A Rumor of War

by Philip Caputo

  At some point in this self-examination, I realized I had lied to the investigating officer. Walking over to the adjutant’s tent, I called the colonel and said I wanted to amend my statement and to exercise my right to counsel. He returned to battalion HQ with Rader, a tall redhead in his late twenties.

  “Sir,” I said, “that part in my statement where I said that I didn’t tell the men to stick by their statements? Well, that isn’t true. I wasn’t thinking straight. I’d like it deleted and replaced with the truth.”

  Sorry, he said, that statement had been made under oath. It could not be deleted. That was the law. If I wished to say something else, fine, but the original statement would remain in the record. The colonel smiled, quite pleased with himself and the inexorable logic of his precious law. He had me on another charge. I made another statement.

  Afterward, Rader and I had the first of our many long interviews. He asked me to describe everything that had happened that night.

  “All right,” I said, “but before I do, I want you to read this. I wrote it while I was waiting for you and the colonel to get here.”

  I handed him a turgid essay on front-line conditions. In a guerrilla war, it read, the line between legitimate and illegitimate killing is blurred. The policies of free-fire zones, in which a soldier is permitted to shoot at any human target, armed or unarmed, and body counts further confuse the fighting man’s moral senses. My patrol had gone out thinking they were going after enemy soldiers. As for me, I had indeed been in an agitated state of mind and my ability to make clear judgments had been faulty, but I had been in Vietnam for eleven months.…

  Rader crumpled up my literary ramblings and said, “This is all irrelevant, Phil.”

  “Why? It seems relevant to me.”

  “It won’t to a court-martial.”

  “But why? We didn’t kill those guys in Los Angeles, for Christ’s sake.”

  Rader replied with a lecture on the facts of life. I cannot remember exactly what he said, but it was from him that I got the first indication that the war could not be used to explain the killings, because it raised too many embarrassing questions. We were indeed going to be charged as if we had killed both men on the streets of Los Angeles. The case was to be tried strictly on the facts: who said what to whom; what was done and who did it. A detective story. The facts, Rader said, are what he wanted. He did not want philosophy.

  “Did you order your men to assassinate the two Vietnamese?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you say they were to capture them, or to shoot first and ask questions later?”

  “No. They were supposed to capture them, kill them if they had to. But the thing is, I must have given them the impression that I wouldn’t mind if they just killed them. Jim, I wasn’t right in the head that night…”

  “Don’t try temporary insanity. There’s a legal definition for that, and unless you were bouncing off walls, you won’t fit it.”

  “I’m not saying I was crazy. What I’m saying is that I was worn-out as hell. And scared. Goddamnit, I admit it. I was scared that one of those damned mines was going to get me if I didn’t do something. You’ve got to realize what it’s like out there, never knowing from one minute to the next if you’re going to get blown sky-high.”

  “Look, a court-martial isn’t going to care what it’s like out there. You’ve got to realize that. This isn’t a novel, so drop the dramatics. Nothing would’ve happened if those villagers hadn’t complained. But they did and that started an investigation. Now the machine’s in gear and it won’t stop until it’s run its course. Now, did anyone else hear you brief the patrol?”

  “Yeah, Sergeant Coffell and the platoon sergeant were there.”

  “So, in other words, you gave orders to capture if possible, kill if necessary, or words to that effect. That’s what you said, and there are two witnesses who’ll corroborate you. Right?”

  “That’s what I said. I’m not sure if I completely meant it. I had this feeling that night … a sort of violent feeling…”

  “Feelings aren’t admissible evidence. I’m not worried about your psyche. The important thing is whether or not you ordered your men to commit an assassination.”

  “Damnit, Jim. It keeps coming back to the war. I wouldn’t have sent those guys out there and they would never have done what they did if it hadn’t been for this war. It’s a stinking war and some of the stink rubs off on you after a while.”

  “Will you please drop that. If you ordered an assassination, tell me now. You can plead guilty and I’ll try to get you a light sentence—say, ten to twenty in Portsmouth.”

  “I’ll tell you this. I’ll have a helluva time living with myself if those guys get convicted and I get off.”

  “Do you want to plead guilty to murder?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it wasn’t murder. Whatever it was, it wasn’t murder. And if it was murder, then half the Vietnamese killed in this war have been murdered.”

  “No. You don’t want to plead guilty because you’re innocent as charged. You did not order an assassination.”

  “All right. I’m innocent.”

  “So, what we have is this: you gave orders to a patrol to capture two Viet Cong suspects who were to be killed only if necessary. That’s a lawful order in combat. And there are two NCOs who’ll support you on that, right?”

  “You’re the boss. Whatever you say. Just get me out of this mess.”

  “Don’t give me that ‘you’re the boss’ routine. Are those the facts or aren’t they?”

  “Yes, those are the facts.”

  And so 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. Conversely, the attorneys for the enlisted men had them convinced that they were all good, God-fearing soldiers who had been obeying orders, as all good soldiers must, orders issued by a vicious killer-officer. And that was neither a lie nor the truth. The prosecution had meanwhile marshaled facts to support its argument that five criminal marines, following the unlawful orders of their criminal platoon leader, had cold-bloodedly murdered two civilians whom they then tried to claim as confirmed Viet Cong to collect the reward their captain had offered for enemy dead, a reprehensible policy not at all in keeping with the traditions of the U.S. Marine Corps. And that was neither a lie nor the truth. 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.

  * * *

  Still, I was not without hope for an acquittal. Throughout the investigation, a number of officers told me: “What’s happened to you could’ve happened to anybody in this war.” In their eyes, I was a victim of circumstances, a good officer unjustly charged. I had an above-average service record, and was normal to outward appearances. Those other officers saw in me a mirror image of themselves. I was one of them.

  And the enlisted men were all good soldiers. There wasn’t a mark on their records, not even for AWOL. Fou
r of the five had been honorably wounded in combat. Two—Allen and Crowe—were family men. And yet, paradoxically, they had been accused of homicide. If the charges were proved, it would prove no one was guaranteed immunity against the moral bacteria spawned by the war. If such cruelty existed in ordinary men like us, then it logically existed in the others, and they would have to face the truth that they, too, harbored a capacity for evil. But no one wanted to make that recognition. No one wanted to confront his devil.

  A verdict of innocent would solve the dilemma. It would prove no crime had been committed. It would prove what the others wanted to believe: that we were virtuous American youths, incapable of the act of which we had been accused. And if we were incapable of it, then they were too, which is what they wanted to believe of themselves.

  * * *

  It was nine o’clock. Witnesses began to file into the neighboring hut, where the court-martial was being held. In our hut, the clerks continued to peck at their typewriters. Rader and I again went over my testimony. He told me how to behave on the stand: use a firm, but not strident, tone of voice; look at the six officers who were to be my judges when I answered questions; appear earnest and forthcoming.

  I was called sometime in the late afternoon. Crowe, sitting at the defendant’s table, looked very small. I confess I don’t remember a word of what I said on the stand. I only recall sitting there for a long time under direct and cross-examination, looking at the six-man court as I had been instructed to do and parroting the testimony I had rehearsed a hundred times. I must have sounded like Jack Armstrong, all-American boy. Later, during a recess, I heard the prosecutor congratulating Rader. “Your client did very well on the stand today, Mister Rader.” I felt pleased with myself. I was good for something. I was a good witness.

  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. The war simply wasn’t my show any longer. I had declared a truce between me and the Viet Cong, signed a personal armistice, and 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 important thing was to get through this insane predicament with some degree of dignity. I would not break. I would endure and accept whatever happened with grace. For enduring seemed to me an act of penance, an inadequate one to be sure, but I felt the need to atone in some way for the deaths I had caused.

  Lying there, I remembered 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. In April, with the insurrection in full swing, One-Three suffered heavy casualties in an operation in the Vu Gia Valley. Because of the investigation, I had been transferred from the battalion to regimental HQ, where I was assigned as an assistant operations officer. There, I saw the incompetent staff work that had turned the operation into a minor disaster. Part of the battalion was needlessly sent into a trap, and one company alone lost over one hundred of its one hundred and eighty men. Vietnamese civilians suffered too. I recalled seeing the smoke rising from a dozen bombed villages while our artillery pounded enemy positions in the hills and our planes darted through the smoke to drop more bombs. And I recalled seeing our own casualties at the division hospital. Captain Greer, the intelligence officer, and I were sent there from the field to interview the survivors and find out what had gone wrong. We knew what had gone wrong—the staff had fouled up—but we went along with the charade anyway. I can still see that charnel house, crammed with wounded, groaning men, their dressings encrusted in filth, the cots pushed one up against the other to make room for the new wounded coming in, the smell of blood, the stunned faces, one young platoon leader wrapped up like a mummy with plastic tubes inserted in his kidneys, and an eighteen-year-old private, blinded by shellfire, a bandage wrapped around his eyes as he groped down the aisle between the cots. “I can’t find my rack,” he called. “Can somebody help me find my rack?”

  Meanwhile, the armies of Thi and Ky continued to spar in Danang. One morning in May, after I had been sent to division HQ, I led a convoy of marine riflemen into the city. They were part of a security detachment that was to guard American installations—not against the VC, but against the rebelling South Vietnamese troops. I returned to HQ in the afternoon. Division’s command post was on Hill 327, which gave us a ringside seat. Looking to the west, we could see marines fighting the VC; to the east, the South Vietnamese Army fighting itself. Early that evening, I saw tracers flying over the city, heard the sound of machine-gun fire, and then, in utter disbelief, watched an ARVN fighter plane strafing an ARVN truck convoy. It was incredible, a tableau of the madness of the war. One of the plane’s rockets fell wide of the mark, exploding near an American position and wounding three marines. The prop-driven Skyraider roared down again, firing its rockets and cannon once more into the convoy, packed with South Vietnamese soldiers. And I knew then that we could never win. With a government and an army like that in South Vietnam, we could never hope to win the war. To go on with the war would be folly—worse than folly: it would be a crime, murder on a mass scale.

  The insurrection ended on May 25. General Walt sent a message to all Marine units in I Corps. In it, he said that the “rebellion” had been crushed and that we could “look forward to an era of good relations with our South Vietnamese comrades-in-arms.”

  The message shocked me. Even Lew Walt, my old hero, was blind to the truth. The war was to go on, senselessly on.

  A few days later, my antiwar sentiments took an active form. The division HqCo commander ordered me to take part in a parade in honor of some visiting dignitary. I refused. He said I could not refuse to obey an order. I replied, yes, I could and would. I thought the whole thing was a mess, a folly and a crime, and I was not going to participate in some flag-waving sham. I was in no position to make such statements, he said. Oh yes I was. I was already up for the most serious crime in the book—one more charge made no difference to me. He could get somebody else to strut around to Sousa marches. Much to my surprise, I won.

  It was then that I tried to do a bit of proselytizing among the clerks in t
he 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.”

  * * *

  Rader walked into the tent in the early evening. “Phil,” he said, “they’ve come in with a verdict on Crowe. Not guilty on all counts.”

  I sat up and lit a cigarette, not sure what to think. “Well, I’m happy for him. He’s got a wife and kids. But how does that make it look for us?”

  “Well, I think it looks good. Just hang loose until tomorrow. You go up at oh-nine-hundred.”

  Curiously, I slept very well that night. Maybe it was my sense of fatalism. Worrying could do no good. Whatever was going to happen, I could do nothing about it. The next morning, I ate an enormous breakfast and managed a few quips about the condemned man’s last meal. Then, long before I was due, I walked to the quonset hut, feeling much as I had before going into action: determined and resigned at the same time. I waited in the hut for about an hour, watching the same clerks sitting at the same desks typing the same reports. The red light on the coffee pot glowed and the fans whirred, rustling the pages of the calendar, which was now turned to July. The same crowd of witnesses milled around outside. Captain Neal was there. He looked worn and old. I went out and offered him a cigar. Smoking it, his eyes fixed on the ground, he shook his head and said, “We lost half the company. I hope they realize that. We’d lost half the company then.”