Front lines

Philip Caputo's views of Vietnam

by Bill Rodriguez

Back in 1977, two years after Saigon fell, Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War shook up a lot of readers. The memoir recounted events a dozen years before in Vietnam: an idealistic young warrior lands in Danang, among the first U.S. foot soldiers, and leaves the next year, jaded, embittered and opposed to American involvement as unjustified and doomed. His evolution described the country's attitude in microcosm.

Caputo is one of the featured writers participating in "Writing Vietnam," a program at Brown University April 21-23. On the second day of the event, he and six other authors will read from and discuss their work in the afternoon and participate in a forum in the evening. (See "Listings" for times and details.)

A Rumor of War was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, an award the author would eventually share with his Chicago Tribune colleagues for investigative reporting. Caputo also has written five novels and the 1991 memoir Means of Escape, which details his imprisonment by Palestinian guerrillas in Beirut and other experiences as a war correspondent.

From 1968 to 1977, Caputo was a reporter and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Stationed in Beirut in 1975, he was tapped to help cover the last month of the Fall of Saigon. He was witness to the first military defeat in United States history, fleeing on one of the last flights out, his helicopter taking gunfire from the abandoned Republic of South Vietnam soldiers.

In 1990, he and a half-dozen other Americans who had written about their Vietnam War experiences were invited by the Vietnamese Writers' Union "to meet their warrior poets," as he put it. In a recent phone interview, Caputo spoke about that experience and other matters.

Q: When you went back there at the Fall of Saigon, you certainly must have had a complex response. After all, when you returned to the States from the war, you soon were protesting U.S. involvement.

A: After I got back from the war I thought that it was at best a colossal mistake for us to have been there. But when I went back, to see all those people so terrified and so panicked, it brought home to me how much they had relied on us. That whether it was right for us, or let's say intelligent for us to have gone in there, after we did the reality of the matter was that they depended on us. We had pledged our support to them, and then we were pulling the rug out from under them, and I felt really ashamed about that. Even though I realized that in the end it was really their war to win or lose, no matter what you did. And then I had the feeling that the friends of mine who died, when I was in the service, died for nothing. And that brought a lot of mixed feelings of anger and betrayal and sorrow.

Q: In your 1990 visit to Vietnam with other "warrior poets," were there tense moments?

A: No. None. Zero. No tense moments whatever. I was stunned by the amicable response. The writers and poets I met would take me aside and we would take little walks down dark alleys and they would complain to me about the regime and the problems they were having with it as writers. I was surprised by that kind of candor.

I was especially moved by meeting, in Danang, a former North Vietnamese army officer, who like me was a platoon commander in an infantry regiment that my regiment had fought against at about the same time, in 1966. Whether he and I were actually in the same battle we never could quite determine. When it was all over, he came and threw his arm around my neck and we drank a toast to each other, and he said, "We're brothers in arms." I was very moved by that. And in fact it was true. We had a bond, of having both been there under fire, that was probably closer then the bond I would have felt toward some of our own rear-echelon officers.

Q: In the epilogue to A Rumor of War, you write how Americans swaggered into Vietnam but "somehow" lost their "high moral purpose." Have you subsequently come to any conclusions about that "somehow"?

A: I still believe that we did not go in there with the idea of conquest, of taking over a country for some Imperialist reasons, that there were minerals there or something vital to our economy. We really did go in there for this idealistic reason, the thought of sparing this country from Marxist or Communists tyranny. I think what happened was that once we got in there we discovered that things were not nearly as black-and-white as we thought. There was an extraordinarily complex history to Vietnam that we had unwittingly stepped into. But then I think that what took over was that while we were this enormously rich and powerful nation that had never, ever lost a war, [we thought that] we could never lose this one. It just simply became a game for us to win or lose. In other words, we began to view it as a power struggle. And when we stepped over that line is when the moral purpose became lost. It's almost like that song that World War I soldiers used to sing, that "we're here because we're here because we're here because we're here" and there was no reason beyond that.

Q: Americans tend to shout "We're number one!" a lot. Do you think there's something about our collective psyche that helps explain the brutality and the sometimes murderous frustration of the young soldiers around you in Vietnam?

A: No, I don't think it was the idea that we're No. 1 and we're going to win and if you don't let us win we're going to kill you. No, I don't think it was that. What happened there was, first of all, on one level it was the kind of brutalization that all soldiers undergo, no matter what the war is. Combat is a brutalizing experience. There's no way to avoid that. General Sherman didn't just say that "war is hell," he said "war is cruelty." He said there is no way to refine it.

On another level it was the frustrations of fighting an enemy that was often invisible. You often couldn't tell who the enemy was. If you ran into a North Vietnamese unit, it was unequivocal and gave more of the appearance and substance of a conventional war. But an awful lot of the war was guerrilla fighting and you couldn't really tell who was who. And that was not just frustrating, it was quite terrifying after a while. You found yourself surrounded, in a sea of hostility.