Summary Of Philip Caputo's Rumor Of War

Novelist and Journalist Philip Caputo, has written fifteen books, including two memoirs, five books of general nonfiction and eight novels. A Rumor of War, has been published in fifteen languages, has sold two million copies since its publication in 1977 and is widely regarded as a classic in the literature of war. Philip Caputo has won ten journalistic and literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, Overseas Press Club Award, Sidney Hillman Foundation Award, Connecticut Book Award and many other well-known awards. Caputo’s writing began in 1968, when he joined the staff of the Chicago Tribune, serving as a general assignment and team investigative reporter until 1972. A Rumor of War is an autobiography about a man that fought in Vietnam …show more content…
The novel begins with Caputo as a boy that wants to desperately prove that he is a man and he is capable of being a hero like the ones he has read in all those school book fables in his small southwestern suburb. He is caught up in the energy of a nation, which is being led to fear communism almost as much as it does becoming complacent. He hungers for adventure and danger, if nothing else, but to prove to himself that he is really living life. However, this comes to Caputo being the main character of his own book, entering the war with romantic notions of being a hero. He had thoughts of ending the war with a few short weeks or months and returning home to a parade of patriotic countrymen that will give him a friendly slap on the back and ask him to tell them another heroic tale of his adventures in Vietnam. What he finds, is a rude awakening to the realities of a battle fought in the middle of the jungle with Viet Cong who refuse to play by the rules he has learned at Officers Training …show more content…
Later I realized a reconciliation was impossible; I would never be able to hate the war with anything like the undiluted passions of my friends in the movement. Because I had fought in it, it was not an abstract issue, but a deeply emotionally experience, the only significance thing that had happened to me. It held my thoughts, senses, and feelings in an unbreakable embrace. I would hear in thunder the roar of artillery. I could not listen to the rain without recalling those drenched nights on the line, nor walk through woods without instinctively searching for a trip wire or an ambush. I could protest as loudly as the most convinced activist, but I could not deny the grip the war had on me, nor the fact that it had been an experienced as fascinating as it was repulsive, as exhilarating as it was sad, as tender as it was cruel”. Caputo came home from the war jaded and disillusioned and against the