A Rumor Of War

by Philip Caputo

In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch’d And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars.…

No great dependence is to be placed on the eagerness of young soldiers for action, for the prospect of fighting is agreeable to those who are strangers to it. —Vegetius

For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.

I warrant you, you shall find the ceremonies of the wars, and the cares of it, and the forms of it … to be otherwise. —Shakespeare HENRY V

I have made fellowships— Untold of happy lovers in old song. For love is not the binding of fair lips … But wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong … —Wilfred Owen “APOLOGIA PRO POEMATE MEO”

How many dead? As many as ever you wish. Don’t count ’em; they’re too many. Who’ll buy my nice fresh corpses, two a penny? —Siegfried Sassoon “THE EFFECT”

Your dextrous wit will haunt us long Wounding our grief with yesterday. Your laughter is a broken song; And death has found you, kind and gay. —Siegfried Sassoon “ELEGY”

“He’d never seen so many dead before.” The lilting words danced up and down his brain, While corpses jumped and capered in the rain. No, no; he wouldn’t count them anymore … —Siegfried Sassoon “THE EFFECT”

I first made that observation in Vietnam in 1965, when I noticed that the stench of a dead American made me just as sick as that of a dead Vietnamese. Since then, I have made it again and again in other wars in other places, on the Golan Heights and in the Sinai Desert, in Cyprus and Lebanon, and, coming full circle back to Vietnam, in the streets of Xuan Loc, a city much fought over during the North Vietnamese offensive in 1975. All those dead people, Americans, North and South Vietnamese, Arabs and Israelis, Turks and Greeks, Moslems and Christians, men, women, and children, officer and enlisted, smelled equally bad. *

I managed to find a driver who knew the route and told him what to do. I returned to the tent, where, in the spirit of the madness in which I was taking part, I made up a new title for myself. I wrote it on a piece of cardboard and tacked the cardboard to my desk. It read: 2LT. P. J. CAPUTO. OFFICER IN CHARGE OF THE DEAD. * * *

If I were fierce and bald and short of breath, I’d live with scarlet majors at the Base, And speed glum heroes up the line to death. —Siegfried Sassoon “BASE DETAILS”

The greatest tragedy is war, but so long as there is mankind, there will be war. —Jomini THE ART OF WAR

The numbers were not all that changed. I was twenty-four when the summer began; by the time it ended, I was much older than I am now. Chronologically, my age had advanced three months, emotionally about three decades. I was somewhere in my middle fifties, that depressing period when a man’s friends begin dying off and each death reminds him of the nearness of his own.

” That night, I was given command of a new platoon. They stood in formation in the rain, three ranks deep. I stood front and center, facing them. Devlin, Lockhart, and Bryce were in the first rank, Bryce standing on his one good leg, next to him the faceless Devlin, and then Lockhart with his bruised eye sockets bulging. Sullivan was there too, and Reasoner and all the others, all of them dead except me, the officer in charge of the dead. I was the only one alive and whole, and when I commanded, “Platoon, rye-eet FACE! Sliiiing HARMS! For-WARD HARCH!” they faced right, slung their rifles, and began to march. They marched along, my platoon of crippled corpses, hopping along on the stumps of their legs, swinging the stumps of their arms, keeping perfect time while I counted cadence. I was proud of them, disciplined soldiers to and beyond the end. They stayed in step even in death.

Hearing this on the way home, I had to pull over. Caputo is gut-wrenching at times.

Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land, Drawing no dividends from time’s tomorrows. —Siegfried Sassoon “DREAMERS”

They come like sacrifices in their trim, And to the fire-eyed maid of smoky war All hot and bleeding will we offer them … —Shakespeare HENRY IV, PART I

What would it be like when they answered the bell and saw a man in uniform standing in the doorway? Would they know instinctively why he had come? What would he say? How do you tell parents that all the years they had spent raising and educating their son were for nothing? Wasted. In that war, soldier’s slang for death was “wasted.” So-and-so was wasted. It was a good word.

My own motives for joining the marines had been mostly personal, but Levy seemed to have no personal ambition. He was a patriot—the best sort, the kind who do not walk around with American flags in their lapels. He had volunteered because it had seemed the right thing to do, and he had done it quietly, easily, and naturally. He had one other attribute rare in this indulgent age: an inflexible fidelity to standards.

But I had to admire his determination to do the thing as it was supposed to be done. It was typical of him. I think it was that fidelity to standards that killed him. Badly wounded in the legs, he did not have to endanger himself by trying to rescue the corpsman. He could have stayed under cover without any loss of honor, but they had drilled into our heads that a marine never left his wounded exposed to enemy fire. We never left our wounded on the battlefield. We brought them off, out of danger and into safety, even if we had to risk our own lives to do it. That was one of the standards we were expected to uphold. I knew I could not have done what Levy had done. Pulling himself up on his wounded legs, he had tried to save the corpsman, not knowing that the man was beyond saving. And he had probably done it as he had everything else—naturally, and because he thought it was the right thing to do.

It could not have been important, yet I wanted to remember. I want to remember now, to remember what you said, you, Walter Neville Levy, whose ghost haunts me still. No, it could not have been anything important or profound, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you were alive then, alive and speaking. And if I could remember what you said, I could make you speak again on this page and perhaps make you seem as alive to others as you still seem to me. So much was lost with you, so much talent and intelligence and decency. You were the first from our class of 1964 to die. There were others, but you were the first and more: you embodied the best that was in us. You were a part of us, and a part of us died with you, the small part that was still young, that had not yet grown cynical, grown bitter and old with death. Your courage was an example to us, and whatever the rights or wrongs of the war, nothing can diminish the rightness of what you tried to do. Yours was the greater love. You died for the man you tried to save, and you died pro patria. It was not altogether sweet and fitting, your death, but I’m sure you died believing it was pro patria. You were faithful. Your country is not. As I write this, eleven years after your death, the country for which you died wishes to forget the war in which you died. Its very name is a curse. There are no monuments to its heroes, no statues in small-town squares and city parks, no plaques, nor public wreaths, nor memorials. For ...

Oh they taught me how to kill, Then they stuck me on this hill, I don’t like it anymore. For all the monsoon rains Have scrambled up my brains, I’ve had a belly-full of war. Oh the sun is much too hot, And I’ve caught jungle rot, I don’t like it anymore. I’m tired and terrified, I just want to stay alive, I’ve had a belly-full of war. So you can march upon Hanoi, Just forget this little boy, I don’t like it anymore. For as I lie here with a pout, My intestines hanging out, I’ve had a belly-full of war.

” Everything rotted and corroded quickly over there: bodies, boot leather, canvas, metal, morals. Scorched by the sun, wracked by the wind and rain of the monsoon, fighting in alien swamps and jungles, our humanity rubbed off of us as the protective bluing rubbed off the barrels of our rifles. We were fighting in the cruelest kind of conflict, a people’s war. 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. According to those “rules of engagement,” it was morally right to shoot an unarmed Vietnamese who was running, but wrong to shoot one who was standing or walking; it was wrong to shoot an enemy prisoner at close range, but right for a sniper at long range to kill an enemy soldier who was no more able than a prisoner to defend himself; it was wrong for infantrymen to destroy a village with white-phosphorus grenades, but right for a fighter pilot to drop napalm on it. Ethics seemed to be a matter of distance and technology. You could never go wrong if you killed people at long range with sophisticated weapons. And then there was that inspi...

Finally, there was hatred, a hatred buried so deep that I could not then admit its existence. I can now, though it is still painful. I burned with a hatred for the Viet Cong and with an emotion that dwells in most of us, one closer to the surface than we care to admit: a desire for retribution. I did not hate the enemy for their politics, but for murdering Simpson, for executing that boy whose body had been found in the river, for blasting the life out of Walt Levy. Revenge was one of the reasons I volunteered for a line company. I wanted a chance to kill somebody.

We are but warriors for the working day. Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirched With rainy marching in the painful field. —Shakespeare HENRY V

The worn white soldiers in Khaki dress, Who tramped through the jungle and camped in the byre, Who died in the swamp and were tombed in the mire. —Rudyard Kipling “THE BALLAD OF BOH DA THONE”

… for, as I am a soldier … I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur Till in her ashes she lie buried. The gates of mercy shall be all shut up, And the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart, In liberty of bloody hand shall range With conscience wide as hell … —Shakespeare HENRY V