Philip Caputo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist "whose bestselling, disillusioning memoir, A Rumor of War, about leading a Marine platoon through the sniper-riddled and booby-trapped jungles of Vietnam, entered the canon of wartime literature," died May 7, the New York Times reported. He was 84.
[Editor's note: NPR's Fresh Air today looks back at Caputo's life and work.]
A Rumor of War (1977) sold two million copies and was translated into 15 languages. "To call it the best book about Vietnam is to trivialize it," novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne wrote in his review of the book for the Los Angeles Times. "Heartbreaking, terrifying and enraging, it belongs to the literature of men at arms." It was adapted into a 1980 two-part CBS mini-series starring Brad Davis.
In the New York Times, author and editor Theodore Solotaroff observed that Caputo "steadily forces you to see and feel and understand what it was like to fight in Vietnam" by "the acuity of his running commentary on the psychological and moral devastation of fighting a 'people's war'; and, most to the point, by placing himself as a Marine lieutenant directly before the reader and giving the American involvement a sincere, manly, increasingly harrowed American face."
Caputo wrote in his book that it was about "the things men do in war and the things war does to them." The Times noted that it "opens with an account of Mr. Caputo's enthusiastic enlistment in the Marine Corps as a 24-year-old Midwesterner, driven by a need to prove his courage and manhood, followed by his 16-month tour of duty as a platoon commander and infantry lieutenant.... Caputo soon realizes that the destruction is not an act of madness but of retribution."
After troops under his command intentionally shot two civilians suspected of having Vietcong loyalties, Caputo took responsibility for the killings and in 1966, before the charges of premeditated murder were dropped, he left the service with an honorable discharge.
A Rumor of War's commercial success allowed Caputo to quit working at the Chicago Tribune, where in 1973 he had shared a Pulitzer for general or spot news reporting, to become a novelist.
His 10 works of fiction include Acts of Faith (2005), set in war-torn Sudan, where "a swaggering American aviator who plans to fly food, medicine and clothing to starving rebels... is soon caught up in romantic and political complications that challenge his idealism," the Times wrote.
Former television talk show host Charlie Rose asked Caputo in 2005 about his often returning in his work to the idea of a character in a foreign country "where there's something interesting going on and having him or her go through some interesting journey of self-discovery."
"That's my thing, that's what I do, that is always on my menu," Caputo replied. "In these states of extremes--which are both geographical states and states of mind--the truth of a human character is revealed and starkly revealed."
In 1975, as the war in Vietnam was ending, Caputo returned to the country as a correspondent and was in Saigon when the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong captured the city. He was evacuated by helicopter and later reflected on the American experience in an epilogue to A Rumor of War.
"My mind shot back a decade, to that day we had marched into Vietnam, swaggering, confident and full of idealism," he wrote. "We had believed we were there for a high moral purpose. But somehow our idealism was lost, our morals corrupted and the purpose forgotten."