A Rumor Of War

by Philip Caputo

Once I had seen pigs eating napalm-charred corpses—a memorable sight, pigs eating roast people.

There is an ineradicable streak of machismo, bordering on masochism, in all marines,

There was nothing we could not do because we were Americans, and for the same reason, whatever we did was right.

Most of the huts are made of thatch, but the American presence has added a new construction material: several houses are built entirely of flattened beer cans; red and white Budweiser, gold Miller, cream and brown Schlitz, blue and gold Hamm’s from the land of sky-blue waters.

3d platoon seems to have gone crazy. They destroy with uncontrolled fury. At last it is over. The hamlet which is marked on our maps as Giao-Tri (3) no longer exists.

These villagers aided the VC, and we taught them a lesson. We are learning to hate.

but Sullivan probably had not felt any intimations of mortality when he walked down to that river, a string of canteens jangling in his hand. Then the sniper centered the cross hairs on his telescopic sight, and all that Sullivan had ever been or would ever be, all of his thoughts, memories, and dreams were annihilated in an instant.

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.

He was a patriot—the best sort, the kind who do not walk around with American flags in their lapels.

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.

We were all the victims of a great practical joke played on us by God or Nature. Maybe that was why corpses always grinned. They saw the joke at the last moment.

That is the secret to emotional survival in war, not thinking.

Looking at them, it was hard to believe that most of them were only nineteen or twenty. For their faces were not those of children, and their eyes had the cold, dull expression of men who are chained to an existence of ruthless practicalities. They struggled each day to keep dry, to keep their skin from boiling up with jungle rot, and to stay alive.

didn’t care how death came so long as it came quickly and painlessly. I would die as casually as a beetle is crushed under a boot heel, and perhaps it was the recognition of my insect-like pettiness that had made me stop caring. I was a beetle. We were all beetles, scratching for survival in the wilderness. 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, so would it go on without me. My death would not alter a thing.

I wondered if I was dying. Well, if I am, I thought, it is not so bad. Dying is actually pleasant. It is painless. Death is an end to pain.

Eating the rice on that desolate hill, it occurred to me that we were becoming more and more like our enemy. We ate what they ate. We could now move through the jungle as stealthily as they. We endured common miseries. In fact, we had more in common with the Viet Cong than we did with that army of clerks and staff officers in the rear.

We passed through the village like a wind; by the time we started up Hill 52, there was nothing left of Ha Na but a long swath of smoldering ashes, charred tree trunks, their leaves burned off, and heaps of shattered concrete. 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.

So we went along with the captain’s policy, without reflecting on its moral implications. That is the level to which we had sunk from the lofty idealism of a year before. We were going to kill people for a few cans of beer and the time to drink them.

None of this testimony, none of these “facts” amounted to the truth. The truth was a synthesis of all three points of view: the war in general and U.S. military policies in particular were ultimately to blame for the deaths of Le Du and Le Dung. That was the truth and it was that truth which the whole proceeding was designed to conceal.

It was then that I tried to do a bit of proselytizing among the clerks in the HqCo office. The war, I said, was unwinnable. It was being fought for a bunch of corrupt politicians in Saigon. Every American life lost was a life wasted. The United States should withdraw now, before more men died.

“Sir,” said a lance corporal, “if we pulled out now, then all our efforts up to now would have been in vain.”

The plane banked and headed out over the China Sea, toward Okinawa, toward freedom from death’s embrace. None of us was a hero. We would not return to cheering crowds, parades, and the pealing of great cathedral bells. We had done nothing more than endure. We had survived, and that was our only victory.

I kept thinking about Levy, about Sullivan, about all of the others, and something in me cried out against the waste of their lives. The war was lost, or very nearly lost. Those men had died for no reason. They had given their all for nothing.

No writer ever truly succeeds. The disparity between the work conceived and the work completed is always too great, and the writer merely achieves an acceptable level of failure.