A Rumor of War: Postscript Summary & Analysis

It took Caputo as long to write A Rumor of War as it did the United States to fight the Vietnam War. He works on the memoir sporadically from the spring of 1967 to September 1976. The pressure of working as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, as well as the feeling of being “too fractured by the war” prevented him from writing his thoughts down coherently. While living in England, he starts reading great British memoirs from World War I, including Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. He realizes that a memoir would be the best form through which to recall Vietnam and “the changes it wrought in cultural and social values.”

By the fall of 1975, when Caputo is the Tribune’s Middle East correspondent in Beirut, he has accumulated a “a mass of notes and sketches but only about fifty pages of manuscript good enough to show someone.” He finds an agent, but his next problem is finishing the book while reporting on another war in Lebanon, where he gets shot, suffering serious bullet wounds in his left ankle and right foot, as well as superficial fragment wounds in the back, head, left leg, and right arm. He moves back into his parents’ house in Westchester, Illinois, to recuperate. There, he completes the manuscript

Caputo’s purpose in writing A Rumor of War was to make people understand the morally and emotionally ambiguous world in which the soldiers existed. He also wanted them to feel the war—the heat, the mosquitoes, the ambushes—as if they, too, were there. The next objective was to get the readers to ask themselves what they would do if they were there. He also strove toward the universal purpose of writing about war itself and what it means.

A Rumor of War is published in May 1977 and becomes an immediate sensation. Caputo is besieged by radio, TV, and print interviewers. Despite achieving success, he feels guilty, as though he were profiting from the deaths of his brothers in arms. He begins to suffer from panic attacks during a nationwide book tour. To calm down, he drinks excessively and smokes too much marijuana. He has a nervous collapse and spends several days in the psychiatric ward of an East Coast hospital. Caputo says that he did not write his memoir as a form of therapy but thinks that it and the other books about the war have been therapeutic for a wounded nation. He remains in awe of the fascination that Vietnam continues to hold for people—not only those who fought in or against it, but also those who were not yet born when Saigon fell.