A Rumor of War

Profane and worldly, Sergeant Campbell reports directly to Caputo as a platoon sergeant during his initial deployment to Vietnam. However, as a more experienced fighter and life-time Marine, Campbell only reluctantly follows Caputo’s orders and never misses an opportunity to point out Caputo’s mistakes. Caputo struggles to gain Campbell’s and the other men’s respect. He is never certain that he achieves this goal. Campbell’s character symbolizes the closeness of the NCOs to the other enlisted men, and the fact that junior officers, such as Caputo, rely on the sergeants to teach them the ropes of leadership and to smooth their path with the enlisted men. Without a good sergeant in his platoon, Caputo can accomplish little.

When Caputo first arrives in Vietnam, he reports directly to Captain Peterson. From him, Caputo learns all of the practicalities of warfare in the bush. A lean and hard-muscled, sane, calm, and reasonable man, Peterson was the kind of soldier Caputo wanted to emulate. However, Caputo’s hot-headed and impulsive ways remain a problem for him throughout his time in Vietnam. Notable for his decency and level-headed knowledge of military objectives, Captain Peterson stops several atrocities in the making, determined to retain proper military vision for his command, particularly in its treatment of non-combatants. Captain Peterson sums up his war experience by saying to Caputo, “ ‘[W]e’ve been shot at and missed and shit on and hit, and now we’re getting out of this hole’ ” (216).

The epitome of a Marine officer, Colonel Bain (Caputo’s first CO in Vietnam) risks his life by going into the bush to rescue some Marines who have been pinned down without proper back-up. Caputo’s great respect for Bain is demonstrated by his description of Bain as the model of what a Marine officer should be. Generous and bold, but knowledgeable and wise about battle tactics, Bain symbolizes what is good among the American Marine officers, particularly the staff officers who put themselves in harm’s way to do what they believe is their duty to their men.

A political careerist, Karsch represents everything that the front line soldiers hated about the war in Vietnam. Supercilious and out-of-touch, his guidance means nothing to the Marines actually fighting in the bush. Karsch symbolizes all that is wrong with the American military’s priorities in fighting the Vietnam War. All spit-and-polish with no sense of duty to the men he is supposed to lead, General Karsch exemplifies, for Caputo, one of the reasons that the war was lost and so many soldiers were killed, because the command structure only wanted a high VC body count to justify their political policies’ success.