A Rumor of War

In this section, Caputo begins a desk job at his regimental HQ in May 1965, where he will stay until September 1965. Caputo’s chief duty is to maintain an up-to-date tally of the dead—both Vietnamese and American. Called the “scoreboard” by the staff commanders, Caputo updates the figures whenever there is an action that costs lives or leaves men wounded. The careerist priorities and ignorance of the command structure concerning the soldiers who are fighting and dying disgusts Caputo, and his own complicity as a staff officer causes him considerable pain.

After a two week liberty in Japan, Caputo arrives at regimental HQ in Danang. When he returns to his old company to retrieve some gear he had left behind, he learns that one man, Sergeant Sullivan, had been killed by a sniper and another, Ingram, had been paralyzed during a battle. Death has come home to C Company.

Back at regimental headquarters, the constant, deafening noise of giant mortars being fired throughout the night prevents Caputo from sleeping. Though these are defensive guns, not the enemies’, Caputo is still unnerved by the noise and lack of sleep. Though he is given what seems to be a heavy workload, as “Regimental Casualty Reporting Officer, Regimental Secret and Confidential Documents Officer, Regimental Legal Officer, and Regimental Mess Officer” (164), Caputo has plenty of time on his hands to read.

As time goes on, the casualties increase, and Caputo finds that keeping up with the casualty reporting takes most of his time. As the Regimental Casualty Reporting Officer, he is required to report the exact cause and manner of death, or the exact wounds the men suffer for the Marine Corps records. This means that he must frequently visit the morgue to meet with the doctor and to look at the most grievous wounds imaginable to report accurately on each death. He is also required to gather reports of the number of enemy dead and wounded.

Caputo files the reports for each death or wounding after each action, then he updates Colonel Wheeler’s “scoreboard” (168), with its columns for Marines killed and wounded in action or by friendly fire, and with columns for Viet Cong killed, wounded, or POW. The scoreboard had to be kept up-to-date for high-ranking visitors, so they could see how the regiment was performing. The war, for those at a distance, such as the staff officers, became a matter of columns of numbers rather than living men.

During the visit of a General, Colonel Wheeler (regimental Commanding Officer, or CO) forced his men, including Caputo, to keep the bodies of two Viet Cong for the General’s viewing. The Colonel also forced all of the men in the offices of the regiment to line up and walk by the bodies. Disgusted, Caputo arranges the scene with the bodies as requested, even though they have begun to decompose, with guts falling out and legs falling off, in the heat.

It is during this period that Caputo begins to question the war and the purpose of all those deaths. 

The Viet Cong begin nightly attacks on the regimental compounds. They are fought off each night, with some Viet Cong infiltrators killed. The regimental compound is barely defended with a concertina wire fence and some foxholes. Next, two VC are caught examining the compound’s defenses in broad daylight.

Despite these warnings of an imminent attack on the compound and the nearby air field, the staff officers do nothing. Caputo remarks that the officers continued to play volleyball and enjoy their easy assignments, rather than preparing for an attack. Examples of urgent matters, according to the regimental staff officers, were the mandatory wearing of shirts during work details.

The Viet Cong hit the airfield, beginning with mortar fire, early in the morning of July 1st. No one was prepared, but somehow the Viet Cong are repelled. The airfield sustained relatively minor damage, with only a couple of transport planes and a few fighter planes destroyed.

There was no heavy fighting around Danang for the rest of that summer, with all of the fighting occurring at night. Under the cover of darkness, the Viet Cong shelled the regimental compound and deployed snipers. A war of attrition—deaths on both sides in twos and threes—begins.

This slow attrition only highlights for Caputo the personal aspect of each death because the men he knew die individually, one at a time. He lists each fallen man to emphasize the agonizing slowness and lack of progress for either side during this time in the war. Since his reprimand by the chaplain, reminding Caputo that each loss is devastating to the man’s family—something brought home to him further as the self-proclaimed “officer in charge of the dead” (175)—he now honors the dead by remembering each man’s character and personality, and how he died.