Rumor of War by Philip Caputo

    Observing Trump's casual attack on Venezuela and listening to his drum-banging, and the return trip to machine-gun survivors had me pulling Vietnam stuff out of my library. I had read Karl Marlantes' memoir (Matterhorn) several years ago and was struck by observational similarities between Caputo and Marlantes. Both reveal the guilty pleasure they both felt from going to war. After returning home, both missed it, the camaraderie and “aliveness” that battle brings to the psyche. During officer training, a particularly boring session filled with WWII tactics that proved to be completely irrelevant to Vietnam, a classmate whispered to Caputo, “You know,” he whispered, “the trouble with war is that there isn’t any background music.”

 

    I happened to watch a particularly terrifying video on Youtube about non-human threats to the soldiers: snakes, tigers, and centipedes. Vietnam is home to multiple species of extremely venomous snakes: the krait, bamboo pit viper, King Cobra, Monocle Cobra, sea snakes in the rivers, Weaver ants, and even poisonous plants: “The plant contains a compound similar to strychnine and its effects can be felt almost immediately, eventually leading to death by asphyxiation. Despite its killer reputation, accidentally ingesting heartbreak grass occurs quite regularly and has been in the news over the last few years in relation to the suspicious death of a Russian whistle-blower in 2012. The centipedes could be a foot long and possessed an extremely painful bite: it would kill you, just make you miserable but wouldn't get you an evacuation helicopter unlike” Tigers, crocodiles and elephants – oh my! Plants and hard-to-see insects aren’t the only dangers lurking in the Vietnam jungle. Crocodiles lurk in the water, and elephants can charge unprovoked." (1)

 

    Marlantes and Caputo both acknowledge that to be a leader you have to order friends into situations where there is a likelihood they will die. And they are always the best guys, because in order to meet the object you need the best guys, not the ones with bone spurs. Soldiers dies by the hundreds taking hills because they were ordered to do so, only to have those hills evacuated and abandoned a matter of days or weeks later. It's no wonder morale sank. It was all about body count; the problem was the U.S. body count was escalating as well. By April 1969 35,000 Americans had been killed; 60% were under 21.

 

    Caputo reached a point where death was not to be feared. His description is almost lyrical. His platoon was sent on a mission where they were essentially bait for the NLF only to come under artillery fire from their own guns. 

 

    The ground slammed against my chest, bouncing me up an inch or so, and a part of me kept going up. I felt myself floating up out of myself, up to the tops of the trees. Hovering there, I felt an ineffable calm. I could see the flashing shells, but they no longer frightened me, because I was a spirit. I saw myself lying face down in the foxhole, my arms wrapped around the back of my neck. I felt no fear, just a great calm and a genial contempt for the puny creature cringing in the foxhole below me. I wondered if I was dying. Well, if I am, I thought, it is not so bad. Dying is actually pleasant. It is painless. Death is an end to pain. Rich the treasure, sweet the pleasure, sweet is pleasure after pain. Death is a pleasure. The Big D is the world’s most powerful narcotic, the ultimate anesthetic.

 

   Another quote:

    We ate lunch. Our rations were the same as the Viet Cong’s: cooked rice rolled into a ball and stuffed with raisins. The riceballs were easier to carry than the heavy C-ration tins and alleviated the diarrhea from which we all suffered. Eating the rice on that desolate hill, it occurred to me that we were becoming more and more like our enemy. We ate what they ate. We could now move through the jungle as stealthily as they. We endured common miseries. In fact, we had more in common with the Viet Cong than we did with that army of clerks and staff officers in the rear.

 

    Life was a matter of blind chance. Walking back from the patrol during a cease fire, in constant rain, many suffering from immersion foot, someone stumbled on a hidden mine they blew up injuring many, but for Caputo, because he was standing in a certain place, and wearing a flak jacket, could pick the shrapnel out of his jacket, but the men around him were not as lucky. Rodella was being worked on by a corpsman. He had a sucking chest wound.

  

  It was his eyes that troubled me most. They were the hurt, dumb eyes of a child  who has been severely beaten and does not know why. It was his eyes and his silence and the foamy blood and the gurgling, wheezing sound in his chest that aroused in me a sorrow so deep and a rage so strong that I could not distinguish the one emotion from the other.

 

   And then, of course, there was the paperwork (need the info from the dog tags and details about the explosion) before they would send the medevac choppers. And the radios quit (WWII vintage) but finally after Caputo's threats, the choppers were on their way.

 

    The finale or consequence can be summarized by the tragedy of the "snatch patrol. Driven by exhaustion, fear, and a "savage desire" for results, Caputo sends a squad into a Vietnamese village to capture two suspected Viet Cong. Though his formal orders are to capture, he implicitly communicates a desire for blood. The squad subsequently kills two young men—one of whom was actually their own informant.

 

   Following the event, Caputo and his men were court-martialed for premeditated murder; penalty: firing squad. During the preparation for the trial, Caputo's excellent defense counsel, Rader, meticulously grooms Caputo to present "facts" that are technically true but stripped of their psychological and environmental context. Ultimately, Caputo realizes the trial is not designed to find the truth, but to protect the institution by either branding the men as "criminals" or acquitting them to prove the system’s virtue, all while ignoring the war’s inherent role in the tragedy.

 

   In the sterile environment of a courtroom, "facts" are the currency of justice. They are cold, verifiable, and binary. However, as Caputo demonstrates in his account of the Giao-Tri killings, a collection of facts can be used to tell a profound lie. The central conflict of the text lies in the "wide gulf" between the facts—the technical details of orders and actions—and the truth—the psychological and moral reality of men transformed by the "moral bacteria" of war.

 

    Rader, is a master of the factual. He insists on a narrative where Caputo issued a "clear, legitimate order" that was simply "disobeyed." Rader’s strategy relies on the "inexorable logic of the law," which values what was said over what was meant. On the witness stand, Caputo performs excellently, "parroting" rehearsed testimony that contains no perjury. Every word is technically a fact: he did order a capture; he did not order an assassination. Yet, Caputo acknowledges that this factual account is not the truth. It ignores the "silent communication" of bloodlust shared with his men and the "addled state of mind" produced by months of stalking through a landscape of landmines and "free-fire zones."

 

    The "truth," according to Caputo, is a "synthesis" that the court-martial is specifically designed to conceal. The truth is that the war itself—its policies of "body counts" and its demand for "bodies" over prisoners—created the conditions for the murder. The truth is that the line between a soldier and a murderer becomes blurred when the institution rewards the latter while providing the legal framework to punish the former when it becomes politically inconvenient. To admit this truth would be to "open a real can of worms," questioning the morality of the American intervention itself.

 

   Caputo's "crimes" were committed in a environment where the usual rules of society were not just suspended, but inverted. The military’s "sole aim was to kill Viet Cong." Success was measured by the Body Count. This metric incentivized violence and stripped away the distinction between enemy combatant and civilian. In "Free-Fire zones, soldiers were authorized to fire on anything that moved. Caputo notes the irony that the military used "weapons far more horrible than pistols" (like napalm or heavy artillery) to kill civilians daily, yet he was being tried for the death of two individuals as if he were a "common criminal" in a peacetime city. Caputo’s frustration and moral conundrum stems from the fact that the military defines "murder" not by the act of killing itself, but by the context of the paperwork. If the victims had been confirmed VC, he would have received a medal; because they were civilians, he faced a firing squad.

 

    The reason this is an "absurdity" is that a trial for murder in a war zone necessitates a trial of the war itself. If Caputo is guilty, then the system that produced him and the policies that directed him (like the reward for "bodies") are also guilty. The military legal system functions as a mechanism for "institutional conscience." By focusing strictly on the facts of the "detective story," the Marine Corps ensures that regardless of the verdict, the institution remains unblemished. If found guilty, the men are "common criminals" who do not represent the "fine fighting sons" of America. If found innocent, the system has proven its "fairness." In both scenarios, the war is acquitted. The facts act as a shield, protecting the observers from the "horror" Caputo feels when he looks into the "glassy eyes" of the dead boy.

  

  The legal absurdity Caputo describes is the ultimate "Catch-22" of the Vietnam War. He points out a fundamental hypocrisy: the military spent months stripping away his civilian inhibitions to turn him into an efficient killer, only to re-apply those same civilian moral standards once his killing became a public relations liability.

    

 (1)https://www.warhistoryonline.com/vietnam-war/vietnam-jungle.html

 

   From the archives

 

    Yeah, we ran into tigers. In infantry combat talk, a tiger is an ambush. So, I’m on the radio and Scott on the chopper calls up and tells me, “You’ve got a tiger in front of you,” and obviously I’m thinking there’s an ambush in front of me, and I said, “Well how many are there,” and he said, “One,” and I laughed. I said, “Well that’s not a tiger, that’s a sniper.” He says, “No,” he says, “Tiger, you know, the one on the four legs!” So, that was more scary than an ambush to me because a tiger can rip you apart. So, they scared it off, a tiger. Snakes of course, obviously we ran into a lot of snakes over there. That was about it. I mean, there were spottings of elephants but I’d never seen an elephant over there. That was pretty much it as far as the wildlife and the monkeys.

    (https://vva.vietnam.ttu.edu/images.php?img=/OH/OH0152/OH0152.pdf&from=website)

 See also my meditations on the Medina trial. https://rarebits.blogspot.com/2025/12/caedite-eos-mylai-and-similarities.html