38 pages • 1 hour read
Philip CaputoA Rumor of War
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1977A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Death
Death is nearly a character in its own right in Caputo’s memoir and forms the most significant background motif. Capricious and brutal, Death proves that the Marines’ bodies are no match for the weapons thrown at them: hideous battle wounds are inflicted by mines, shells, booby traps, and snipers, along with the psychological toll of ambushes and watching the man next to them fall, while they are not injured. Throughout the memoir, Caputo honors the fallen by describing their characters, their bravery and their personality quirks, and by giving each man’s name. Clearly, death stalks every man who enters Vietnam. According to Caputo, death is the only winner in this war or any war, as he states: “No one who had seen war cold ever doubt that death had dominion” (245).
Caputo also frequently discusses his state of mind regarding death. For much of the war, he is filled with an instinctive fear of death. Once he has completed his desk job and returns to the front lines, he reports:
A sudden and mysterious recovery from the virus of fear had caused the change of mood. I didn’t know why. I only knew I had ceased to be afraid of dying. It was not a feeling of invincibility; indifference, rather. I had ceased to fear death because I had ceased to care about it. Certainly, I had no illusions that my death, if it came, would be a sacrifice (260).
However, once he achieves this indifference, his other feelings are also numbed. He loses the ability to make moral distinctions and therefore moral choices. He loses his humanity.
Weather and Terrain of Vietnam
The impenetrable jungles, mountainous terrain, heat, and damp of Vietnam come to be a tangible force in the memoir. Caputo speaks of the weather as if it is a living entity, sent to deliberately target the Marines. Several men die of heat stroke, while dysentery and malaria are commonplace, but no one gets invalided out for such afflictions. Going without decent food, dirty, marching on ruined feet, and constantly aware of the possibility of land mines or sniper fire, the landscape too becomes a malicious force. Caputo describes it:
We marched for an hour through the gallery jungle that grew alongside the river, and in the mottled light, and dense, damp air, it was like walking underwater. The trail was narrow and muddy—even in the dry season nothing ever dried in the bush, it only became less wet. A maze of bamboo and elephant grass twice the height of a man grew on one side of the trail, and on the other side there was the sluggish river, and, west of the river, the mountains. The saw-edged grass slashed our skin, sweat made our scratches sting, and the heat pounded against our helmets and wrung the sweat out of us as we might wring water from a sponge. There were moments when I could not think of it as heat—that is, as a condition of the weather; rather, it seemed a thing malevolent and alive (84–85).
Facing an enemy that they cannot see, the jungle seems to belong to the Viet Cong guerrillas, who disappear into it so easily and are rarely killed or captured in it. In comparison, the Marines struggle to simply make paths through the jungle, let alone engage the enemy there. Caputo comments, “It took us all morning to cover the three miles between the landing zone and the village. Four hours to walk three miles, and the company had not once run into significant enemy resistance. It was the land that resisted us, the land, the jungle, and the sun” (87). Face with such an environmental enemy, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army forces have an advantage over the Americans. In addition, the Viet Cong typically strike at 2 a.m., a time when the Marines are at their most vulnerable, whether they are asleep or merely exhausted.
