A Rumor of War

In late October 1965, the fighting grows more intense, and the soldiers on both sides begin to commit atrocities fueled by their frustration and rage. The Viet Cong regularly kill all the wounded American soldiers that they can find, and they torture and execute any prisoners they take. In retaliation, the Americans fight by the “unwritten rule, ‘If he’s dead and Vietnamese, he’s VC’ ” (229).

Caputo admits that the hallucinations he suffers, seeing living men as dead men, have gotten worse: they are his waking nightmare, and even include his own image when he looks in the mirror. Furthermore, Caputo confesses that he hates the Viet Cong and wants a chance to kill, so he volunteers for an infantry company on the front lines.

Caputo is assigned to Walt Levy’s platoon in Charlie Company by Captain Neal. After nine months active duty in Vietnam, Caputo is given a three day R-and-R in Saigon by his new captain before he starts his new duties. For the three days and two nights of his R-and-R, Caputo feels alive again, renewed, and without fear. 

Thrown back into the rhythm of daily sorties in the VC controlled countryside and nights back at a base camp disturbed by the fire fights and shelling that protects the perimeter, Caputo and his men are completely exhausted. The men are also filthy, wet, and cold, due to the incessant monsoon rains, which are only broken by spells of scorching sun. Only two weeks into his new duty, Caputo dreads each day. They search villages by day, looking for VC, or their arms and supplies, at the mercy of sniper fire and land mines. By night they huddle in their tents, still suffering from the rains, while artillery shelling protects the perimeter.

At the end of December, the men are assigned the duty of clearing out a village called Hoi-Vuc, which remains in enemy hands, despite being cleared several times by the Marines. As they head for Hoi-Vuc, the men on point—Allen, Crowe, and Lonehill—come across a group of VC, who are bathing in the nearby river.

As Caputo attempts to call up the rest of his platoon to clear the village, he is cut off by VC sniper action. He and his men are trapped on a peninsula, caught in a cross fire between the VC troops on the river’s edges, with the village of Hoi-Vuc in sight. Caputo manages to get his men in order and they clear the village of VC, driving the VC towards D Company, which awaits them on the other side of the village. This successful engagement of the enemy fills Caputo with adrenaline, and he challenges the last remaining sniper to hit him, yelling and waving his arms out in the clear. Fortunately, the sniper departs. The men in Charlie Company dig in for the night near the village.

They survive the night, despite losing radio communication with their HQ, being shelled and rained upon in their hastily dug foxholes. The next day, they are ordered forward, as communication is reestablished with HQ. They reach their objective, Hill 92, late in the afternoon, after evading sniper fire and booby traps. The platoon has been under enemy fire for a full 24 hours. Their objective achieved, the platoon is called back to base camp.

On the way back, Charlie Company runs into a large land mine. The back of Allen’s head is hit, and many other men are also injured. Caputo’s flak jacket is shredded in the back, but he is essentially uninjured. Helping to evacuate and dress the wounds of the others, Caputo finds that the wounded “aroused in me a sorrow so deep and a rage so strong that I could not distinguish the one emotion from the other” (282).

Caputo calls for an evacuation helicopter for the wounded men and is reprimanded for their injuries by Captain Neal. Completely enraged, Caputo calls for a rocket strike on the village he believes housed the VC sapper who made the land mine.

Eleven days later, the battalion sits waiting to be flown into a large-scale operation against a North Vietnamese regiment. Originally intended as a night assault, to protect the landing sites for the Marines, operation Long Lance ends up being a daylight assault instead. With no intelligence about how many troops or what types of troops they face, the men face a battle with complete uncertainty. Some of the men crack under the pressure, but they are severely dealt with. Fear is contagious, and it cannot be allowed to fester among the ranks.

The battalion is flown 25 miles into enemy territory, eight men at a time in each helicopter. Caputo’s company is pinned down by enemy fire, while the Viet Cong pour rocket and machine gun fire into the landing zone. Finally, Captain Neal calls for an airstrike, which takes out the rocket launchers and some machine guns, using bombs followed by napalm.

After the landing, C and D Companies advance through the valley, facing no more enemy fire, but that ends when they reach a village called Ha Na. The companies search the village and find about a ton of VC supplies, and concrete bunkers. They blow up the supplies and the bunkers, inadvertently setting the village huts on fire. Desperate to achieve their objective, the men rush toward Hill 52 on the other side of the village. Snipers attempt to mow them down from hidden positions in the tree line, but a fighter-bomber arrived to strafe the Viet Cong positions. Company D runs into severe resistance, as Caputo attempts to move his men forward through the chaos of the village.

With fire to their rear and snipers ahead, along with the deafening bombing from the American fighter-bombers, the men go berserk. They set the rest of the village aflame; Caputo loses his mind with the rest of his troops. They calm down as soon as they reach the top of Hill 52.

Captain Neal severely reprimands Caputo for his failure to control himself or his platoon. He threatens to relieve Caputo from command if anything similar happens again.

Crowe brings information on the location of two Viet Cong sappers and other Viet Cong soldiers. Caputo becomes obsessed with these two sappers, who probably made the land mines and booby traps that cost the company 35 men in the last month, as he attempts to protect his men and get revenge on the VC. Caputo passes on this information, but he is not confident that anyone will follow up on it.

A month goes by, and the war continues. Caputo finds himself with a growing need to “do something” (317). He determines that he will bring in the Viet Cong sappers, dead or alive. Caputo sends Allen, Crowe, Lonehill and two others to kidnap the sappers from the village and pretend, if they are killed, that the two men ran into their ambush. Caputo makes it clear that he does not care whether the men are brought back dead or alive, and he knows that his men will kill them if given the slightest pretext. The men bring back two bodies; however, one of the dead men is Le Dung, the innocent boy who was the original informant.

Caputo and Crowe are charged with the murders of the two Vietnamese men. Caputo spent five months in limbo before his own trial, feeling confused and guilty about the charges against him. He was told to kill VC, and he followed those orders; however, he resigns himself to whatever punishment his trial will bring, realizing that his real defense, the war and its pressures, are no defense at all because his actions put the United States’ Vietnam policy on trial too.

Crowe is acquitted, and, with the exception of one minor charge, the General drops the charges against Caputo too. Caputo agrees to plead guilty to the one remaining charge, and he is free. He is ordered home for the remainder of his enlistment. Waiting for his plane, he watches new troops land; all he feels is pity for them. As Caputo’s plane takes off, he thinks, “We had done nothing more than endure. We had survived, and that was our only victory” (337).

In August of 1975, Caputo huddles in a hotel corridor with his fellow journalists, as the losing battle for the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon, rages outside. Fighting had begun in the city streets, and none of the journalists knew if they would be able to escape, or what the North Vietnamese soldiers would do to them if they could not get out of Saigon.

With his colleague from the Chicago Tribune, Caputo ventures to the AP office down the street for the latest news. The North Vietnamese seemed to be at least a day away from Saigon. Hoping that the American Embassy would order an evacuation the next day, Caputo packed his gear and spent the night talking, drinking, and smoking pot with another journalist. Caputo felt that he had a responsibility to be there at the end of the war in which he served, so he had volunteered to go to Saigon.

On April 29th, the embassy called for an evacuation, and Caputo left with the other journalists, AVRN officers, and Vietnamese civilians on the last helicopters out of the Saigon’s airport. The planes and helicopters taking off were fired upon, so the danger was not over. Marine helicopters arrived to evacuate them, guarded and protected by Marine soldiers. Caputo was loaded onto a CH-53 helicopter and flown to a ship for his trip home. The war, so long and expensively fought, was over.