Philip Caputo was a regular soldier placed in to a horrific situation. Every person in a war or police action is placed in to the same situation. His actions and reactions are typical of anyone who is placed in a warzone, with an enemy who practices guerrilla warfare. I do not condone such actions, but I can understand them. He starts out as most normal people do, a young idealistic individual looking to save the world through patriotism. With every death, his perceptions change, and his mind and actions grow numb to the horrors he sees, does and causes while he is in Vietnam. It culminates into him giving orders that could have ruined his life.
His book starts out with the reasonings for his enlistment, he wanted to get away from the little boring town of Westchester, Illinois that he lived in (5). Philip had big ideas about what patriotism, war, and being a soldier what were all about. He thought that the movies were the truest depiction of how war is. He found out how far from the truth the movies were the hard way. His parents wanted him to go to college, so I found it interesting that he enlisted for officers training to accommodate them with a college degree, normally teenagers don’t actively want to listen to their parents. He finished officers’ training without any problems and was deployed to Okinawa in January 1965 (30). That first group he was with, he felt lonely with at first. They had been together a while and Philip was the new outsider in their ranks. The assignment was for 90 days unless he could get them to accept him. Then he might be able to keep that assignment. He was able to stay with that platoon. He did get to go on several missions with this platoon. He got much closer to those men and was sad when he was reassigned to headquarters.
I think during this time at headquarters reporting the casualty statistics was the first big blow to his view about the war there. He was one of the people that was called to report those wounded, killed or missing in the war. In writing those statistics, Philip also had to view many of the deceased. Some of those casualties ended up being from his old platoon. His views at the time were of sorrow, and loss of comrades in arms (163). I think this is a good normal reaction to loss.
After being “The Officer of Death” as the section is titled (151), for a while has taken a toll on Lieutenant Caputo. He keeps statistics current for his commanding officer and had to verify deaths for the most accurate. He used a lot of medical terminology, but he does not think the terminology fits the nature of the wounds most of the time and I would tend to agree that they were not descriptive enough. He was ordered to leave some dead VC displayed for clerks to see them to get used to look and the smell. Philip found this difficult and did not want to keep them there. He sent the bodies to be buried and was forced bring them back for a general to inspect them (174). That was one just of the gross orders that was carried out in the war. While in Danang, a chaplain questioned why were still in the war. Caputo got very angry and yelled at the chaplain. After he cooled off, Caputo started his own questioning of the war. (179).
Philip described many people’s deaths. I could guess by the way he was writing, he still had no callous of the reasonings behind their deaths. His days were spent listening to the regular reports of the deaths. There were some of his memories that stood out more than others, there were attacks on the base they were at. He describes the extent of the injuries and wrote how the doctor maintained his professional detachment from the dead soldiers (198). I think he was wishing he could have the same detachment the doctor had. He soon after started having nightmares. He was the platoon leader of all the dead people that he was creating the reports on (199). It seems at this point, the mental anguish was taking its toll on him and he noticed it in others as well. He wrote about how he and the other men would go through these brooding moments then lash out in anger. He knew his reasonings why, sorrow for the loss of people he knew in the platoon, and guilt for not being there with them (201).
Lieutenant Caputo went back to a new platoon. He knew the dangers and still wanted to go back. He hated the boredom that came with only counting bodies and thought he would go crazy while he was there (230). The last reason he wanted to go and fight was because he wanted revenge for all the soldiers the VC had killed. The platoon he went to endured all kinds of non-combat torture. The soldiers had fungus and sores from being in wet surroundings because of the monsoon season. They had hardly any sleep. They were still required to perform their duties without question. That type of surroundings can break men. The platoon was sent to clear a city of VC and while heading there, a trap had exploded and injured several men. The lieutenant after evacuating the injured discovered a wire leading towards a smaller village. He ordered his men to shell the small village. (300). This is the place where I feel he had lost his humanity towards the Vietnamese. He did not think of them as anything, they just needed to be gone.
Project Long Lance was the last offensive Lieutenant Caputo writes about. He writes about how his platoon start to unravel as they are looking for the VC in villages. One of the times they found a cache of supplies and in looking for the enemy, burned the village down in a group fit of rage He said he had no feelings for those people, innocent and guilty (304). After everything has calmed down, Caputo feels guilty for what his troops did. The other he writes about is the killing of two Vietnamese that were thought to be identified as VC when they were possibly not. Under pressure from command for more enemy kills than our own causalities, Caputo sent a strike team to capture the suspects and kill only if necessary (317). The two men were killed, and the strike team and Caputo were court marshaled. The strike team was cleared, and Caputo only had a letter of reprimand placed in his record. Caputo writes about how he gave the right orders, but his feelings were that he wanted them dead.
This book has given me more awareness than I care to know about the trials of a war and the choices made during war. Working in a trauma hospital and seeing what people can do to each other without the added stress of an actual war, what Philip Caputo has written does not surprise me as much as it saddens me. It saddens me to know that humanity can fall to the wayside so quickly practically without half a thought. I found his book to have both heroic and deplorable points almost every chapter. Most of the heroic moments in my opinion were when they kept their humanity, but there were more deplorable than heroic moments. I do believe in fighting for what you believe in, and I’m not sure if this was one of those times. I am also not naive to think that in the moment, they thought they knew what they were doing. Wars change people for the worse in most cases and in my opinion, this is no exception. It was not his fault, he was just a victim of circumstance.
Work cited
- Caputo, Philip, A Rumor of War, Henry Holt and Company, 1996.