Philip Caputo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose best-selling, disillusioning memoir, \u201cA Rumor of War,\u201d about leading a Marine platoon through the sniper-riddled and booby-trapped jungles of Vietnam, entered the canon of wartime literature, died on Thursday at his home in Norwalk, Conn. He was 84.<\/p>\n
The cause was cancer, his son Marc Caputo wrote in a social media post<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Vietnam War, which cost the lives<\/a> of at least one million Vietnamese and 58,000 American service members, generated an outpouring of fictional and nonfictional books, by some reckoning more than 3,500 titles.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s first military defeat.<\/p>\n The standouts include works of fiction, including Tim O\u2019Brien\u2019s \u201cThe Things They Carried\u201d (1990), and nonfiction ones like Michael Herr<\/a>\u2019s \u201cDispatches\u201d (1977), Ron Kovic\u2019s \u201cBorn on the Fourth of July\u201d (1976) and Mr. Caputo\u2019s \u201cA Rumor of War\u201d (1977), which sold two million copies and was translated into 15 languages.<\/p>\n \u201cTo call it the best book about Vietnam is to trivialize it,\u201d the novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne wrote in his review of \u201cA Rumor of War\u201d for The Los Angeles Times. \u201cHeartbreaking, terrifying and enraging, it belongs to the literature of men at arms.\u201d<\/p>\n In The New York Times, the author and editor Theodore Solotaroff wrote<\/a> that Mr. Caputo \u201csteadily forces you to see and feel and understand what it was like to fight in Vietnam\u201d by \u201cthe acuity of his running commentary on the psychological and moral devastation of fighting a \u2018people\u2019s war\u2019; 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Caputo wrote in \u201cA Rumor of War\u201d that his book was about \u201cthe things men do in war and the things war does to them.\u201d It opens with an account of Mr. Caputo\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n He vividly recorded the toll on the soldier\u2019s 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 \u2014 purportedly to secure the perimeter around the Danang airstrip essential to the safe passage of supplies and soldiers.<\/p>\n 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 Vietcong \u2014 guerrilla fighters supporting the Communist government in Hanoi \u2014 were experienced at warfare, and the periodic skirmishes were bloody, costing the lives of men to whom Mr. Caputo had grown close.<\/p>\n In one skirmish, the platoon encountered a hamlet, rife with Vietcong sympathizers, where an ambush had been set up.<\/p>\n \u201cThe marines are letting out high-pitched yells, like the old rebel yell, and throwing grenades and firing rifles into bomb shelters and dugouts,\u201d he wrote. \u201cPanic-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.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Caputo soon realizes that the destruction is not an act of madness but of retribution. \u201cThese villagers aided the V.C. and we taught them a lesson,\u201d he wrote, using the shorthand for Vietcong. \u201cWe are learning to hate.\u201d<\/p>\n After troops under his command intentionally shot two civilians suspected of having Vietcong loyalties, Mr. Caputo took responsibility for the killings and wrote that he was \u201calmost court-martialed\u201d<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n The book was a decade in the making. Its commercial success \u2014 it was turned into a 1980 two-part CBS mini-series starring Brad Davis<\/a> \u2014 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.<\/p>\n