A Rumor Of War

by Philip Caputo

A helicopter assault on a hot landing zone creates emotional pressures far more intense than a conventional ground assault. It is the enclosed space, the noise, the speed, and, above all, the sense of total helplessness. There is a certain excitement to it the first time, but after that it is one of the more unpleasant experiences offered by modern war. On the ground, an infantryman has some control over his destiny, or at least the illusion of it. In a helicopter under fire, he hasn’t even the illusion.

Behind us, a knot of marines were running in the crouched position men adopt under fire. Several were carrying radios, and the tall, waving antennae made an obvious target. As loudly as I could, I yelled at them to spread it out. They kept moving in a closely packed crowd, and one of my marines said, “That’s battalion headquarters. Fuckin’ pogues don’t know enough to stay out of the rain.” I hollered at them again, but they could not hear or simply ignored me. I was about to yell a third time, when they were all engulfed in smoke and clouds of pulverized earth, the shells going crump-crump-crump and bodies falling or flying out of the smoke. Faint with distance, the cry “Corpsman! corpsman!” drifted across the field. It was battalion headquarters, and it had almost been wiped out.

one of the Skyhawks comes in to strafe the tree line. The nose of the plane is pointing down at a slight angle and there is an orange twinkling as it fires its mini-gun, an aerial cannon that fires explosive 20-mm bullets so rapidly that it sounds like a buzz saw. The rounds, smashing into the tree line and the rice paddy at the incredible rate of one hundred per second, raise a translucent curtain of smoke and spraying water. Through this curtain, we see the Viet Cong behind the dike sitting up with his arms outstretched, in the pose of a man beseeching God. He seems to be pleading for mercy from the screaming mass of technology that is flying no more than one hundred feet above him. But the plane swoops down on him, fires its cannon once more, and blasts him to shreds. As the plane climbs away, I look at the dead men through my binoculars. All that remains of the third Viet Cong are a few scattered piles of bloody rags.

Miller’s company had run into a nest of enemy machine guns and had lost thirteen men.

Miller had lost seventeen men in the assault and fallen back to call in air strikes.

sniper in the cane field. Crack-crack-crack. The rounds narrowly missed us, and we clambered out of the trench to pour rifle fire into the field. A Viet Cong came running out of the yellow-green cane. At a range of nearly four hundred yards, Lonehill put a bullet at the man’s feet, adjusted the elevation knob of his rifle, and coolly fired again, the enemy soldier falling hard.

From page 262: “Lonehill, a full-blooded Comanche from Oklahoma, a crack shot who stood six feet two and looked at you with a stare that made you choose your words carefully when you spoke to him.”

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.

the fact was we had needlessly destroyed the homes of perhaps two hundred people. All the analysis in the world would not make a new village rise from the ashes. It could not answer the question that kept repeating itself in my mind nor lighten the burden of my guilt. The usual arguments and rationalizations did not help, either. Yes, the village had obviously been under enemy control; it had been a VC supply dump as much as it had been a village. Yes, burning the cache was a legitimate act of war and the fire resulting from it had been accidental. Yes, the later deliberate destruction had been committed by men in extremis; war was a state of extremes, and men often did extreme things in it. But none of that conventional wisdom relieved my guilt or answered the question: “Tai Sao?” Why?

Page and Navarro, killed a few days before, had faced no choice. The booby-trapped artillery shell had not given them any time to choose, or to take cover, or to do anything but die instantly. Both had had only four days left of their Vietnam tours, thus confirming the truth in the proverb, “You’re never a short-timer until you’re home.”

The corpsmen said that sun and air would help dry the running sores on feet and lower legs. The disease had been diagnosed as tropical impetigo.

The corpsmen had given me penicillin shots, but even antibiotics were not effective in that climate. Pus continued to ooze from the ulcers, so that whenever I took off my boots to change socks I had to hold my breath against the stench of my own rotting flesh.

Neal told me and the other officers that he was adopting a new policy: from now on, any marine in the company who killed a confirmed Viet Cong would be given an extra beer ration and the time to drink it. Because our men were so exhausted, we knew the promise of time off would be as great an inducement as the extra ration of beer. 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.

I learned about the wide gulf that divides the facts from the truth. Rader and I had a dozen similar conferences over the next five months. “Preparing testimony,” it was called. With each session, my admiration for Rader’s legal skills increased. He prepared my case with the hard-minded pragmatism of a battalion commander preparing an attack on an enemy-held hill. In time, he almost had me convinced that on the night of the killings, First Lieutenant Philip Caputo, in a lucid state of mind, issued a clear, legitimate order that was flagrantly disobeyed by the men under his command. I was fascinated by the testimony that was produced by our Socratic dialogues. Rader had it all written on yellow legal tablets, and I observed that not one word of it was perjured. There were qualifying phrases here and there—“to the best of my recollection,” “if I recall correctly,” “words to that effect”—but there wasn’t a single lie in it. And yet it wasn’t the truth.

The trial dragged on to its conclusion. In my tent awaiting the verdict, I felt in limbo, neither a free man nor a prisoner. I could not help thinking about the consequences of a guilty verdict in my own case. I would go to jail for the rest of my life. Everything good I had done in my life would be rendered meaningless. It would count for nothing. I already regarded myself as a casualty of the war, a moral casualty, and like all serious casualties, I felt detached from everything. I felt very much like a man who has lost a leg or an arm, and, knowing he will never have to fight again, loses all interest in the war that has wounded him. As his physical energies are spent on overcoming his pain and on repairing his bodily injuries, so were all of my emotional energies spent on maintaining my mental balance. I had not broken during the five-month ordeal. I would not break. No matter what they did to me, they could not make me break. All my inner reserves had been committed to that battle for emotional and mental survival. I had nothing left for other struggles.

all I asked for now was a chance to live for myself on my terms. I had no argument with the Viet Cong. It wasn’t the VC who were threatening to rob me of my liberty, but the United States government, in whose service I had enlisted. Well, I was through with that. I was finished with governments and their abstract causes, and I would never again allow myself to fall under the charms and spells of political witch doctors like John F. Kennedy.

the South Vietnamese insurrection that had begun three months before and ended only in May. That insurrection, as much as my own situation, had awakened me to the senselessness of the war. The tragifarce began when General Thi, the commander of I Corps, was placed under arrest by the head of the Saigon government, Nguyen Cao Ky. Ky suspected him of plotting a coup. Thi’s ARVN divisions in I Corps rallied to his support. There were demonstrations and riots in Danang, where Thi’s headquarters were located. This prompted Ky to declare that Danang was in the hands of Communist rebels and to send his divisions to the city to “liberate it from the Viet Cong.” Soon, South Vietnamese soldiers were fighting street battles with other South Vietnamese soldiers as the two mandarin warlords contended for power. And while the South Vietnamese fought their intramural feud, we were left to fight the Viet Cong.

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. The clerks, their patriotism unwavering, having never heard a shot fired in anger, looked at me in disbelief. I wasn’t surprised. This was 1966 and talk such as mine was regarded as borderline treason. “Sir,” said a lance corporal, “if we pulled out now, then all our efforts up to now would have been in vain.” “In other words, because we’ve already wasted thousands of lives, we should waste a few thousand more,” I said. “Well, if you really believe that ‘not in vain’ crap, you should volunteer for a rifle company and go get yourself killed, because you deserve it.”

“Here’s the situation. The general is thinking of dropping all charges against the rest of you because Crowe was acquitted. In your own case, you’d have to plead guilty to the third charge and accept a letter of reprimand from the general. What do you want to do?” “You mean if I plead guilty to charge three, there’s no court-martial?” “Unless you want one.” “Of course I don’t want one. Okay, I’m guilty.”

“Congratulations,” he said, pumping my hand. “The charges have been dropped. The general’s going to put a letter of reprimand in your jacket, but hell, all that’ll do is hurt your chances for promotion to captain. You’re a free man. I also heard that the adjutant’s cutting orders for you. You’ll be going home in a week, ten days at most. It’s all over.”

Late in the month, the atmosphere of disintegration became palpable. Not just an army, but an entire country was crumbling, collapsing before our eyes. The roads were jammed with refugees and routed soldiers. Some of the columns were twenty miles long, winding out of the hills and rubber plantations toward the flat marshlands around Saigon. They stretched along the roads for as far as we could see, processions that seemed to have no beginning and no end. They shambled in the rain and heat: barefoot civilians; soldiers whose boots were rotting on their feet, some still carrying their weapons and determined that their little bands would stick together, most without weapons, broken men determined only to escape; lost children crying for their parents, parents for their children; wounded men covered with dried blood and filthy battle dressings, some walking, some lying in heaps in the backs of ambulances; trucks, buses, herds of water buffalo, and oxcarts creaking on wooden wheels. They were packed densely and stretched down the roads, solid, moving masses that rolled over barricades and flowed past the hulks of burned-out tanks, past the corpses and pieces of corpses rotting in the fields at the roadsides. And from behind those retreating columns came the sound of bombs and shellfire, the guttural rumbling of the beast, war, devouring its victims.

America had lost its first war.

People didn’t want to know about the tumults of the warrior’s heart, to hear the cries that came howling straight out of the heart of darkness, the belly of the beast. Both sides of the Vietnam debate in the United States shared a suspicion, at times a contemptuousness, of the veteran. The war was fought by the children of the slums, of farmers, mechanics, and construction workers. The debate was waged by elites. The establishment that got us involved in Vietnam did not send its sons and daughters there; in fact, its sons and daughters were in the forefront of the antiwar movement. By the time Saigon fell in 1975, a lot of “hawks” had an almost cartoonish view of the Vietnam veteran as a drug-addicted, undisciplined loser, the tattered standard-bearer of America’s first defeat. The Left drew an equally distorted picture of him as, at best, an ignorant hardhat with a gun, at worst as a psychopath in uniform. In the eyes of the antiwar movement, each soldier was the incarnation of what it considered a criminal policy. As the citizens of a democracy, the noisy patriots and protestors had a right to their opinions about Vietnam but not, it seemed to me, to the smug righteousness with which they voiced them, because they hadn’t been there.

Our self-image as a progressive, virtuous, and triumphant people exempt from the burdens and tragedies of history came apart in Vietnam, and we had no way to integrate the war or its consequences into our collective and individual consciousness. Scholar John Hellman speaks directly to this point in his analysis of Vietnam War literature, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam: Vietnam is an experience that has severely called into question American myth. Americans entered Vietnam with certain expectations that a story, a distinctly American story, would unfold. When the story of America in Vietnam turned into something unexpected, the true nature of the larger story of America itself became the subject of intense cultural dispute. On the deepest level, the legacy of Vietnam is the disruption of our story, of our explanation of the past and our vision of the future.