A Rumor of War

by Philip Caputo

  The next day, April 30, the ship’s captain announced that the Saigon government had surrendered to the North Vietnamese. We took the news quietly. It was over.

  Postscript

  It took as long to write this book as it did for the United States to fight the Vietnam War. I started in the early spring of 1967, in the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and finished in September 1976, in the tiny settlement of Pine Creek, Montana. Not that I worked on it day and night for nine years. The manuscript often lay in a drawer for months. There was one period, in the early ’70s, when I didn’t look at it for more than a week or two a year. At the time, I was a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Twelve-hour workdays, the pressures of daily deadlines, and constant shuttling to and from assignments in Europe and the Middle East left little time and still less energy for serious literary work. On a deeper level, my thoughts and emotions were too fractured by the war to set them down on paper coherently. I had a story to tell and a profound need to tell it, but I wasn’t ready to write it. I needed the distance only time could give.

  My peripatetic life made the manuscript probably one of the most well traveled in modern literary history, while my confused state of mind caused it to undergo several metamorphoses, something like the phases of a mayfly. In its nymph stage, it was an autobiographical novel; as an emerger, it was a collection of loosely connected short stories and vignettes; finally, it hatched and took wing in its present form, a memoir. While living for a time in England, I fell under the spell of the great British memoirs from World War I: Robert Graves’s Good-Bye to All That, Guy Chapman’s A Passionate Prodigality, and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. The form somehow felt right, and it seemed to me that Vietnam, though a far less bloody and horrible conflict, resembled the First World War in its pointlessness, in its ultimate disillusionment, and in the changes it wrought in cultural and social values.

  By the fall of 1975, when I was the Tribune’s Middle East correspondent in Beirut, I had accumulated a mass of notes and sketches but only about fifty pages of manuscript good enough to show someone. Returning to Chicago on home leave, I sent the fifty pages to about half a dozen literary agents, but only one responded. Aaron Priest, who is still my agent, promised he would sell the story and that I would hear from him in six weeks to two months. He sounded a lot more confident than I felt.

  I returned to Beirut, a city then in the early throes of its own war. My biggest problem was how to cover it while finishing a book about another war. That was solved in an unusual fashion on October 25, 1975, a date I’ll always remember. Having survived sixteen months in Vietnam without a scratch, I managed to get myself shot in Lebanon, suffering serious bullet wounds in my left ankle and right foot and superficial fragment wounds in my back, head, left leg, and right arm. Hors de combat, I was evacuated to Northwestern University Hospital in Chicago. One day, while recovering from a fourth operation on my ankle and foot, I received a telegram from Priest: he had sold the book to Holt, Rinehart and Winston (now Henry Holt) for an advance of $6,000. I was astonished.

  In late November, I was released from the hospital on indefinite medical leave from the Tribune. My first wife, Jill, and our two young sons, Geoffrey and Marc, had meanwhile been evacuated from Lebanon. We moved into my parents’ house in Westchester, Illinois, where I could recuperate. There, in the same bedroom in which I had done my grammar school and high school homework, I struggled to complete the manuscript. Confined to a wheelchair, I discovered that getting shot, like being sentenced to hang, concentrates the mind wonderfully. No distractions now, no deadlines or assignments, no excuses.

  Writing isn’t writing, it’s rewriting. The prologue and first chapter went through twenty-five full revisions before I got them exactly right. I strove for a clarity and simplicity of style—a narrative that would sound artless. Achieving that often is the most difficult art of all; but there was more than a devotion to craftsmanship in all my revising. I knew A Rumor of War would have to be exceptional if it was to be read by more than a handful.

  By the mid-1970s, the public had heard enough about Vietnam from journalists, commentators, and analysts of every kind. More words than bullets had been expended on that war—and miles and miles of film footage. Journalistic accounts like David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest and Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam had won wide audiences, and deservedly so; but novels, memoirs, short stories, and poetry by those who fought the war either did not see print or sank swiftly out of sight. Vietnam was considered a legitimate subject for journalism, but as a subject for literature it was almost as taboo as explicit sex had been to the Victorians.

  I think this was so because journalism—good journalism, that is—makes its appeal to the mind, literature to the senses and emotions; and there was far too much emotion loose in the country, too many passions unleashed by the 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. Like opposing armies facing each other in static trench warfare, they had settled comfortably into their fortified positions, content to lob rhetorical grenades at one another. I wanted A Rumor of War to make people uncomfortable—in effect, to blow them out of their snug polemical bunkers into the confusing, disturbing emotional and moral no-man’s-land where we warriors dwelled. I would do that not by creating my own polemic but by writing about the war with such unflinching honesty and painstaking attention to detail as to put the reader there—as much as was possible on the printed page. I did not want to tell anyone about the war but to show it. I wanted readers to feel the heat, the monsoons, and mosquitoes, to experience the snipers, booby traps, and ambushes. Above all, I wanted to communicate the moral ambiguities of a conflict in which demons and angels traded places too often to tell one from the other, even within yourself. In a way, the book was designed to be a vicarious tour of duty, and when readers came to the end, I hoped they would look into the mirror, or, better yet, into their souls, and ask themselves, “Now what do I think? How would I have behaved if I had been there?”

  But I had greater ambitions. I strove to write a book that would reach beyond its time and place toward the universal, a story not only about Vietnam but about war itself, and the truth of war, and what poet Wilfred Owen called the pity of war. From that first line scribbled in the Camp Lejeune BOQ to the last in the Montana cabin, and through all the sentences and places in between, I was guided and inspired by a remarkable passage from Joseph Conrad’s preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus:

  And if [the writer’s] conscience is clear, his answer to those who in the fulness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who demand to be promptly improved, or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run thus:—My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you he
ar, to make you feel—it is, above all to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

  By the summer of 1976, with two thirds of the book done, I was well enough to get around on a cane or crutches and half crazy from being cooped up so long. Jill, the boys, and I went to Key West, where we rented a two-room waterfront cottage for about $200 a week. It was one of the happiest summers of my life. I wasn’t writing the book any longer, I was taking dictation; daily swims proved therapeutic for my injuries, and I got to go deep-sea fishing about once a week. The idyll ended in August, when we had to return to Westchester to put six-year-old Geoff in school. Now that I was more or less mobile, I found my parent’s modest house much too crowded for writing and headed to Montana. In a three-week burst of feverish work, I completed the final two chapters.

  After sending the manuscript to my Holt editor, Marian Wood, my family and I packed up for the Soviet Union, where I’d been assigned as the Tribune’s Moscow bureau chief. I had no doubts about the reception A Rumor of War would get from the critics and readers: they would hate it. In optimistic moments, I hoped the book would earn enough royalties to pay for a special holiday, say in the Greek Isles. Because I was living abroad, I was unaware that a profound sea change had come about in public consciousness in America. More than ready to hear the warrior’s voice, Americans were hungry for it. So when Holt published A Rumor of War in May 1977, its reception was light-years away from my expectations: a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, a television contract for a four-hour miniseries, reviews so splendid I was embarrassed, and a spot on the Publishers Weekly and New York Times best-seller lists.

  I was stunned, euphoric—and terrified, utterly unprepared for this response and for the glare of sudden celebrity. To be besieged by radio, TV, and print interviewers was trying enough; more painful was the onslaught of veterans and veterans’ organizations, of veterans’ wives, parents, and friends, and even of former members of the antiwar movement. I received thousands of letters, hundreds of requests to speak here or there, to support this or that cause, to help this or that person publish his story. I felt somehow naked, invaded, and empty. I couldn’t cope with the transformation of what had been an intensely personal and private experience, indeed the most important experience of my life, into public property. Lurking deep down was a certain guilt: the book’s success, my success, seemed undeserved, as if I were profiting from the sufferings and deaths of my brothers in arms and millions of Vietnamese. During a nationwide book tour—that Via Dolorosa which most modern writers must walk—I suffered acute panic attacks and, to calm down, I began to drink too much. One night, when I was particularly wound up and knocking back straight scotches, someone offered me a joint—a potent bomber of pure Colombian gold—and I smoked it down to the roach. The combination of exhaustion, anxiety, alcohol, and drugs had the inevitable effect: I had a nervous collapse and spent the next several days in the psychiatric ward of an East Coast hospital, drugged on Thorazine yet happy that no one could get to me. I tell this story for the first time to emphasize that I did not write A Rumor of War as a form of therapy. Writing it was a trial; living with its publication an ordeal.

  * * *

  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. Nonetheless, I regard A Rumor of War as a success, not in the commercial or critical sense, but in the sense that it does most of what I intended. Though it has stood the test of time so far, having attained the somewhat oxymoronic status of “contemporary classic,” I can’t say with certainty that it has grasped the brass ring of universality. But if we go somewhere after we die, I would like nothing better than to look down from heaven or up from hell and see my great-grandchildren’s generation reading it and finding in it some quality that resonates in their own lives.

  To return to the present, A Rumor of War and five other books published at about the same time—Larry Heinemann’s Close Quarters, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, and James Webb’s Fields of Fire—broke the ice and made the Vietnam War a legitimate subject for literature and the warrior’s voice respectable. Perhaps I should say they opened the floodgates. Ken Lopez, a Massachusetts bookseller who collects and catalogs Vietnam War literature, lists over thirty-five hundred titles published since 1977. As Lopez states in the introduction to one of his catalogs: “No American war has generated the outpouring of literary effort that Vietnam did.” Pretty remarkable for a band of warrior-poets whom many thought too inarticulate or ill educated to sing of their muddy, brutal battles in the monsoon.

  Though I didn’t write A Rumor of War as personal therapy, I think that it and the best of the other books about the war have been therapeutic for a wounded nation. Vietnam was the epicenter of a cultural, social, and political quake that sundered us like no other event since the Civil War. It was not an anomalous chapter in our national history, as even a casual reading of the Indian wars and the campaign to suppress the Philippine insurrection will bear out, but it was an anomalous chapter in our national mythology. 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.

  It would be inaccurate, dangerously so, to say that that disruption has ended. America today is balkanized by “group-think,” as if the fissures opened during the upheavals of the ’60s—between hawk and dove, black and white—have spread and spiderwebbed, so that now the great American tribe is split into subtribes: Hispanic or Anglo, gay or straight, feminist or antifeminist, pro-choice or pro-life. Some of the more egregious theories of the politically correct, for whom Columbus and the Pilgrims are villains instead of heroes and the larger story of America a shameful instead of an inspiring narrative, suggest that Hellman’s “intense cultural dispute” is far from over. And the growth of disaffected, right-wing militias is ominous.

  But for all our present troubles, the nation has pulled far back from the brink it was edging toward twenty-five years ago, when the only language of argument was the radical’s bomb, the cop’s club and tear gas, the National Guardsmen’s rifle fire at Kent State. It may be decades before we heal completely from Vietnam (the legacy of the Civil War cast its shadow for more than a century after Appomattox), but the art to come out of the war has had a lot to do with what healing has occurred.

  At the very beginnings of Western civilization, it was the role of the battle singers, who sang their verses around the warriors’ guttering fires, to wring order and meaning out of the chaotic clash of arms, to keep the tribe human by providing it with models of virtuous behavior—heroes who reflected the tribe’s loftiest aspirations—and with examples of impious behavior that reflected its worst failings.

  Vietnam was fought with M-16s and helicopters instead of swords and steeds, but the battle singer’s task was the same. The nature of the war made it exceptionally difficult: How to find meaning in such a meaningless conflict? How to make sense out of a succession of random fire-fights that achieved nothing? How to explain our
failings? And what heroes could be found in a war so murky and savage? Yet the task was necessary. In this book, I tried to give meaning by turning myself into a kind of Everyman, my experiences into a microcosm of the whole. My own journey, from the false light of youthful illusions, through a descent into evil, and then into a slow, uncertain ascent toward a new and truer light of self-knowledge, I hope, reflects our collective journey. Our heroes were men like Walt Levy, who, in his act of shining self-sacrifice, showed that we can rise to the better angels in our nature even in conditions where it is all too easy to succumb to our demons. Other writers have adopted other strategies, from exciting experiments like Going After Cacciato and Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green: A Novel of Vietnam to more classical narratives like John DelVecchio’s The Thirteenth Valley. And great books continue to come out of the war, like Tobias Wolff’s haunting memoir In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War, published in 1995. The best books offer Conrad’s “glimpse of truth,” which is why the public has turned so avidly to the literature of the war. The politicians, commentators, analysts, and historians still cannot agree on the war’s causes, much less on its larger significance. So it is left to the artist to make sense of it, or at the very least to begin to make sense of it, shaping enduring art out of the shapeless muck of a terrible experience.

  When I travel around the country, on lectures or book tours, I am often surprised by the fascination Vietnam continues to hold for people—not only those old enough to have fought in it, or against it, but also for those who weren’t even born when Saigon fell. Bookseller Ken Lopez explains why in his introduction: