A review by bobbo49
A Rumor Of War by Philip Caputo

4.0

This is Caputo's memoir of 16 months as a marine lieutenant in Vietnam in 1965-66. While Caputo doesn't have the literary skills of O'Brien or Herr or Marlantes, he does have a very raw, personal and real story of America at war in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and of the disillusionment that crept into the lives of so many of its soldiers as they risked (or gave) everything in that futile effort. The last stage of his military career - a court martial for murder in the field - and his return to Vietnam as a journalist in 1975, as the American war ended, lend a perspective to Caputo's account that few others could provide.