Philip Caputo, who wrote blistering Vietnam War memoir, dies at 84

Philip Caputo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose bestselling, disillusioning memoir, A Rumor of War, about leading a Marine platoon through the sniper-riddled and booby-trapped jungles of Vietnam, entered the canon of wartime literature, died Thursday at his home in Norwalk, Conn. He was 84.

The cause was cancer, his son Marc Caputo wrote in a social media post.

The Vietnam War, which cost the lives of at least 1 million Vietnamese and 58,000 U.S. service members, generated an outpouring of fiction and nonfiction books, by some reckoning more than 3,500 titles.

A few works came to be widely regarded as classics because their authors captured unflinchingly the peculiar mix of boredom and terror in combat, the ambivalence about fighting a war that often seemed pointless and unwinnable, and the disheartening malaise that followed America’s first military defeat.

The standouts include works of fiction, including Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), and nonfiction ones like Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977), Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July (1976), and Mr. Caputo’s A Rumor of War (1977), which sold 2 million copies and was translated into 15 languages.

“To call it the best book about Vietnam is to trivialize it,” novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne wrote in his review of A Rumor of War for the Los Angeles Times. “Heartbreaking, terrifying and enraging, it belongs to the literature of men at arms.”

In the New York Times, author-editor Theodore Solotaroff wrote that Mr. Caputo “steadily forces you to see and feel and understand what it was like to fight in Vietnam” by “the acuity of his running commentary on the psychological and moral devastation of fighting a ‘people’s war’; and, most to the point, by placing himself as a Marine lieutenant directly before the reader and giving the American involvement a sincere, manly, increasingly harrowed American face.”

Mr. Caputo wrote in A Rumor of War that his book was about “the things men do in war and the things war does to them.” It opens with an account of Caputo’s enthusiastic enlistment in the Marine Corps as a 24-year-old Midwesterner, driven by a need to prove his courage and manhood, followed by his 16-month tour of duty as a platoon commander and infantry lieutenant.

He vividly recorded the toll on the soldier’s spirit of the punishing heat, dust, malarial mosquitoes, disease-laden water, and minimal hygiene. Those physical challenges were augmented by the confusion about what the platoon under his command was supposed to accomplish in its daily patrols — purportedly to secure the perimeter around the Danang airstrip essential to the safe passage of supplies and soldiers.

It was especially difficult to pinpoint an enemy, hidden and shielded as they were by the thick growth of jungle and by their deadly mines and booby traps. The Viet Cong — guerrilla fighters supporting the communist government in Hanoi — were experienced at warfare, and the periodic skirmishes were bloody, costing the lives of men to whom Mr. Caputo had grown close.

In one skirmish, the platoon encountered a hamlet, rife with Viet Cong sympathizers, where an ambush had been set up.

“The Marines are letting out high-pitched yells, like the old rebel yell, and throwing grenades and firing rifles into bomb shelters and dugouts,” he wrote. “Panic-stricken, the villagers run out of the flame and smoke as if from a natural disaster. The livestock goes mad, and the squawking of chickens, the squeal of pigs and the bawling of water buffalo are added to the screams and yells and loud popping of the flaming huts.”

Mr. Caputo soon realizes that the destruction is not an act of madness but of retribution. “These villagers aided the VC and we taught them a lesson,” he wrote, using the shorthand for Viet Cong. “We are learning to hate.”

After troops under his command intentionally shot two civilians suspected of having Viet Cong loyalties, Mr. Caputo took responsibility for the killings and wrote that he was “almost court-martialed” in 1966 before the charges of premeditated murder were dropped; Mr. Caputo left the service with an honorable discharge. He told the story as an illustration of how war can warp the moral codes of even ethical men.

The book was a decade in the making. Its commercial success — it was turned into a 1980 two-part CBS miniseries starring Brad Davis — allowed Mr. Caputo to quit daily journalism at the Chicago Tribune, where in 1973 he had shared a Pulitzer for general or spot news reporting, and pursue a career as a novelist.

Of his 10 works of fiction, the most highly regarded was Acts of Faith (2005). Set in war-torn Sudan, it was about a swaggering American aviator who plans to fly food, medicine, and clothing to starving rebels but is soon caught up in romantic and political complications that challenge his idealism.

Charlie Rose, the public television talk-show host, asked Mr. Caputo in 2005 whether he was impelled by the idea of taking a character to a foreign country “where there’s something interesting going on and having him or her go through some interesting journey of self-discovery.”

“That’s my thing, that’s what I do, that is always on my menu,” Mr. Caputo said. He later added, “In these states of extremes — which are both geographical states and states of mind — that the truth of a human character is revealed and starkly revealed.”

Philip Joseph Caputo, the older of two siblings, was born June 10, 1941, in Chicago and grew up in nearby Westchester, Ill.

His father, Joseph Caputo, was a plant manager for the Continental Can Co. His mother, Marie (Napolitano) Caputo, managed the home. He attended local Catholic schools, where the teachers were nuns and Jesuit priests.

“By the time I entered my late teens,” he wrote in A Rumor of War of his suburban upbringing, “I could not stand the place, the dullness of it, the summer barbecues eaten to the lulling drone of power mowers.”

At Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., he studied engineering at his father’s behest but struggled with calculus and physics. He left after three semesters, worked as a railroad brakeman, then enrolled at Loyola University in Chicago, where he majored in English and wrote for the college literary magazine and newspaper.

After graduating in 1964, he enlisted in the Marines, filled with idealism inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s “ask what you can do for your country” speech. Following his discharge three years later, he joined the Tribune.

He was a member of a reporting team that won a Pulitzer for exposing flagrant violations of voting procedures in a March 1972 primary. When war broke out in the Middle East in October 1973, he was dispatched to the region as a foreign correspondent. Postings in Rome, Moscow, and Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) followed.

In 1975, during the civil wars that convulsed Lebanon, he was wounded by bullets that struck his left ankle and right foot. He took an indefinite medical leave from the Tribune, and he and his first wife, Jill Ongemach, and their two young sons, Geoffrey and Marc, moved into his parents’ home, where he worked on the manuscript for A Rumor of War.

The unexpectedly exuberant reception, including requests to speak and thousands of letters from Vietnam veterans, overwhelmed him and led to a nervous collapse that required a brief hospitalization in a psychiatric ward. His marriage ended in divorce, as did a second, to Marcelle Besse.

In 1988, he married Leslie Ware, an editor for Consumer Reports. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his sons Geoffrey and Marc, a reporter for Axios; a sister, Patricia Esralew; and three granddaughters.

In 1975, sensing that the long war he covered at its outset was about to end, Mr. Caputo chose to return to Vietnam as a correspondent and was in Saigon that April when the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong captured the city. With shells exploding around him, he was evacuated by helicopter to an U.S. aircraft carrier and reflected on the American experience in an epilogue to A Rumor of War.

“My mind shot back a decade, to that day we had marched into Vietnam, swaggering, confident and full of idealism,” he wrote. “We had believed we were there for a high moral purpose. But somehow our idealism was lost, our morals corrupted and the purpose forgotten.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.