One of the indispensable features of Caputo's narrative [A Rumor of War] is that he is never less than honest, sometimes relentlessly so, about his feelings concerning the thrill of warfare and the intoxication of combat. At least in the beginning, before the madness. After sixteen months of bloody skirmishes and the ravages of disease and a hostile environment, after the psychological and emotional attrition, Caputo—who had begun "this splendid little war" in the jaunty high spi...

["A Rumor of War," Caputo's personal account of the Vietnam War, is] the true story of the transformation of one of "the knights of Camelot," whose "crusade" was Vietnam and whose cause could only be "noble and good" into a vindictive, desperate and chronically schizoid killer in a war he had come to realize was futile and evil. As Emerson put it, "the lengthened shadow of a man is history": Caputo would no doubt agree, for the cou...

What can be said? This is the hardest review I have ever had to write. Okay: there are three options. I can hang it up now, at sentence four. Or I can tell you that A Rumor of War is the most daunting and significant personal account yet generated by our great dishonor, Vietnam—which Rumor is: full stop: no qualifications—and end my assessment, my responsibility, there. Yes, but would that be enough? Would you read it? Oh, I'd like to have authority over your life. For just this moment....

Philip Caputo last wrote A Rumor of War; indisputably the most consequential and terrific Vietnam memoir: alone, it almost made our involvement there worthwhile. Still, I don't see why Caputo should be penalized (or rewarded) for former brilliance. Every reviewer from the NYT to the Block Island Bivalve will compare Rumor and Horn of Africa. Oh, there are coy parallels; the temptation is like a ripe carbuncle. Yet, for our purposes, Horn—novel, not memoir—was written by Phil X. And Phil...

Philip Caputo (A Rumor of War, Horn of Africa) is one of the more successful enhancers of the factual, largely because he writes intensely about his own experiences, which were dramatic and perilous. Caputo, 42, served with the U.S. Marine Corps in Viet Nam during the mid-'60s. He returned ten years later to cover the fall of Saigon for the Chicago Tribune. As a journalist, he also rode camels with Eritrean rebels in Ethiopia and was shot in both feet by Muslim militiamen in Beirut. Substantial parts...

It is difficult to know where to begin an analysis of [A Rumor of War, a] first-rate memoir of a Marine lieutenant's experience with war. It is unquestionably the very best work to appear on the Vietnam war and one of the finest pieces of American writing on war from the ground in this century. The fascination of Caputo's account is not that his experiences were typical or his reactions to the war commonplace among veterans—both of these interpretations would be only partly true. What C...