All men who go to war experience a moral as well as physical odyssey, but few were as dramatic as that of Philip Caputo. In 1960, as a 19-year-old college kid, he joined the US Marine Corps because he was bored stiff with suburban life in Westchester, Illinois, and wanted “to find in a commonplace world a chance to live heroically. Having known nothing but security, comfort and peace, I hungered for danger, challenges and violence.”
Five years later, he fulfilled his dream when he commanded a platoon in the first American contingent to land in Vietnam, still starry-eyed with the romantic vision of the martyred John F Kennedy: “If he was the King of Camelot, then we were his knights and Vietnam our crusade. There was nothing we could not do because we were Americans, and for the same reason, whatever we did was right.”
“He came clean about the iniquities committed by US troops
In 1977, Caputo published an account of what happened to him and his illusions in the ensuing 11 months. It became a sensation that was elevated to instant classic status. It has now been reissued with a new introduction. Caputo was among the first memoirists to come clean about the iniquities committed by US troops, and I would rate his book much higher than Michael Herr’s celebrated Dispatches (also published in 1977), which tells more that seems valid about himself and journalism than about soldiers.
A Rumor of War appeared at a time when Americans’ self-torture was at a peak about what they had done to themselves and to Vietnam. And here it all was, coolly chronicled by a participant and a perpetrator: the casual killings of civilians; the fruitless sweeps of boundless wildernesses; the stream of young marines killed and maimed; the severing of dead enemy ears for souvenirs.
Many Americans serving “in the bush” found it impossible to regard thatch and bamboo huts, their dim interiors boasting only a few pots and beds of woven straw, as the homes of real people, deserving of respect. Vietnamese villagers watched with apparent indifference as soldiers or marines probed their walls and straw piles with bayonets. Caputo wrote: “I smiled stupidly and made a great show of tidying up the mess before we left. See, lady, we’re not like the French. We’re all-American good-guy GI Joes. You should learn to like us.”
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He was dismayed to find that not all his marines, in whom he took such pride, possessed a store of humanity as impressive as their combat skills: “Some of them were not so decent and good. Many had petty jealousies, hatred and prejudices. And an arrogance tempered their ingrained American idealism.” His sergeant observed that in Korea he had seen men sight in their rifles by firing at farmers: “Before you leave here, sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average 19-year-old American boy.”
Caputo writes in his new prologue: “The discovery that the men we had scorned as peasant guerrillas were, in fact, a lethal, determined enemy and the casualty lists that lengthened each week with nothing to show for the blood being spilled broke our early confidence.”
Within a few months, even educated marines such as him had shed their delusions that they were in Vietnam to advance the cause of freedom and democracy, instead focusing ruthlessly on attempting to preserve their own hides.
Yet one of the many virtues of his book is its frankness about his own ambivalence towards this war, and about war as an activity — something that is shared by many veterans who have fought more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. If scant glory has been on offer, there has been fabulous excitement. Some civilians might be shocked to know how many young men became infantrymen because they wanted to kill people; they were merely naive about the risk of themselves becoming dead victims, rather than live heroes.
It is always a moot point, how far the overwhelming American revulsion towards Vietnam, with which Caputo’s book perfectly chimed, was the consequence of principled opposition to the haphazard violence deployed in support of a doubtful cause; and how far it was driven by failure. Americans will forgive all sorts of blunders and iniquities in pursuing objectives that are ultimately fulfilled. Failure, however, is the supreme American sin.
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Caputo writes that in the years following his service, he became nostalgic for the war, felt a strange longing to return to the scenes of his travails and terrors: “Though we were civilians again, the civilian world seemed alien. We did not belong to it as much as we did to that other world, where we had fought and our friends had died.” This is an almost universal truth about the muddled feelings of warriors.
Indeed, much of the value of this immensely readable tale of a young man’s murderous follies is that he tells many things that are not peculiar to Vietnam, but embrace the behaviour and feelings — or lack of them — of soldiers on all battlefields.
It is dangerous to exaggerate historical comparisons, but what seems to me striking about the Vietnam War is not its uniqueness, but the commonality of many of its problems with more recent western conflicts.
It is hard for the armed forces of rich western nations to achieve useful outcomes amid a primitive society with an utterly different culture and an incomprehensible language, in which foreign soldiers are merely brief birds of passage. The Americans in Vietnam could go on winning battles indefinitely, yet their tactical victories were meaningless when there was no credible local polity to exploit them.
A decade ago, Colonel HR McMaster (as he then was) described to me his armoured cavalry regiment’s successes in Iraq, then concluded ruefully: “The problem was, there was nothing to join up to.” This is a pivotal, seminal, fundamental problem for all western interventions, as it was in Vietnam.
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Our politicians seem as incapable today as Lyndon Johnson’s administration was in 1965, of understanding that while soldiers have a role to play in securing a society amid malign forces, they cannot achieve anything worth a nickel unless the local politics work.
Bodley Head £16.99 pp384
Read an extract on The Sunday Times website
Max Hastings is writing a history of the Vietnam War
