Sunday, May 15, 2016

proof/editing Book Review - A Rumor of War

Wasted

In January of 1961, President Kennedy challenged the youth of America to “ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”  One young man in particular took that statement to heart and enlisted in the Marines, ready to fight for his country and return home a hero.  Little did he know how the next sixteen months of his life would transform him from an innocent boy to an accused murderer, only to return home opposed to war altogether.  A Rumor of War is the factual memoir of the author, Philip Caputo, and his experience in the Vietnam War.  The reader will see how Caputo struggled with the war and the meaning of it all.  He began by explaining he will not apologize for his acts of war, but cannot condone it either.  With the details to follow, the reader would understand why.
From the start, Caputo’s style of writing effectively draws the reader directly into battle with him.  Told in first person, one can readily identify with the up and down feelings of Caputo.  He uses details which appeal to every sense, drawing the reader into the jungle and every battle alongside him.  He described the stifling heat, the non-stop insects, the monsoon, the fatigue coupled with the constant fear of instant death.  With the first casualty of Sullivan in their troop, they were all hit with the reality of death and their own mortality.  Later, Caputo summed it up so well when he discusses how thousands of people died each week in the war, and the sum of all of their deaths did not make a difference.  The war went on without them, as it could go on without Caputo.  His own death would not change a thing.  He wrote he could not remember having felt an emotion more sublime or liberating than the indifference towards his own death.  Even away from battle in a different position, death took on a uniform look in his number crunching of the dead each day.  Every person looked alike, just a number.  After three men from his company were reported dead, Caputo saw himself as the Officer of the Dead.  Others were dying, being killed, killing themselves, and he just kept adding the numbers.  In the field, anxiety, depression, and fear became the additional enemy.  Men’s loyalty to their country became loyalty to their men.  He described several times the “lack of release” they felt and the anger that accompanied it.  As a reader with a family member who served in combat, they may better understand why that person behaves as they do because of now knowing what they may have been through.
The book quickly became dark around Chapter 3 when characters were introduced and the deaths began.  One of the main themes of the memoir is how the characters, along with Caputo, are desperately trying to learn who they are.  Caputo was just a boy when he enlisted, yet yearns to be the hero of the war in the end.  What he learns is that the few years he spends at war will change who he is forever.  They didn’t express that they had fought in the war, they had shed blood, and they had become men.  Instead, in a way they could not express, they were aware something significant had happened to them.  Had they truly become men because of their experience, or had they been psychologically damaged for the rest of their lives?  Would they hear artillery fire with every thunder crack?  Could they ever enjoy the rain on their faces again?  As they were losing the war, they were also losing their innocence, their morals, and their sanity.  They were learning to hate.  They were in a place where ordinary men could become crazed killers under extreme conditions.  Where dead men only meant a gap in the line that needed to be filled.  Where it was quickly forgotten that each pool of blood meant a person, a real person had died; a person who had a mother and father, who would be missed, and who was gone forever.  The word “wasted” was the term used for someone who was killed, and how fittingly it was.  A life was wasted, all that it had been and all that it could have been. 

The book was written two years after the end of the war, while events and emotions were still fresh in the mind of Caputo.  He wrote it as he lived it.  It makes one wonder how many others sunk within themselves, forever attempting to bury the memories, how many other stories and experiences will never be told.  Whereas Veterans were not treated well upon their return home from a war considered a loss, Caputo’s book helped change the mind of many Americans by illustrating just what they were put through while defending those critical of them.  It is definitely recommended for any reader who knows anyone who has served in the armed forces.  It certainly reveals an inside world one would never want to experience, but can better understand those who have.

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