognizes that communicating the risks and trauma of warfare requires precise description and a willingness to listen; “They had already been where we were going, to that frontier between life and death, but none of us wanted to listen to them. So I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war, to endure the same old experiences, suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.” The structure of the vicarious tour of duty is an attempt to communicate the same old experiences, illusions, and lessons as they appeared for servicemen in the American War, but by Caputo’s own acknowledgement this attempt is destined to fail because its lesson cannot be fully understood without direct