By Alex Belth
Esquire
October 2017

Philip Caputo is one of the finest journalists of his generation. His 1976 non-fiction account of his service in the Vietnam War, A Rumor of War, is one of the seminal pieces of writing about that conflict. As it celebrates its 40th anniversary and a new paperback edition, we took the opportunity to speak with Caputo. Enjoy.—A.B

Alex Belth: It was really humbling reading A Rumor of War. I don’t know how else to put it but it scared the shit out of me.

Philip Caputo: This might sound strange but I’m actually glad it did because I wrote it with the view in mind of recreating the experience as much as I could on the printed page so that a reader would experience the war almost as if they’d been in it.

AB: How long after you returned did you think of writing a book?

PC: I came back from Vietnam in 1966. I was stationed in Camp Lejeune North Carolina as company commander of an infantry training company, a position I held from the fall of ’66 to spring of ’67. By that time, I tried writing A Rumor of War—I already had the title—as a novel.

I was back in Chicago maybe a month, sold my beloved red Triumph Spitfire, and with some of my back pay I went to Europe. Not only did I not want to read anything about the war—there wasn’t very much published about it yet, anyway, before Michael Herr, before Tim O’Brien, before almost anybody—I didn’t want to be reminded about it. I went to Europe thinking I could get away from it, which proved to be illusionary, especially in France. I remember riding a bus through the French countryside seeing on barns signs, “Paix ala Vietnam”—Peace in Vietnam. I ended up in Spain for two or three months and then finally in England, where I got the idea that the book had to be a memoir. That was from reading not about Vietnam but World War I, Siegfried Sassoon’s memoirs of as an infantry officer.

I ran out of money, came home and got a copy as a copywriter in the advertising department of the 3M company. I was there seven or eight months and then got a job at a small suburban paper that was a minor province in the Chicago Tribune empire. Worked there for about a year and got hired by the Tribune city desk in ’69.

AB: How did you adjust to civilian life?

PC: (Laughs) With great difficulty. It’s the same story—you’re hearing it now from all the guys that have been in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t personally know any of my old buddies who made a smooth transition back into civilian life. And for that matter the only people I know who ever did were many of the World War II veterans. And I don’t know how smooth that transition was either because that war and that generation are now so marinated in mythology that it’s hard to say. They probably felt the same sense of dislocation that we did but it was not as severe because WWII was the great crusade, they were victorious, everybody loved them.

The unraveling that I experienced—that a lot of people experienced—much earlier in the war than many people think, was due to our immediate foxhole experiences. But once I got back and began to follow the war on TV and in the press I began to see this enormous con game—I can’t think of any other word for it—that government and the military was foisting on the American people, especially on the young men of my generation, and even worse, the young men of my generation who weren’t particularly economically or intellectually privileged.

AB: And yet you weren’t an activist personally. Was it strange to be against the war but be in that middle ground between your feelings and the New Left?

PC: Oh yeah. That was why I was heartened when John Kerry got involved with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. By that time I was working at the Tribune and had seen the wire services of the first gathering of veterans in Washington throwing their medals at the White House. I wasn’t’ there, I wasn’t a member formally, but I needed to make some gesture in support of them because I felt then that the only people who had a moral justification for protesting their government’s policies and the war were people who’d fought in it. So I mailed my medals to back to Nixon.

EC: Did you think less of the anti-war protesters, often from upper middle class families?

PC: I did then, yeah. I didn’t think less of somebody who didn’t go to Vietnam. But if someone didn’t go into the service or to the war and then engaged in all of the protest activities, no, I didn’t think much of them. My views have changed, certainly mellowed considerably, since.

AB: How thorough were your notes?

PC: I did keep a journal while in Vietnam that was pretty spotty for practical reasons. It’s not like you had time to sit down and write notes in your journal. But I did write letters home. I didn’t get too graphic in my letters home but I did write to my family about some of the things that had happened and that I saw. Finally though, when you’re 21 or 22 years old and you experience something that intense and that unique, it just tattoos itself in your brain, almost every detail. I relied on memory and the diary and the letters home.

AB: When did you decide to tell the story chronologically?

PC: Because I was married, having children, having this very demanding job, it was very difficult to find more than a couple of hours a month to work on the book and quite often it would sit in a drawer weeks and weeks, months sometimes. It’s interesting—to me, anyway, if you compare me to say, Tim O’Brien, who is 5 or 6 years younger than I am. Now that doesn’t sound like much, but in fact it is. By the time Tim came along the war had been going on for a long time, everybody kind of knew it was absurd. There was a sense of the absurdity of it. But when I went in I was steeped in the literary mythology of World War II and Korea, but especially World War II—James Jones and Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw too. And I wasn’t as in love with the second generation of World War II writers like Kurt Vonnegut or Joe Heller. I’d read those but they didn’t quite resonate with me the way the other ones did.

I was trying to tell this classic kind of war story in a very unclassical war. I couldn’t make sense of it to myself. I said, okay, we go out on patrol and bang, bang, bang, this happens or nothing happens and we go back. And then we go over the same ground again. And absolutely zero is accomplished. Nothing happens. There’s no movement in the event you’re describing from point A to point B to point C towards some conclusion, as in James Jones’ Thin Red Line, which is the Battle of Guadalcanal or Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, which is the battle in the Philippines. Those events actually moved from one point to another point and then you’re characters and your narrative move with it.

In this case, there was no external narrative, probably if I had been somewhat younger I would have been able to do something more experimental with it but I wasn’t able to. I couldn’t figure out, what’s the fucking story here? I was in Rome at the time. This would have been about ’72-’73 and I was trying to read Dante in the original Florentine Italian with the help of a translation and while I was reading it, it occurred to me the journey that Dante takes: he’s in the light and then he plunges into Hell and then emerges into purgatory and then finally into heaven so that he goes from a kind of false light into utter darkness and then emerges into a new and truer light. And I said, That’s the story. Because that’s what happened to me personally but I knew it had to be written in such a way that it would resonate with everybody. That everybody probably experienced what I did to a degree or another and that’s how I came up with the structure. So it had to be chronological.

AB: There are a lot of things you write in your experience but so many things—details of how your parents were handling all this, for instance—that you don’t go into. How much work did you do to cut things out?

PC: I felt like I was going to be a voice for a lot of people who didn’t have a voice or if they had a voice they didn’t want to express it. That’s why there’s all sorts of stuff that I left out. People, to this day will say, I read your novel. And I say, It’s not a novel it’s a memoir. It reads like a novel because I selected certain details to move the narrative from the light of illusion, to the darkness, to the light of truth. I was selective right from the beginning. This sounds like bullshit but it’s really true—I actually saw this novel scroll in front of my head. Went right through my mind in seconds. I knew then what I had to do was transcribe that brief but brilliant vision onto the page. And in that vision, if you want to call it that, all the extraneous details were almost automatically left out.

AB: Have you felt that with other books or just this one?

PC: No, never have felt that since. Or anything even close to it. I can look at all the other 15 books I wrote, especially the fiction, and I have to resist the urge to go and re-write all of it. And that doesn’t occur with that book. I said to myself, I’m going to write a book not just about the Vietnam War but war itself. And I want it to last; I don’t want it be something that’s good for five years and then just be a little interesting artifact. But a consciously unliterary style comes naturally to me, anyway.

AB: You survived the war and yet as a correspondent you ended up in combat situations time and time again—Beirut, Afghanistan—putting yourself in great danger. You write about the addictive nature of combat, but was there something even deeper going on in terms of tempting fate?

PC: I needed to be back in those situations, to make sense of why I had survived and others did not. That there was some meaning to why I lived. I went back into those situations because if I made it out alive it was a sign that I was somehow blessed or forgiven. It’s a little hard to express. Maybe a sign that God was looking on you with favor, after all.

AB: Were you looking for absolution?

PC: I’d say so, yeah, absolutely. Sixteen of the guys that I served with that I knew—I wasn’t close buddies with all of them but with maybe three or four of them—talked to, led them—are on the wall in Washington. So I went through that business of Why did I survive and they didn’t? You do feel a certain—they use the term “Survivor’s Guilt” but that doesn’t quite adequately express it though I can’t think of a substitute for it.

In Vietnam, I had betrayed the best image I had of myself. I was not only a killer but I liked it. There was this darkness in me that was very difficult to accept as part of my own nature. By exposing myself over and over to these situations, I trying to come to terms with that. I was trying to duplicate, if possible, some of the experiences I had in Vietnam with the hopes that I would behave with more nobility—better than I had before.

AB: And was that the case?

PJ: Not really, unfortunately, because in all these other wars I was a correspondent and although I was in danger of being shot at I could always get out of it. There was always the awareness that if I got through a particular firefight or artillery shelling, I could get out. So you couldn’t quite duplicate the circumstances of being a solider. The story I did for Esquire going into Afghanistan in 1979 was different. At one point the Mujahadeen gave me a rifle and said, “Sorry, we can’t guarantee your safety anymore, you’re going to have to take care of yourself, buddy.” So I was kind of a combatant at that point although I never shot at anybody, thank God. They gave me this old Lee Enfield 303 from Kipling’s day and we had to run through this gap in the Russian lines and I was just praying to myself, God forbid I have to shoot some Russian kid just to save my life. But that never happened.

Truth be told, I got so fucking scared in Afghanistan, a few years later the Times called me and wanted to send me to Central America. I don’t remember what they offered to pay me but I turned them down and they said, “What would it take to send you there?” And I said, “$100,000 and a $100,000 life insurance policy for my wife.” And they said, “Well, we can’t do that.” So I said, “Neither can I.”

AB: Did still see the dark side of your personality once you were a journalist or did you see writing and reporting as a salvation?

PC: More the latter. It was about exposing myself to danger but it wasn’t completely self-serving. I felt that these places, they were these dark places of the earth, were dark things were happening and people should know about them. Call it my moral obligation to go and see them and report them.

AB: What were the consequences of your need to put yourself in danger? How did it effect your wife and your children?

PC: [Laughs] Well, oh, um, I don’t know, actually. Don’t forget I’m in my Seventies now, I don’t live this way anymore. [Laughs]

AB: Was it an issue when you were younger?

PC: Yes, it was. And it was harmful to relationships. It wasn’t healthy. It’s one of the reasons Leslie is my third wife. We’ve been married for nearly 30 years but before that I think a lot of stuff I did with myself and lived my life was harmful to the emotional relationships I had.

AB: Once you got out of the service did you still feel you wanted “contact” the way you describe in A Rumor of War?

PC: You mean, actually pick up a gun and fight somebody? I don’t know if I did or not. I’d have to really think about that but no, I didn’t really want to fight anybody or shoot anybody or kill them in some more intimate way. But what I did want was exposure to the danger and then escaping the danger.

I’ve made three trips back to Vietnam, the last earlier this year in February, 2017.The second one I made was on assignment for National Geographic. I was going through the very same places and battlefields I’d been on thirty years ago—this was in 1999. I finally ended up halfway to the Laotian border in this area where I’d been on in this one operation. I remember standing up on this mountaintop looking at it. Leslie, my wife was with me. And this North Vietnamese poet with me. And I said, Something’s missing. I can’t figure out what it is. This is really beautiful to look at and all that. And then I realized what was missing: the horror and the danger wasn’t there. And what I was looking at was scenery. I was looking at landscape but I wasn’t looking at something that was alive so to speak, that had a kind of soul to onto itself. And what was missing was the possibility of take one step and you’re life is over.

AB: You write about the heightened senses, almost a high, that comes with combat. Are there satisfactions in life that are less charged as combat that have touched you as deeply? Things that are more mundane?

PC: Oh. I even had them when I immediately came back from the war because one of the things you always dream about is, Gee, wouldn’t it be great if I could lie in bed and have a cup of coffee. But falling in love comes close to the intensity of the experience of war. Of course, it’s quite different. Just looking at the face of somebody you really love, even as time goes by, one derives just great joy and satisfaction from that. I guess the emotional intensity is of a different order though.

I was on a hunting trip in Africa, hunting Cape Buffalo, which are very dangerous animals. And I can remember that hunt—this was in 2006—was something that the came the closest I’ve ever experienced outside of combat to what combat is like. Your senses, all of your senses, you’re hearing, your smell, your sight, everything is just cranked up as if you’re on some combination of coke and speed. It’s an extremely intense experience, which needs to be differentiated from the joys that are part of ordinary life.

AB: I know you said you had certain literary ambitions for A Rumor of War but I’ve also read that when the book came out and was a success the sudden fame that came your way was really disconcerting. How did you deal with all of that?

PC: That was really hard. It ambushed me. First of all, I finished the book and had got a $6,000 advance. I told my first wife Jill, I hope the book does well enough to earn out the advance and maybe we’ll make enough money to go on a real neat vacation together. I was even planning it, we were going to go to Greece. So when all of a sudden the book turned out to be a sensation I had a lot of trouble dealing with that. It was kind of weird. It wasn’t like I was a child. I was 35, something like that. I’d been a journalist so I’d been out in the world. Looking back on it, some part of me felt that I was now exploiting this experience. And in the exploitation I was betraying my old comrades.

AB: Instead of paying homage which is what you were also trying to do.

PC: Yes, but a part of me definitely felt that way. A couple of times during the book tour I’d be asked these questions and they’d completely flabbergast me and I’d almost be mute about it. I was a journalist but I was a print journalist. Now I’m on these talk shows and morning shows and there’s all these slick TV people moving around and I was supposed to somehow express this profound experience in 3 minutes. On demand. It was pissing me off but I felt guilty about being a sort of celebrity, I guess.

AB: Did you ever talk about that with writers like Michael Herr or Tim O’Brien?

PC: No. I’ve had long conversations with both of them, especially with Tim but I can’t say I ever discussed that with them. Nor did they ever express that to me. So I don’t know if they felt that way—we’ll never know about Michael because he’s gone now.

AB: You are in a small and special fraternity of writers associated with Vietnam.

PC: Yeah, I think we’re—for better and worse—a brotherhood of sorts. You’re forever marked by that, both by the experience of war and then the subsequent book. I remember an essay ages ago by John Knowles, who wrote A Separate Peace. That’s all he was ever known for even though he wrote a lot after that. He talked about the strange blessing of having your first book become a classic but at the same time it is a burden, a curse. Joe Heller told me that in so many words. He was always trying to write himself away from Catch-22. Gloria Jones mentioned that explicitly to me about Jim Jones. Everybody would run into Jim, having read From Here to Eternity and say, “I read your book.” And Jones would have to say, “Which one?” Knowing what they meant.

AB: Forty years later what is it like to revisit A Rumor of War?

PC: I’ve never re-read it cover to cover but have read pieces from it for many years when I’ve been asked. I have this weird feeling that somebody else wrote it. In a way, like my wife says, somebody else did. You were 35 when it was published and you started it when you were 26. So in a way it was written by somebody else.

EC: Do you feel that not only did somebody else write it but the character on the page is also somebody else?

PC: No. I still feel close that person in a way that I don’t to me in college or me in high school. I don’t know how many times I’ve gotten letters or emails or comments on my website or my wife will mention, Do you remember we went here or met this person or we did this? And I don’t remember. Whereas I can remember everything about myself in Vietnam at that time very clearly.

AB: I don’t mean to be corny but do you feel as if you are more at peace with yourself as an older person?

PC: Oh yeah. I can’t remember where I heard this but you assuming you have reasonable degree of health that you tend to get happier as you get older and that’s certainly been my case.

AB: Happier because you are grateful to have the things you have?

PC: Yes. You’re worried your question was corny, I’m worried my answers are. [Laughs] I wake up in the morning and notice the way the light falls on the trees. Sometimes I’ll look at my two dogs, like I’m doing right now. They’re lying on the rug in my office. [Laughs] I just feel this joy in looking at them. Sometimes, I don’t want to get mushy about this, but I tend to wake up before Leslie does, and I love to look at her sleeping. Just the way her face looks. There’s a kind of serenity about her. All those small things mean so much more to you when you’re older and you’ve come to terms with your own limitations. Even when I was middle aged I could be a real hard ass. A pain in the ass sometimes. Stuff now that I know would have bugged me when I was 40, 45, that just rolls off my back. You mellow out. If you have work you love, and a Love you love, that’s it.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

[Photo Credit: Gordon W. Gahan via Harvard Museum]

The Stacks Chat: Philip Caputo