A Rumor Of War

by Philip Caputo

That is what I 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.

I needed to prove something—my courage, my toughness, my manhood, call it whatever you like.

Napoleon once said that he could make men die for little pieces of ribbon.

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.

A man needs many things in war, but a strong imagination is not one of them. In

In Vietnam, the best soldiers were usually unimaginative men who did not feel afraid until there was obvious reason.

It was the land that resisted us, the land, the jungle, and the sun.

you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old

the odor of death is so strong, you can never get used to it, as you can get used to the sight of death.

in war, a man does not have to be killed or wounded to become a casualty.

It was no orderly campaign, as in Europe, but a war for survival waged in a wilderness without rules or laws; a war in which each soldier fought for his own life and the lives of the men beside him, not caring who he killed in that personal cause or how many or in what manner and feeling only contempt for those who sought to impose on his savage struggle the mincing distinctions of civilized warfare—that code of battlefield ethics that attempted to humanize an essentially inhuman war.

who was to speak of rules and ethics in a war that had none?

Those who had lost the struggle had not changed anything by dying.

Thousands of people died each week in the war, and the sum of all their deaths did not make any difference. The war went on without them, and as it went on without them,

The one true god of modern war is blind chance.

Of all the ugly sights I saw in Vietnam, that was one of the ugliest: the sudden disintegration of my platoon from a group of disciplined soldiers into an incendiary mob.