A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo retells a piece of American history from the point of view of a marine. In Vietnam, Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo aged decades in a matter of years. He witnesses many deaths. Some were caused by the Viet Cong, but others by marines. This book “does not pretend to be history” (xiii) because it does not have to. It is not an adventure book written so the good guy always wins. History is told by the people who were involved in the event and Philip Caputo was a marine in Vietnam. A Rumor of War shows what marines went through in Vietnam through the first hand account of Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo.
Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo’s story gives the world an inside point of view on the Vietnam War. This first hand account is part of the …show more content…
As a nation, the United States, can learn from what happened in Vietnam. A Rumor of War is not a book created from Philip Caputo’s imagination. “This book is not a work of the imagination. The events related are true, the characters real, though I have used fictitious names in some places. I have tried to describe accurately what the dominant event in the life of my generation, the Vietnam War, was like for men who fought in it. Toward the end, I have made a great effort to resist the veterans inclination to remember things the way he would like them to have been rather than the way they were” (xxi). Caputo stays true to the story throughout the book. He could have very easily not mentioned the parts of the war when Americans mistreated the Vietnamese. He did not do this because he knows that both the good and the bad part of the war
Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo’s story gives the world an inside point of view on the Vietnam War. This first hand account is part of the …show more content…
As a nation, the United States, can learn from what happened in Vietnam. A Rumor of War is not a book created from Philip Caputo’s imagination. “This book is not a work of the imagination. The events related are true, the characters real, though I have used fictitious names in some places. I have tried to describe accurately what the dominant event in the life of my generation, the Vietnam War, was like for men who fought in it. Toward the end, I have made a great effort to resist the veterans inclination to remember things the way he would like them to have been rather than the way they were” (xxi). Caputo stays true to the story throughout the book. He could have very easily not mentioned the parts of the war when Americans mistreated the Vietnamese. He did not do this because he knows that both the good and the bad part of the war