"When we marched into the rice paddies on that damp March 1965 afternoon, we carried, along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions that the Viet Cong would be quickly beaten and that we were doing something altogether noble and good. We kept the packs and rifles; the convictions, we lost." Eventually, "we fought for no cause other than our own survival."
This memoir is considered the finest written about Vietnam. Caputo was born in Chicago in 1941, raised in the suburbs, and went straight into the Marine Corps after finishing the PLC program at Loyola in 1964. After training and an infusion of "courage, loyalty, and esprit de corps," it was off to Vietnam. He "was twenty-three years old, in superb condition, and quite confident he would live forever." His brigade was the first to arrive in Vietnam and, for a month, dug in a defensive position around the Da Nang Air Base. They suffered the indignities of heat and filth in their foxholes while they waited. After almost two months, they began long-range patrols into the jungle. Dropped into an LZ, the company walked three miles to a village, where the sniper fire began. When they were flown back to base, they were exhausted and had never seen anyone to fire at.
Thus began a pattern of flying into the bush for a day or two and then flying back to base. Their first casualty was a man with a 109-degree temperature. Slowly, the men became immune to death and suffering, and they began to hate. Their first meaningful firefight lasted 90 minutes and led to four VC dead. The company's first fatality, a 19-year-old new father, shook everyone to the core. At the end of May, Caputo was sent for training in Japan and assigned to regimental headquarters as a staff officer. Staff work took up three or four hours per day, and the rest of staff life was pure boredom. On July 1, the VC attacked the airbase. They inflicted serious damage but were held off. One of Caputo's jobs was serving as casualty officer, requiring him to view bodies, catalog injuries, and report the causes of death. The job and the nightmares aged him until he felt like an old man just hanging onto life.
The fall monsoon season brought a new war, no longer guerrilla. Both the VC and the NVA were launching more traditional battles, and Marine losses escalated. Caputo found himself writing up ten casualties a day. By November, he was so bored that he volunteered to go back to a line company. After eight months in-country, his idealistic notions were long gone. He just couldn't do any more paperwork about the dead, and he wanted back in on the intensity of combat. In the first month, his platoon made 200 patrols. One late December day, the platoon was engaged in an intense firefight and performed excellently. Caputo was thrilled. In January, every patrol seemed to run into mines and booby traps, until a helicopter assault into a hot LZ changed the pattern. One day, after five hours of combat, he lost control of his platoon as it torched a village. In his last month, Caputo was haunted by nightmares, and his feet and lower legs were a putrid mess of sores. One night he cracked and sent his men out to capture two suspected VC. When they wound up dead, he and his men were court-martialed. He had to stay in Vietnam a few extra months before the matter was dropped. He became further embittered and came to believe the whole war effort was hopeless hypocrisy.
A decade later, he was back as an experienced war journalist for the last days of South Vietnam. In the final month, the NVA rolled over its token opposition. He helicoptered out a day before the regime fell—one of the first Americans in-country and one of the last out. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist died earlier this month.
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