A Rumor of War, by Philip Caputo
Walsh, Edward J .
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "A Rumor of War, by Philip Caputo" fated invitation to a mystical union of souls, an incurable form of rationalization that got him into perpetual trouble." The implication is that Russell sought the lofty explanation when downright...
...It was a mysterious fraternity born of the smoke and danger of death...
...Marines were fanning out across the rice paddies, some in extended skirmish lines, some in serried, staggered ranks, the mortar shells bursting among them...
...In the end, the clash of emotions doesn't work...
...BOOK REVIEW A Rumor of War Philip Caputo / Holt, Rinehart, Winston / $10.00 Edward J. Walsh Of the American writers, it was probably Stephen Crane, in The Red Badge of Courage, who first described the sublime camaraderie of men in battle...
...Government were Hamburg and Dresden, and neither HEW nor HUD had any role there whatsoever...
...A Rumor of War is a book for Vietnam veterans and their loved ones—perhaps especially for the veterans...
...Dear Dr...
...Which is a shame...
...punctuated often by cowardice and awful malice, but with acts of true nobility and manly tenderness as well...
...His unit, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, spearheaded the introduction of American ground troops, in the spring of 1965...
...even fewer—probably no one —who would defend the way Caputo and his men were forced to fight...
...A Rumor of War is his bittersweet memoir...
...the indecisive moralizing by the former English major doesn't mesh with the terse descriptions of fear and courage in the ricepaddies and the crude field hospitals...
...A century had passed since the end of that most tragic of American wars when Marine Second Lieutenant Philip Caputo led his rifle platoon at a jaunty double-time down the ramp of an Air Force transport onto the tarmac at Danang, Vietnam...
...An enemy automatic rifle tack-tacked from a row of grassy mounds, west of the landing zone...
...I suggest you make your campaign more relevant...
...Last week ittook me 20 minutes to convince one dumb cop that I was not an "overloaded dump truck...
...THE BOOTBLACK STAND Dr...
...Caputo survived almost a year in the hot wet jungle, watching his fellow Marines kill, and die...
...But on the other matter, the style and substance of Six Men leave no question: Cooke is conservative, in the spiritual and social sense of that word, and in that sense more "deeply conservative" than some members of the sextet he writes of...
...Crane wrote: "There was a consciousness always of the presence of his comrades about him...
...but it is an accurate one...
...To hell with that...
...If so, it is more evidence that the New World likes what the Old periodically and graciously seems to deposit in its midst: a civilized and civilizing man...
...And, as I shouted at my press conference, I intend to fight for a "real" federal urban policy...
...Ten years after leaving the Corps, Caputo has finished his war story...
...Well, there's no use trying to get inside Cooke's head to discover whether he yearns, or once yearned, to be the hellion or the progressive...
...of the heartrending eagerness of young men for war—the blood-swollen god, Crane called it...
...Practically every time I set out on FDR Drive I am pulled over by some stupid cop, complaining that state law requires that I affix a "slow moving vehicle emblem" to my "bumper...
...In the South Bronx, admittedly, the government has accomplished half of what it accomplished in Dresden, but it is unlikely that the inhabitants will ever recover, for there is no sign the government will ever let up...
...of the archetypal gyrene platoon sergeant, who rules by intimidation—and well...
...We learn—or, for those who were Marines, are reminded—of the Marine Corps policy, cast in iron, of using black ink, never blue...
...Why not fight for an end to the war in Vietnam or for the immediate impeachment of Richard Nixon...
...The book is a chronicle of modern war: shorn of glamor, but not heroism...
...But I should think that the more interesting glimpse of Cooke is suggested in the two sentences that close his prefatory "A Note on Fame and Friendship": "They [the six men] all seem to me to be deeply conservative men who, for various psychological reasons, yearned to be recognized rather as hellions or brave progressives...
...Caputo, like many of our friends and neighbors, went along...
...Of the Marines, traditionally the "first to fight," the 9th MEB was the first to dig foxholes in the muddy clay of 'Nam, the first to hear sniper fire about its ears, the first to shed the illusions wrought by John F. Kennedy's proud mythmaking...
...He [Fleming] felt the subtle battle brotherhood more potent even than the cause for which they were fighting...
...As the Marines bore the brunt of the fighting for the first two years of the war, they took casualties: to booby traps and disease, to insects and misplaced friendlyfire, as much as to the Viet Cong...
...and the battle episodes: The last helicopters were taking off, climbing nose down, banking sharply as they climbed, with the dark-green mountains in the background...
...Marine Corps, works for the United States Industrial Council in Nashville, Tennessee...
...Plunkitt: Like millions of other Americans determined to realize their potential as human beings, I have taken up jogging...
...Perhaps that is their real link with this writer...
...I am seeking the Democratic nomination for Ed Koch's old congressional seat...
...We remember, too, that in 1965 there were few who thought twice about sending ground troops to Vietnam—to plod through glue-like mud in jungles, carrying mortars and 25-pound machine guns, chasing an enemy who lived there but did not mind dying if it helped kill or mutilate an American...
...It is the intensely sad, wholly humane quality of the book that makes it worthwhile...
...he despises, understandably, the body-count syndrome...
...Caputo was there...
...It is all too true, told without melodrama, every fact in place...
...Under fire, man's powers of life are heightened in proportion to the proximity of death, so that he [feels] an elation as extreme as his dread," he tells us...
...he was lucky enough to come back...
...His objections to the Vietnam adventure are not particularly original: He wonders why we were there, what with the corrupt Saigon regime...
...But Caputo plays out his disillusionment with the war as if he had to sell it to the reader...
...GWP There is opportunity In America...
...For him, the war was neither evil nor virtuous, Edward J. Walsh, who served as a. First Lieutenant in the U.S...
...Bloomington, Indiana The American Spectator February 1978 37...
...A veteran of countless firefights, he confesses that he, like many who shared his experience, is unable to detach himself from the compelling thrill of combat, with its mystic lure of danger...
...After his discharge, Caputo participated half-heartedly in the antiwar movement, mailed back his medals, etc., all of it tortuously replayed in A Rumor of War...
...George Washington Plunkitt, our prize-winning political analyst, has accepted a staff position with the House Ethics Committee, but he has graciously consented to continue advising American statesmen in these times of trouble...
...Whatever his later sympathy for Joan Baez, she isn't mentioned...
...Crane may have been more 36 The American Spectator February 1978 eloquent, but not more honest...
...I can tell you I am some kind of runner...
...I have already gone through five pairs of Adidas Superstars...
...The best passages are the descriptions of Marine Corps training which the author, for all his agony, thoroughly enjoys in the retelling, as do all Marines...
...It is an enduring lesson that, on thebattlefield, all wars are the same...
...Six Men is distinctively the work of such a man...
...The tedious finger-wagging aside, it is the timeless nobility of brave men that Caputo admires...
...but, one suspects, a terrible adventure he undertook, seeking no more than adventure and material for a Hemingwayesque novel, living out his tough-Marine fantasies, but getting more than he bargained for...
...he laments what the war did to the good, average, small-town boys in his platoon...
...At the same time, the author is candid...
...Yes, there are spots throughout the book where Cooke necessarily pops up, as in the anecdotes in whichhe co-stars...
...the book could have been a poignant work of art...
...Yet the male-dominated capitalist system continues to oppress me and my sisters...
...Sincerely yours, Bella Abzug Dear Ms...
...The value of Caputo's work is in the descriptions of young men risking death to rescue wounded buddies, which happened as often as the incidents of cowardice and cruelty of which we are constantly reminded...
...If we learned nothing else from the 1960s, it was that the onlycities ever improved by the U.S...
...It is the unending contradictions which mark Caputo's book most conspicuously...
...The implication is that Russell sought the lofty explanation when downright lust may have been—and probably was—all that was at work...
...Address all correspondence to The Bootblack Stand, c/o The American Spectator...
...Edward failed in having both a sense of duty and a knowledge of history, and Russell lackedCooke's term—horse sense...
...But for all the searing emotion of collecting the wounded, for all the gripping suspense of waiting in foxholes on endless pitch-black nights, it is the handwringing ambiguity of the author's loss of faith that finally dominates, and dilutes the genuine power of his book...
...Abzug: Cut the ordure...
...With a few moving exceptions, his protest is the same as that heard on college campuses in the late sixties...
...The dustjacket notes that in reading Six Men one will come upon a seventh—Cooke himself—and I would be remiss were I to let him go unattended...
...Significantly, Caputo dedicates his book to two of his comrades, an enlisted man and an officer who both fell in Vietnam...
...Two-and-a-half years after America's humiliation in Indochina, there are few left who would defend our policy there...
...That is not a flattering notion about a man who hated hypocrisy and made much of the importance of honesty...
...Because qualities such as these often are missing in our public men, and in our journalists, I venture that their presence in Cooke accounts for a great deal of his popularity...
...S'arkes Tarzian Inc...
...We all could do worse...
Vol. 11 • February 1978 • No. 4
