A Rumor of War: The Classic Vietnam Memoir

“War is always attractive to young men who know nothing about it, but we had also been seduced into uniform by Kennedy’s challenge to ‘ask what you can do for your country’ and by the missionary idealism he had awakened in us. America seemed omnipotent then: The country could still claim it had never lost a war, and we believed we were ordained to play cop to the Communists’ robber and spread our own political faith around the world.” 

In this quote from the Prologue, Caputo establishes one of the significant metaphors in the memoir: the Marine Corp as religion. Through terms such as “missionary idealism” and “political faith,” Caputo announces that his memoir is shaped by growing up with this particular belief system and vision of the US’s greatness.

“So, when we marched into the rice paddies on that damp March afternoon, we carried, along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions that the Viet Cong would be quickly beaten and that we were doing something altogether noble and good. We kept the packs and rifles; the convictions, we lost.” 

Here, Caputo foreshadows the lost innocence and disillusionment that the war brings all soldiers of his generation.

“The discovery that the men we had scorned as peasant guerrillas were, in fact, a lethal, determined enemy and the casualty lists that lengthened each week with nothing to show for the blood being spilled broke our early confidence. By autumn, what had begun as an adventurous expedition had turned into an exhausting, indecisive war of attrition in which we fought for no cause other than our own survival.” 

All of Caputo’s deeply-held beliefs about his role in the war are broken by his experiences in Vietnam. One significant theme of his memoir is the disillusionment and useless destruction brought about by war, aptly described here.