A Rumor of War

by Philip Caputo

  “Okay, you know what to do,” I said to Allen, the patrol leader. “You set in ambush for a while. If nobody comes by, you go into the ville and you get them. You get those goddamned VC. Snatch ’em up and bring ’em back here, but if they give you any problems, kill ’em.”

  “Sir, since we ain’t supposed to be in the ville, what do we say if we have to kill ’em?”

  “We’ll just say they walked into your ambush. Don’t sweat that. All the higher-ups want is bodies.”

  “Yes, sir,” Allen said, and I saw the look in his eyes. It was a look of distilled hatred and anger, and when he grinned his skull-like grin, I knew he was going to kill those men on the slightest pretext. And, knowing that, I still did not repeat my order that the VC were to be captured if at all possible. It was my secret and savage desire that the two men die. In my heart, I hoped Allen would find some excuse for killing them, and Allen had read my heart. He smiled and I smiled back, and we both knew in that moment what was going to happen. There was a silent communication between us, an unspoken understanding: blood was to be shed. There is no mystery about such unspoken communication. Two men who have shared the hardships and dangers of war come to know each other as intimately as two natural brothers who have lived together for years; one can read the other’s heart without a word being said.

  The patrol left, creeping off the outpost into the swallowing darkness. Not long afterward, I began to be teased by doubts. It was the other half of my double self, the calm and lucid half, warning that something awful was going to happen. The thought of recalling the patrol crossed my mind, but I could not bring myself to do it. I felt driven, in the grip of an inexorable power. Something had to be done.

  And something was done. Allen called on the radio and said they had killed one of the Viet Cong and captured the other. They were coming in with the prisoner. Letting out a whoop, I called Neal on the field phone. He said he had monitored Allen’s radio transmission. He congratulated us:

  “That’s good work your men did out there.”

  I was elated. Climbing out of the bunker, I excitedly told Coffell “They got both of ’em! Both of ’em! Yeeeah-hoo!” The night was hot and still. Off to the west, heat-lightning flashed like shellfire in the clouds that obscured the sky above the mountains. It was clear directly overhead, and I could see the fixed and lofty stars.

  Waiting by the perimeter for the patrol to return, I heard a burst of rifle fire and the distinctive roar of Crowe’s shotgun. Allen called on the radio again: the prisoner had whipped a branch in Crowe’s face and tried to escape. They had killed him.

  “All right, bring the body in. I want to search it,” I said.

  They came in shortly. The five men were winded from their swift withdrawal and a little more excited than such veterans should have been. Allen was particularly overwrought. He started laughing as soon as he was inside the perimeter wire. Perhaps it was the release from tension that made him laugh like that, tinny, mirthlessly. When he calmed down, he told me what had happened:

  “We sneaked into the ville, like you told us, sir. Crowe guided us to the house where he’d talked to the informant. It was empty, so we went to the hooch where the VC lived. Me, Crowe, and Lonehill went inside. The other two stayed on the trail to guard our rear. It was dark in the house, so Crowe turned on his flashlight and there’s the two Cong, sleepin’ in their beds. Lonehill goes into the other room and this girl in there starts screamin’. ‘Shut her up,’ I said and Lonehill cracks her with his rifle barrel.” Allen started to laugh again. So did Crowe and a few of the men who were listening. I was laughing, too. How funny. Old Lonehill hit her with his rifle. “So about then, one of the Cong jumps up in his bed and the broad starts screamin’ again. Crowe went in and slapped her and told her to keep her damned mouth shut. Then he comes back into the room and pops the Cong sittin’ up with his forty-five. The dude jumps up and runs—he was hit in the shoulder—and Crowe runs after him. He was runnin’ around outside yellin’ ‘Troi Oi! Troi Oi!’” (Oh God) “and then Crowe greased him and he didn’t do no more yellin’. The other dude made a break for the door, but Lonehill grabbed him. ‘Okay, let’s take him back,’ I said, and we moved the hell out. We was right at the base of the hill when the gook whipped the branch in Crowe’s face. Somebody said, ‘He’s makin’ a break, grease the motherfucker,’ and Lonehill greased him and Crowe blasted him with the shotgun. I mean, that dude was dead.” Madly and hysterically, we all laughed again.

  “Okay,” I said, “where’s the body?”

  “Right outside the wire, sir.”

  The dead man was lying on his belly. The back of his head was blown out, and, in the beam of my flashlight, his brains were a shiny gray mass. Someone kicked the body over onto its back and said, “Oh, excuse me, Mr. Charles, I hope that didn’t hurt,” and we all doubled over with laughter. I beamed the flashlight on the corpse’s face. His eyes were wide and glowing, like the eyes in a stuffed head. While Coffell held the flashlight, I searched the body. There was something about the dead man that troubled me. It was not the mutilation—I was used to that. It was his face. It was such a young face, and, while I searched him, I kept thinking, He’s just a boy, just a boy. I could not understand why his youth bothered me; the VC’s soldiers, like our own, were all young men.

  Tearing off his bloodstained shirt, shredded, like his chest, by shotgun pellets, I looked for his papers. Someone quipped, “Hey, lieutenant, he’ll catch cold.” Everyone laughed again. I joined in, but I was not laughing as hard as before.

  There were no documents in the boy’s pockets, no cartridge belt around his waist. There was nothing that would have proved him to be a Viet Cong. That troubled me further. I stood up and, taking the flashlight from Coffell, held it on the boy’s dead face.

  “Did you find anything on the other one?” I asked Allen.

  “No, sir.”

  “No documents or weapons?”

  “No, sir. Nothing.”

  “How about the house? Did you find anything that looked like booby-trap gear in the house?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And no forged papers or anything like that?”

  “No, sir. We didn’t find nothing.”

  The laughter had stopped. I turned to Crowe.

  “Are you sure this was one of the two that kid pointed out?”

  “Yes, sir,” Crowe said, but he looked away from me.

  “Tell me again why you shot him.”

  “Whipped a branch in my face, like Allen said.” Crowe would not look at me. He looked at the ground. “He whipped a branch in my face and tried to make a break, so we wasted him.”

  The air seemed charged with guilt. I kept looking at the corpse, and a wave of horror rolled through me as I recognized the face. The sensation was like snapping out of a hypnotic trance. It was as jarring as suddenly awakening from a nightmare, except that I had awakened from one nightmare into another.

  “Allen, is that how it happened?” I asked. “The prisoner tried to escape, right?”

  “As far as I know, yes sir. Crowe shot him.”

  He was already covering himself. “Okay, if anyone asks you about this, you just say both these guys walked into your ambush. That’s what you’ll say, and you stick to that, all of you. They walked into your ambush and you killed one and captured the other. Then the prisoner tried to escape, so you killed him, too. Got that? You don’t tell anybody that you snatched him out of the village.”

  “Yes, sir,” Allen said.

  “Shove off and pass that on to the others. You too, Crowe.”

  “Yes, sir,” Crowe said, hanging his head like a naughty child.

  They walked off. I stayed for a while, looking at the corpse. The wide, glowing, glassy eyes stared at me in accusation. The dead boy’s open mouth screamed silently his innocence and our guilt. In the darkness and confusion, out of fear, exhaustion, and the brutal instincts acquired in the war, the marines had made a mistake. An awful mistake. They had kill
ed the wrong man. No, not they; we. We had killed the wrong man. That boy’s innocent blood was on my hands as much as it was on theirs. I had sent them out there. My God, what have we done? I thought. I could think of nothing else. My God, what have we done. Please God, forgive us. What have we done?

  Clicking off the flashlight, I told Coffell to get a burial party together. I did not know what else to do with the body of Crowe’s informant, the boy named Le Dung.

  * * *

  The typewriters in the quonset hut began to click promptly at eight o’clock, when the legal clerks came in to begin another routine day of typing up routine reports. The red light on the electric coffee pot glowed and the electric fans on the clerks’ desks stirred the warm, dense air. Having slept undisturbed for eight hours, as they did every night, and breakfasted on bacon and eggs, as they did every morning except when the division HQ mess served pancakes, the clerks were happy, healthy-looking boys. They appeared slightly bored by their dull work, but were content in the knowledge that their rear-echelon jobs gave them what their contemporaries in the line companies lacked: a future.

  Sitting in one corner of the hut with my defense counsel, Lieutenant Jim Rader, I looked at the clerks and wished I were one of them. How pleasant it would be to have a future again. A crowd of witnesses milled around outside: marines and Vietnamese villagers, the latter looking utterly bewildered by the courtroom drama in which they would soon play their assigned roles. One of the clerks muttered a curse as a fan blew some papers off his desk. The artificial gust blew against the wall behind him, rustling the pages of his short-timer’s calendar. The calendar was graced by a pornographic drawing, beneath which the word June was flanked by the numbers 1966. All the dates had been crossed off except today’s, the 30th, the day on which Lance Corporal Crowe was to be tried on two counts of premeditated murder.

  I was to appear as a witness for the prosecution. There was an absurdity in that, as I was to be tried on the same charges by the same prosecutor the following morning. But then, the fact that we had been charged in the first place was absurd. They had taught us to kill and had told us to kill, and now they were going to court-martial us for killing.

  A bound sheaf of papers as thick as a small-town phone book and entitled “Investigating Officer’s Report” sat on Rader’s desk. It was the product of five months’ labor on the part of various military lawyers, and the two top forms—DD457 and DD458—contained the charges against me: “… in that First Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo … did murder with premeditation Le Dung, a citizen of the Republic of Vietnam. In that First Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo … did murder with premeditation Le Du…” There was a third charge, resulting from my panicked attempt to deny that I had tried to cover up the killings: “In that First Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo … did subscribe under lawful oath a false statement in substance as follows: ‘I did not tell them to stick by their statements,’ which statements he did not then believe to be true.”

  There was a lot of other stuff—statements by witnesses, inquiry reports, and so forth—but one square on form DD-457 was conspicuously blank. It was the square labeled EXPLANATORY OR EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES ARE SUBMITTED HEREWITH. Early in the investigation, I wondered why the investigating officer had not submitted any explanatory or extenuating circumstances. Later, after I had time to think things over, I drew my own conclusion: the explanatory or extenuating circumstance was the war. The killings had occurred in war. They had occurred, moreover, in a war whose sole aim was to kill Viet Cong, a war in which those ordered to do the killing often could not distinguish the Viet Cong from civilians, a war in which civilians in “free-fire zones” were killed every day by weapons far more horrible than pistols or shotguns. The deaths of Le Dung and Le Du could not be divorced from the nature and conduct of the war. They were an inevitable product of the war. As I had come to see it, America could not intervene in a people’s war without killing some of the people. But to raise those points in explanation or extenuation would be to raise a host of ambiguous moral questions. It could even raise the question of the morality of American intervention in Vietnam; or, as one officer told me, “It would open a real can of worms.” Therefore, the five men in the patrol and I were to be tried as common criminals, much as if we had murdered two people in the course of a bank robbery during peacetime. If we were found guilty, the Marine Corps’ institutional conscience would be clear. Six criminals, who, of course, did not represent the majority of America’s fine fighting sons, had been brought to justice. Case closed. If we were found innocent, the Marine Corps could say, “Justice has taken its course, and in a court-martial conducted according to the facts and the rules of evidence, no crime was found to have been committed.” Case closed again. Either way, the military won.

  “I was talking to your old skipper outside,” Rader said. “He told me you seemed nervous.”

  “Well, how the hell do you expect me to feel? By tomorrow night, I could be on my way to Portsmouth for life.” Portsmouth, the U.S. Naval prison, is a penal institution that was said to combine the worst aspects of Marine boot camp and a medieval dungeon. Nevertheless, a life sentence there was better than the alternative—execution by firing squad. That possibility had been hanging over our heads until only a few weeks before, when it was ruled that our case would be tried as noncapital. We were not to be shot if found guilty. A boon!

  “Look, I don’t want you thinking that way,” Rader said. “I’m confident about what the outcome’ll be. Even if you’re convicted, we’ll appeal. All the way up to the President if we have to.”

  “Terrific. Meanwhile I’ll have brig guards playing the drums on my head with billy clubs. Christ, you’ve heard what it’s like in that place. Can you imagine what they’ll do to a busted officer?”

  “I don’t want you getting bitter. I want you to do well on that stand today. I can tell you that I admire you for the way you’ve borne up under all this. Don’t mess it up now. Really, I would’ve cracked long ago.”

  “Well, I don’t break, Jim. That’s one thing I’m not going to do. I broke once and I’m never going to break again.”

  “Hell, when did you ever break?”

  “That night. The night I sent those guys out there. I just cracked. I couldn’t take it anymore. I was frustrated as hell and scared. If I hadn’t broken, I would’ve never sent those guys out.”

  “Oh, that. We’ve been over that a dozen times. No drama, okay? This is the real world. We’ve been over that, over and over. You told them to capture those Vietnamese and to kill them if they had to. You didn’t order an assassination. That’s what you’ll say on the stand and you’ll say it because it’s the truth.”

  Rader and I had argued the point before. We had argued it from the day that he was appointed my defense counsel. That had been in February, after several villagers from Giao-Tri lodged a complaint with their village chief, who went to the district chief, a Vietnamese Army colonel, who took the matter to the American military authorities in Danang. Two young men from Giao-Tri, both civilians, had been assassinated by a marine patrol. The investigation got under way. The battalion was meanwhile establishing new permanent positions forward of the old front line. The Viet Cong protested the intrusion into their territory with land mines, infiltrators, mortars, and snipers. My platoon lost several more men, including Jones, who was seriously wounded by a booby trap. The other two platoons suffered about sixteen casualties between them, and C Company became so short-handed that Neal had to make riflemen out of the mortar crews attached to the company, leaving no one to man the eighty-ones.

  It was in this depressing atmosphere of steady losses that the five marines and I were called to battalion HQ to be questioned about what came to be known as “the incident at Giao-Tri.”

  Most of the particulars of that long and complicated inquiry have faded from memory. What remains most vividly is the mind-paralyzing terror that came over me when the investigating officer told me I was under suspicion of murder. Murder.
The word exploded in my ears like a mortar shell. Murder. But they were Viet Cong, I told the IO, a hearty lawyer-colonel from the division legal section. At least one of them was. No, he said, they did not appear to be VC. That had been confirmed by the village police chief and the village chief. Murder. I knew we had done something wrong, but the idea of homicide had never occurred to me. Bewildered and frightened, I answered the colonel’s questions as best as I could, but when he asked, “Did you tell your men to stick to their statements?” I blurted out “No!”

  Accompanied by his reporter, a lance corporal who had tapped out my answers on a transcript machine, the colonel left a few minutes later with his papers, case books, and machine, all the paraphernalia from the tidy world of Division HQ, the world of laws, which are so easy to obey when you eat well, sleep well, and do not have to face the daily menace of death.

  I was badly shaken afterward, so badly I thought I was going to break in two. It was not only the specter of a murder charge that tormented me; it was my own sense of guilt. Lying in a tent at HQ, I saw that boy’s eyes again, and the accusation in their lifeless stare. Perhaps we had committed homicide without realizing it, in much the same way McKenna had. Perhaps the war had awakened something evil in us, some dark, malicious power that allowed us to kill without feeling. Well, I could drop the “perhaps” in my own case. Something evil had been in me that night. It was true that I had ordered the patrol to capture the two men if at all possible, but it was also true that I had wanted them dead. There was murder in my heart, and, in some way, through tone of voice, a gesture, or a stress on kill rather than capture, I had transmitted my inner violence to the men. They saw in my overly aggressive manner a sanction to vent their own brutal impulses. I lay there remembering the euphoria we had felt afterward, the way we had laughed, and then the sudden awakening to guilt. And yet, I could not conceive of the act as one of premeditated murder. It had not been committed in a vacuum. It was a direct result of the war. The thing we had done was a result of what the war had done to us.