Philip Caputo, Author of A Rumor of War, Dies at 84
Philip Caputo, who spent sixteen months fighting in Vietnam and thirty-five years trying to write his way out of it, has died at the age of 84. His family confirmed the news this week. The cause of death was not disclosed.
That he was best known for a single book is not an insult. A Rumor of War, published in 1977, is one of those rare works that makes a genre almost redundant. Every Vietnam memoir written since has had to reckon with it. Caputo arrived in Southeast Asia in 1965 as a freshly minted Marine lieutenant, full of the kind of idealism that the Kennedy years manufactured so efficiently. What he found — and what he wrote about with such unflinching honesty — was something else entirely: the casual brutality that war instils in ordinary men, the fog of conscience that settles after orders are followed and bodies counted.
Before he was a novelist, Caputo was a journalist. A good one. He shared a Pulitzer Prize with the Chicago Tribune team that exposed voter fraud in 1972, and he was shot twice while covering the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 — not a metaphor, literally shot. He reported from Afghanistan and Africa. He wrote about war the way a man writes about something that has never quite let him go.
The books came steadily after A Rumor of War: novels, more memoirs, a body of work that never quite achieved the same seismic impact as his debut, but that showed a writer committed to the long haul. He understood that the story of war is not finished at the ceasefire; it goes home, it lingers in marriages and nightmares and the way a man holds a fork at dinner.
For readers who want to follow that thread — the way violence persists in memory, in places, in ordinary lives long after the headlines move on — our catalog holds some compelling companions. La memoria de los nenúfares traces a woman's journey back to Vietnam decades after a wartime love story left its mark; an intimate counterpoint to the soldier's memoir. And for those drawn to the literature of men in uniform, Arturo Pérez-Reverte's early novel El húsar captures the intoxication and horror of combat with comparable precision.
Philip Caputo was 84. He had survived Vietnam, a civil war, and thirty years of American literary culture. His son Marc called him simply the author of "a best-selling classic about Vietnam." That is an understatement dressed as a compliment. A Rumor of War is not a classic. It is evidence.
