A Rumor of War: Chapter One Summary & Analysis

Philip Caputo’s first experience of the world outside of the classroom is in a war zone. He trains in Quantico, Virginia, practices what he learned there in the jungles and rice paddies of Da Nang, South Vietnam, then teaches others his combat skills at a training base in North Carolina called Camp Geiger. When his three-year enlistment expires in 1967, he is ignorant “about marriage, mortgages, and building a career.” However, Caputo learns all about “the art of killing.” He learns how to use every weapon from a knife to a 3.5-inch rocket launcher. Using a two-way radio, he is also able to perform “magical feats of destruction” with jet fighters that release napalm and high-explosive bombs.

Caputo goes back home feeling older than his father. He returns after having seen “all manner of violence and horrors so grotesque that they evoked more fascination than disgust.” He recalls having once seen pigs eating “napalm-charred corpses.” It was rather ironic to watch pigs eating roasted people.

Caputo joins the Marines in 1960 because he is tired of suburban life in Westchester, Illinois. Westchester is one of the towns that springs up near Chicago “as a result of postwar affluence, VA mortgage loans,” and the urge to leave cities in favor of open spaces and more housing options. Caputo recalls the town’s “sleek, new schools,” “supermarkets full of Wonder Bread and Bird’s Eye frozen peas,” and rows of “split-levels” that “lined dirtless streets on which nothing ever happened.” By the time Caputo is in his late teens, he cannot stand the place.

The only thing that Caputo likes about his “boyhood surroundings” is the Cook and DuPage County forest preserve, which offers some fishing and small game. Occasionally, Caputo finds “flint arrowheads in the muddy creek bank,” reminding him of the region’s past—“that savage, heroic time” when the indigenous people trod on the forest paths with their “moccasined feet” and “fur trappers cruised the rivers in bark canoes.” This was America before it “became a land of salesmen and shopping centers.” Caputo longs for that world—a place where he can live “heroically.” He has known “nothing but security, comfort, and peace” but hungers for “danger, challenges, and violence.”

Caputo does not know how to fulfill this ambition for danger and challenge until a Marine recruiting team sets up a stand in the student union at Loyola University. They have displayed a poster of “a trim lieutenant” with an “athletic, slightly cruel-looking” face.” He looks “like a cross between an All-American halfback and a Nazi tank commander.” Caputo takes a pamphlet and reads about every battle in which the Marines have fought from the Revolutionary War to the Korean War. Caputo realizes that war is the heroic experience that he seeks. He envisions it as “the ordinary man’s most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary.”

Caputo’s other reason for enlisting is feeling that he needs to prove his manhood. During his freshman year at Purdue University, he feels freed from “the confinements of suburban home and family.” However, “a slump in the economy” prevents him from finding a job during the summer break. Worse, he is flunking out of school, after having spent the first year drinking too much and attending frat parties. He transfers to the smaller Loyola University in Chicago. At nineteen, he moves back in with his parents, which he hates. He fears that his parents view him as an irresponsible adolescent who still needs their care. He is desperate to demonstrate to them that he is “a man after all, like the steely-eyed figure in the recruiting poster.” 

Caputo joins the Platoon Leaders’ Class, which is the Marines’ version of ROTC. He is set to attend six weeks of basic training in the summer and then an advanced course in the summer before he graduates from college. In the summer of 1961, Caputo attends Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia. He and the other aspiring lieutenants range in age from nineteen to twenty-one. Those who survive the course will be sent to Vietnam in four years, though most of them currently do not know where Vietnam is. The first six weeks comprise of boot camp at Camp Upshur, which is located deep in the forest. The candidates are “shouted at, kicked, humiliated, and harassed constantly.” What Caputo recalls most vividly is the endless hours marching in the hot sun at the command of Sergeant McClellan’s voice.

About seventy percent of Caputo’s original class makes it through training and graduate in August 1963. Those who pass the initial trial return to Quantico two years later for the even tougher advanced course. Some of the training is familiar—“more close-order drill, bayonet practice, and hand-to-hand combat.” Additionally, the marines must run over Hill Trail, a range of seven hills as steep as roller coasters but “ten times as high.” They run while “wearing full pack equipment.” Dozens of men collapse during these runs, and drill sergeants show them no mercy. An overweight man who lies unconscious against a tree stump is shaken and shouted at. Caputo recalls, too, the “intense indoctrination” that encouraged an undying love for the Marine Corps and the code by which marines are expected to live, particularly “never [leaving] their casualties on the battlefield.” They also learn Marine Corps history and acts of heroism.

Caputo finds Basic School rather pleasant compared to Officer Candidate School. There is no more harassment from drill sergeants who now have to call the lieutenants “sir.” Living conditions are also “regal.” The purpose of the school is to turn the young lieutenants into professionals and to emphasize infantry fundamentals, such as how to take a hill and then defend it. Caputo detests the classroom work and longs for the romance of war, illustrated through books and films. That August, when they are midway through their Basic course, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution passes, setting up the next arena for war in Indochina.

The senior first lieutenant lectures Caputo and the other junior officers on counterguerrilla operations. The instructor disabuses his students of any sense “that guerilla-fighting [is] something like Indian-fighting” and stresses to them that it is “a highly-specialized art.” The officers have to learn “complex tactics with esoteric names” designed “to outwit the wily insurgents.” A few of Caputo’s classmates become “counterinsurgency cultists,” learning everything they can about the subject. Caputo finds it ironic that these “crew-cut, American-looking officers” study the teachings of Mao Tse-tung “as devoutly as the Chairman’s disciples in Peking and Hanoi.” They are ambitious and think that learning such tactics will make them better at their profession, while Caputo is only interested in the adventure Vietnam may offer.

As winter approaches, Caputo attends the Marine Corps birthday ball, which commemorates the Corps’ origins in a Philadelphia tavern on November 10, 1775. Caputo goes AWOL from Quantico Naval Hospital, where he is recovering from mononucleosis, to attend the celebration. He imagines something like the gatherings of Beowulf’s warriors in the mead hall and is disappointed to discover something more akin to a cotillion, attended by fellow marines and their wives and girlfriends. Still, that night in 1964 holds special significance as a moment of innocence, before the “fear, disfigurement, sudden death, the pain of long separation, [and] widowhood.”