A Rumor of War, by Philip Caputo (New York: Holt, 1996; first published in 1977)
A Rumor of War is Philip Caputo’s magnificent memoir of his sixteen months, beginning in March of 1965, serving as a young Marine Lieutenant in Vietnam. John Gregory Dunne wrote in the Los Angeles Book Review: “To call it the best book about Vietnam is to trivialize it…A Rumor of War is a dangerous and even subversive book, the first to insist – and the insistence is all the more powerful because it is implicit – that the reader ask himself these questions: How would I have acted? To what lengths would I have gone to survive?” A Rumor of War is a book to pick up again as a reminder.
This book does not pretend to be history. It has nothing to do with politics, power, strategy, influence, national interests, or foreign policy; nor is it an indictment of the great men who led us into Indochina and whose mistakes were paid for with the blood of some quite ordinary men. In a general sense, it is simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to them. More strictly, it is a soldier’s account of our longest conflict, the only one we have ever lost, as well as the record of a long and sometimes painful personal experience. – from A Rumor of War, by Philip Caputo
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