Author: Ó Cathasaigh
Original Thread: Summer Book Reviews

Summer Book Reviews - A Rumor Of War The number one thing that I have grown to hate about going off to college is the fact that I have neither the time, nor the inclination to be able to read for my own pleasure. As any student can attest to, we are forced to read books that, while they may be interesting, are incredibly arduous and uninteresting to read on strict deadlines. I managed to down several books last year, from Death in the Haymarket, to Silent Spring, to Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State. However, I hated every second of that reading.

When I finally made my way home after the end of my final exams, I decided to spend an hour a night or more just reading books that I wanted to read. Much to my surprise, I managed to actually pull it off, and finished a rather interesting book in two weeks and started a second. Since I’d like to stick with this, I’ve decided to do reviews of all the books that I will read this summer.




The first such book was a very interesting one entitled A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo. This is in essence a memoir of Caputo’s service in the earliest stages of the Vietnam War as a “Boot Brown Bar” 2nd Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. This chilling true story will undoubtedly change your views about America’s most controversial war. It covers Caputo’s change from an idealistic college graduate, inspired by the words of John F. Kennedy’s “Ask Not” speech, to a cynical Veteran of many ambushes and skirmishes with an enemy as cruel and vicious as any America had ever faced.
The book spends most of it’s time describing how life really was in Vietnam for the first Marines to land in 1965. From the early high spirits and arrogance of his company, to the realization of the truth about War as his men killed and were killed. It is incredibly chilling as it describes the horrors of going out on a patrol in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Booby traps, landmines, and enemy ambushes could maim or kill anyone at anytime. Not that the American forces are painted as helpless in the book, they take their revenge on the Viet Cong as well. Caputo describes his transition from a ‘civilized’ officer, speaking out against an ARVN ranger beating information out of a Vietnamese Civilian to an Officer who simply wanted to kill. In the words of the ARVN ranger “you’ll learn how things are done around here.” Caputo and his men did.

Another theme of the book was the brutality that the War put into otherwise normal men. Burning villages, shooting civilians without realizing it, and remorselessly gunning down any Viet Cong that could be found were just a few examples of what Caputo saw during his term of service in Vietnam. It is not a book to ridicule the American forces as evil, but to show just what the constant strain of fighting a war in which there is no rear to relax in, and every step could be your last does to normal people. As one critic put it, this book is the “first to insist that…the reader ask himself the questions: How would I have acted? To what lengths would I have gone to survive? The sense of self is assaulted, overcome, subverted, leaving the reader to contemplate the deadening possibility that his own moral safety net might have a hole in it.” A Rumor of War challenges everything you think you know about the Vietnam War and the men who fought it, no matter your opinion of the conflict.

In closing, a Rumor of War is the most terrifying book I have ever read. All the more frightening because it’s a completely true story. Each “character” is, or rather was, a real person with a family and a life. It is saddening to think that each of the men who is killed in the book were actual people, and that they are also a small portion of the fifty thousand American Soldiers who were also killed in a fruitless war. It will most certainly make you wonder if you could have kept your sanity in the completely insane environment of 1965 Vietnam.