Caputo takes on various part-time responsibilities commonly assigned to junior staff. He handles casualty reporting, maintaining control of secret and confidential documents, and taking care of legal issues the mess hall. The most important of these to Caputo's mental and emotional development becomes his duty of casualty reporting. In this work, Caputo's last clinging romantic notions of war dissolve into numbers, growing numbers of men, Americans and Viet Cong, who are dead or wounded.
He lists and adjusts the daily numbers of men who have been shot by both the enemy as well as their own, men who have been blown up by mines or mortar shells, run over with convoy trucks or killed or wounded in helicopter crashes. Here, death begins to take on a uniform look. The dead Americans, Vietnamese, men, women.....
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