A Rumor Of War

by Philip Caputo

This is the greatest strength of A Rumor of War. It shatters the illusions about war that we allow ourselves to be fooled by. It unravels war’s alienating jargon and casts aside all of our comforting platitudes. It lets you in, whoever you might be, wherever you might be, and whenever you might be. And it does so without asking for anything other than your consideration of one man’s attempt to be honest about what happens when human beings are trapped in war’s terrible orbit.

On March 8, 1965, as a young infantry officer, I landed at Danang with a battalion of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, the first U.S. combat unit sent to Indochina. I returned in April 1975 as a newspaper correspondent and covered the Communist offensive that ended with the fall of Saigon. Having been among the first Americans to fight in Vietnam, I was also among the last to be evacuated, only a few hours before the North Vietnamese Army entered the capital.

War is always attractive to young men who know nothing about it, but we had also been seduced into uniform by Kennedy’s challenge to “ask what you can do for your country” and by the missionary idealism he had awakened in us.

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.

By autumn, what had begun as an adventurous expedition had turned into an exhausting, indecisive war of attrition in which we fought for no cause other than our own survival.

we learned about death at an age when it is common to think of oneself as immortal. Everyone loses that illusion eventually, but in civilian life it is lost in installments over the years. We lost it all at once and, in the span of months, passed from boyhood through manhood to a premature middle age.

We left Vietnam peculiar creatures, with young shoulders that bore rather old heads.

this desire to go back did not spring from any patriotic ideas about duty, honor, and sacrifice, the myths with which old men send young men off to get killed or maimed. It arose, rather, from a recognition of how deeply we had been changed, how different we were from everyone who had not shared with us the miseries of the monsoon, the exhausting patrols, the fear of a combat assault on a hot landing zone. We had very little in common with them. 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.

Anyone who fought in Vietnam, if he is honest about himself, will have to admit he enjoyed the compelling attractiveness of combat. It was a peculiar enjoyment because it was mixed with a commensurate pain. Under fire, a man’s powers of life heightened in proportion to the proximity of death, so that he felt an elation as extreme as his dread. His senses quickened, he attained an acuity of consciousness at once pleasurable and excruciating. It was something like the elevated state of awareness induced by drugs. And it could be just as addictive, for it made whatever else life offered in the way of delights or torments seem pedestrian.

Two friends of mine died trying to save the corpses of their men from the battlefield. Such devotion, simple and selfless, the sentiment of belonging to each other, was the one decent thing we found in a conflict otherwise notable for its monstrosities.

The marines in our brigade were not innately cruel, but on landing at Danang they learned rather quickly that Vietnam was not a place where a man could expect much mercy if, say, he was taken prisoner. And men who do not expect to receive mercy eventually lose their inclination to grant it.

Most American soldiers in Vietnam—at least the ones I knew—could not be divided into good men and bad. Each possessed roughly equal measures of both qualities. I saw men who behaved with great compassion toward the Vietnamese one day and then burned down a village the next.

was left with none of the optimism and ambition a young American is supposed to have, only a desire to catch up on sixteen months of missed sleep and an old man’s conviction that the future would hold no further surprises, good or bad. I hoped there would be no more surprises. I had survived enough ambushes and doubted my capacity to endure many more physical or emotional shocks. I had all the symptoms of combat veteranitis: an inability to concentrate, a childlike fear of darkness, a tendency to tire easily, chronic nightmares, an intolerance of loud noises—especially doors slamming and cars backfiring—and alternating moods of depression and rage that came over me for no apparent reason. Recovery has been less than total.

I joined the Marines in 1960, partly because I got swept up in the patriotic tide of the Kennedy era but mostly because I was sick of the safe, suburban existence I had known most of my life.

I joined the Platoon Leaders’ Class, the Marines’ version of ROTC. I was to attend six weeks of basic training the following summer and then an advanced course during the summer before I graduated from college. Completion of Officer Candidate School and a bachelor’s degree would entitle me to a commission, after which I would be required to serve three years on active duty.

the Marine Corps, as we quickly learned, was more than a branch of the armed services. It was a society unto itself, demanding total commitment to its doctrines and values, rather like one of those quasi-religious military orders of ancient times, the Teutonic Knights or the Theban Band.

The Corps prized élan in its troops. The offensive was the only tactic worthy of the name.

The essence of the offensive was the frontal assault: “Hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle.” This was the supreme moment of infantry combat; no tricky flanking or encircling movements, just a line of determined men firing short bursts from the hip as they advanced on the enemy at a stately walk.

We took these stage-managed exercises seriously, thinking they resembled actual combat. We couldn’t know then that they bore about as much similarity to the real thing as shadowboxing does to street-fighting.

counterinsurgency was still surrounded by the Kennedy mystique, even though the young president had been dead for nearly a year. But the glamorous prince of Camelot had given the new doctrine his imprimatur by sending the first Special Forces detachments to Vietnam, glamorous figures themselves in their green berets and paratrooper boots. The fascination was strongest among the junior officers, who were drawn by the apparent romance of fighting guerrilla bands in far-off places.

The senior first lieutenant who tutored us in counterguerrilla operations had served there for thirty days as a “military observer,” which did not exactly qualify him as an expert. He had been wounded, however, and although it had happened under less than heroic circumstances—he was hit in the buttocks while squatting over a latrine—the Purple Heart pinned above his left pocket gave him an air of authority.

mysteries of counterrevolution. His lectures were full of enough jargon to dispel the illusion that guerrilla-fighting was something like Indian-fighting, a rough, seat-of-the-pants form of warfare. On the contrary, it appeared to be a highly specialized art; complex tactics with esoteric names were required to outwit the wily insurgents. We were taught how to batter them into submission with the Hammer and Anvil Movement, to make them dance to their deaths in a Minuet Ambush, to trap them in a Constricting Cordon, and to repulse their attacks with the Triangular Defense.

A few of my classmates became counterinsurgency cultists, immersing themselves in almost all of the literature published on the subject. They made a curious sight, those crew-cut, American-looking officers studying the gospels of Mao Tse-tung as devoutly as the Chairman’s disciples in Peking and Hanoi. They were obeying the old injunction “Know your enemy.” Most of those studious officers were regulars with career ambitions, and they boned up on that exotic strategy for the same reason medical students read articles on the latest trends in surgery: they thought it would make them better at their profession if and when the time came to practice it in earnest.

Sometimes I could not remember ever having done anything else. My college years receded, and it seemed as if I had spent almost all my life humping a too heavy pack beneath too hot a sun down a road that was too long. The essence of the Marine Corps experience, I decided, was pain.

The Marine Corps had made highly efficient fighting men of us, and we had begun to look it. Gone were the shaggy, somewhat overweight children who had stumbled off the buses at OCS a long time before. They had been replaced by streamlined marines, whose hardened limbs were adapted for walking great distances or for thrusting a bayonet into a man’s ribs with ease. But the most significant changes were not the physical ones. We had become self-confident and proud, some to the point of arrogance. We had acquired the military virtues of courage, loyalty, and esprit de corps, though at the price of a diminished capacity for compassion.

Lance Corporal Marshall, in civilian life a freelance knight of the quarter-mile strip, given to telling tales about back-road jousts won on his chrome-gilt steed, a chopped Chevy with a California rake, four-speed stick, four-eleven rear end, and a fuel-injected mill that idled with a throaty rumble and exploded like Vesuvius when he wound her out, red-lined the tac, and did zee-ro to sixty in five flat, goddamn, leaving the other dudes like they were standing still. Ambition: to save enough money in the Corps to buy an even hairier beast when he got out and spend the rest of his life watching telephone poles whip past in a blur.

A few generalizations can be made about all of them. They were to a man thoroughly American, in their virtues as well as flaws: idealistic, insolent, generous, direct, violent, and provincial in the sense that they believed the ground they stood on was now forever a part of the United States simply because they stood on it.

“. . . Them: “first command was a rifle platoon in a battalion of the 3d Marine Division, which I joined on Okinawa after graduation from Basic School and a month’s leave in San Francisco. There were about forty men in it, but I can remember only a few. What remains in my memory is a partial roster of 2d platoon, C Company, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines . . .”

Most of them came from the ragged fringes of the Great American Dream, from city slums and dirt farms and Appalachian mining towns. With depressing frequency, the words 2 yrs. high school appeared in the square labeled EDUCATION in their service record books, and, under FATHER’S ADDRESS, a number had written Unknown. They were volunteers, but I wondered for how many enlisting had been truly voluntary. The threat of the draft came with their eighteenth birthdays, and they had no hope of getting student deferments, like the upper-middle-class boys who would later revile them as killers. In some cases, a juvenile-court judge had presented a Hobson’s choice between the Corps and jail. Others were driven by economic and psychological pressures; the Marines provided them with a guaranteed annual income, free medical care, free clothing, and something else, less tangible but just as valuable—self-respect.

platoon sergeant, William Campbell (“Wild Bill” to his friends), was a veteran of Korea and countless barroom brawls in most of the ports between Naples and Yokohama. He fit the Hollywood image of a Marine sergeant so perfectly that he seemed a case of life imitating art. Six feet three inches and two hundred and twenty pounds of pure mean, he believed in the Marine Corps the way a Jesuit believes in the Catholic Church, and felt only disdain for the Navy, the Army, the Congress, motherhood, and officers—in that order. It was a sight to watch him walking down a street, straight-backed and swaggering in a uniform bleached white by tropic suns, his eyes glaring scornfully from beneath the bill of a faded cap.

The redhaired giant walked with a slight limp, a souvenir of the frostbite he had suffered in the Chosin Reservoir in 1950. At that time, before names like Khe Sanh, Hue, and Con Thien were added to the Corps’ battle-streamers, the fighting withdrawal from “frozen Chosin” was considered to be its greatest contest, a trial by fire and ice. Over the years, the campaign attained the dimensions of an epic—even the most sober military historians compared it to the march of Xenophon’s Immortals—and any marine who could say, “I was at Chosin” was likely to be regarded with a great deal of respect. And Campbell was among those few who could.

Platoon Sargeant William Campbell, “Wild Bill” to this friends.

The platoon did not resent Campbell’s violent methods. There is an ineradicable streak of machismo, bordering on masochism, in all marines, and I think the platoon was proud that its sergeant was reputed to be one of the toughest in the division. Besides, his man-to-man way of meting out punishment was preferable to the impersonal retribution of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If nothing else, it kept their records clean and saved them from losing rank or the chance for promotion.

about two weeks after I arrived on Okinawa, I watched him at work. He was standing off to one side of the field, hands on his hips, bawling commands to which the platoon responded with machinelike precision. It was an impressive demonstration of the thing he did best, and when he asked if I would like to give it a try, I said no, I could not do half as well as he, let alone any better. “That’s right, lieutenant,” he replied with a sneer. “Ain’t nobody better’n me.” I had a hard time convincing him that I was the platoon commander. I am not sure if I ever succeeded. He always seemed to tolerate me as an unavoidable nuisance, which is the way he felt about most officers. For all that, I grew to admire and even like him.

The town was named Heneko, and the marines went there at night to fight over meager honors, get hustled by the bowlegged bargirls, and drink in the heavy, reckless way of young GIs overseas for the first time. The days followed the time-honored routine of garrison life: reveille, roll call, calisthenics, morning chow, working parties, noon chow, close-order drill, working parties, calisthenics, evening chow, liberty call for those who had liberty, guard mount for those who did not, evening colors, taps, lights-out.

“Black ink, sir. Everything written in the Marine Corps is written in black ink.” “Top,” I said, “what the hell difference does it make?” His tone changed to one of indulgent exasperation, as if he were speaking to an idiot child. “Please, sir. Use my pen. Black ink. That’s the system, lieutenant, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that you can’t beat the system.”

nearly got lost several times, only proving the truth of the old service adage that the most dangerous thing in the world is a second lieutenant with a map and compass.

We practiced tactics perfected by the British during the Malayan uprising in the 1950s, a conflict that bore only a facile resemblance to the one in Indochina. Nevertheless, it was the only successful counterinsurgency waged by a Western power in Asia, and you could not argue with success. So, as always seems to be the case in the service, we were trained for the wrong war; we learned all there was to know about fighting guerrillas in Malaya.

all.

Vietnam, from what I could see of it, did not look like a war-torn country (a scenic defect American firepower would eventually correct). The “Communist stronghold” in front of us reminded me of a tropical park. Groves of bamboo and coconut palm rose out of rice paddies like islands from a jade-colored sea. Carrying poles slung across their shoulders, peasant women in conical hats jogged down a paddy dike past a small boy riding a water buffalo. A group of young girls glided by, provocative creatures in their silk trousers and filmy ao-dais. They smiled politely when a machine-gunner named Bunch waved at them from his foxhole. “Hey, naisson, number one. Joto itchiban.”

They were all filthy after a day of muddy digging, and bleary-eyed after nearly two days without sleep. I think they also felt a little let down. The haste with which they had been sent to Vietnam caused them to assume that the situation was desperate. The wagon train was surrounded and the cavalry had to come to the rescue. They had whipped themselves into such a fever of anticipation that reality proved to be an anticlimax. Rather than desperate, the situation appeared to be totally calm.

Our toughest battle that night was waged against Vietnam’s insect life. Mosquito netting and repellents proved ineffective against the horde of flying, creeping, crawling, buzzing, biting things that descended on us. From every hooch came the sound of slaps and cries of “goddamn little bastards, get outta here.” By midnight, my face and hands were masses of welts.

Ten days passed, ten days of total idleness. The novelty of our surroundings wore off and the battalion began to suffer from a spiritual disease called la cafard by the French soldiers when they were in Indochina. Its symptoms were occasional fits of depression combined with an inconquerable fatigue that made the simplest tasks, like shaving or cleaning a rifle, seem enormous. Its causes were obscure, but they had something to do with the unremitting heat, the lack of action, and the long days of staring at that alien landscape; a lovely landscape, yes, but after a while all that jungle green became as monotonous as the beige of the desert or the white of the Arctic.

I guess we believed in our own publicity—Asian guerrillas did not stand a chance against U.S. Marines—as we believed in all the myths created by that most articulate and elegant mythmaker, John 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.

The new phase opened with B Company’s skirmish on April 22. As far as I know, it was the first engagement fought by an American unit in Vietnam.

After I came home from the war, I was often asked how it felt, going into combat for the first time. I never answered truthfully, afraid that people would think of me as some sort of war-lover. The truth is, I felt happy. The nervousness had left me the moment I got into the helicopter, and I felt happier than I ever had. I don’t know why. I had an uncle who had told me what the fighting had been like on Iwo Jima, an older cousin who had fought with Patton in France and who could hardly talk about the things he had seen. I had read all the serious books to come out of the World Wars, and Wilfred Owen’s poetry about the Western Front. And yet, I had learned nothing.

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.

When the helicopters flew off, a feeling of abandonment came over us. Charley Company was now cut off from the outside world.

even in the dry season nothing ever dried in the bush, it only became less wet.

There was no pattern to these patrols and operations. Without a front, flanks, or rear, we fought a formless war against a formless enemy who evaporated like the morning jungle mists, only to materialize in some unexpected place. It was a haphazard, episodic sort of combat. Most of the time, nothing happened; but when something did, it happened instantaneously and without warning. Rifle or machine-gun fire would erupt with heart-stopping suddenness, as when quail or pheasant explode from cover with a loud beating of wings. Or mortar shells would come in from nowhere, their only preamble the cough of the tubes.

In those weeks we did not see heavy fighting; the battalion’s casualties averaged no more than twenty a month, out of a total combat strength of about a thousand men.

We began to change, to lose the boyish awkwardness we had brought to Vietnam. We became more professional, leaner and tougher, and a callus began to grow around our hearts, a kind of emotional flak jacket that blunted the blows and stings of pity.