A Rumor Of War Essay
...o resist” (12). The quotes that head each chapter reflect the chapters in which they head. Caputo does this to present the overall idea, a summarization of the point that each chapter is trying to convey. Chapter four begins with an Irish ballad, “I’d read of our heroes, and wanted the same, to play my own part in the patriot game” (59). This quote expresses the admiration that young boys had for those that came before them, and the desire they had to become a hero and patriot. It portrays the romantic view of war, and the chapter that this quote initiates expresses the irony in such romance, it expresses the realities of war. Caputo explains the uncomfortable temperature, “The only valid measurement was what the heat could do to a man, and what it could do to him was simple enough: it could kill him, bake his brains, or wring the sweat out of him until he dropped from exhaustion.” There are several other issues explained in chapter four to prove why war is not romantic at all, such as boredom, disease, and bad living conditions, “Dust, filth, and mosquitoes filled our hooches at night” (65). Caputo expresses the realities that he once thought did not exist either, he was once full of illusions. He makes it clear that he still had illusions about war at that point, having not seen all of the death and destruction yet. “I had touched an exposed nerve in these veterans. […] Full of illusions, I did not realize they had none” (75). The next quote I have chosen to explain is from chapter seven by Howard Fast, written April Morning. “And you’ve lost your youth and come to manhood, all in a few hours….Oh that’s painful. That is indeed” (111). This quote explains the truth that boys lose the innocence of youth in what is almost an instant after witnessing the true nature of war with all its atrocities and horrors. Caputo presents both his own feelings and the feelings of his platoon after one of the very first times experiencing the death of an young enemy. It’s always the young men who die. We lingered for several minutes, trying to make some sense out of it. The company had only done what it was expected to do and what it had been trained to do: it had killed the enemy. Everything we had Learned in the Marine Corps told us to feel pride in that. Most of us did, but we could not understand why feelings of pity and guilt alloyed us at the time: for all its intensity, our Marine training had not completely erased the years we had spent at home, at school, in church, learning that human life was precious and the taking of it wrong. The drill fields and our first two months in Vietnam had dulled, but not deadened, our sensibilities. We retained a capacity for remorse and had not yet reached the stage of moral and emotional numbness. (124) It is difficult to observe violence and death at any age, but when a person is young and goes through such emotional, mental, and physical struggles that the boys in Vietnam have, there is an inevitable sense of aging. Philip Caputo’s shifting of attitudes throughout the novel reflects larger changes in society. He entered the war as an enthusiastic idealist disillusioned by the romanticized view of war as a chivalrous and noble enterprise and a shift of reality leaves him a dehumanized and desensitized emotional wreck. Caputo endured the despair of being left in the jungle with no clear reason for being there, the hopeless madness of chasing the guerillas and the agony of losing friends. He reveals how a normal mentally healthy person can be changed into a thoughtless killing machine, fast on the trigger, without any remorse for his victim...