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Unable to communicate with Tribune editors as they evacuated Vietnam, Tribune foreign correspondents Ronald Yates and Philip Caputo messaged to say, “All okay,” on April 30, 1975. (Chicago Tribune)<\/p>\nPhilip Caputo was a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune before going on to pen best-selling books, including his acclaimed 1977 memoir, \u201cA Rumor of War,\u201d which laid bare his searing experiences as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps in Vietnam near the start of the Vietnam War.\n<\/p>\n
The book, which sold more than 1.5 million copies and has been published in 15 languages, provided readers with one officer\u2019s raw insight into the mindsets of Marines during the United States\u2019 protracted involvement in Southeast Asia, and it has become widely considered a classic.<\/p>\n
Caputo subsequently published numerous other novels, including ones that continually returned to aspects of the Vietnam War and its harrowing after-effects.<\/p>\n
\u201cPhil was always very intent on being a writer, and he was a very good writer,\u201d said former Tribune investigative reporter and assistant city editor William Currie. \u201cAs far as being a war correspondent and a foreign correspondent, he was top-notch.\u201d<\/p>\n
Caputo, 84, died of complications of esophageal cancer on May 7 at his home in Norwalk, Connecticut, said his son Marc Caputo, a White House reporter for Axios.<\/p>\n
Phil Caputo, who also had a home in Patagonia, Arizona, previously had bladder cancer and prostate cancer and also had been dealing with Parkinson\u2019s disease.<\/p>\n
Philip Joseph Caputo was born in Chicago and lived with his family in Chicago and Berwyn before moving to a home on Suffolk Avenue in Westchester.<\/p>\n
After attending Fenwick High School in Oak Park, he attended Purdue University before leaving school. He got a bachelor\u2019s degree in English from Loyola University Chicago in 1964.<\/p>\n
In his late teens, Caputo began freelance fiction writing. He had a desire \u2014 owing to a fairly conventional suburban upbringing \u2014 to explore, and to write about it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a simple malady in my boyhood, easily diagnosed,\u201d Caputo wrote in a memoir, \u201cMeans of Escape.\u201d\u00a0\u201cI wanted to wander the great world.\u201d<\/p>\n
From 1964 until 1967, Caputo served in the Marine Corps \u2014 including 15 months in Vietnam \u2014 where he was recommended for a court martial before the charges against him were dropped.<\/p>\n
In \u201cA Rumor of War,\u201d the incident was described in detail as being rooted in pressure from higher-ups to produce high body counts of enemies. Caputo authorized the killing of two Vietnamese villagers, one of whom turns out to have been a U.S. informant.<\/p>\n
In 1967, Caputo hitchhiked around the U.S., Mexico and Europe before taking a job as an assistant sales promotion manager for National Advertising Co., a subsidiary of 3M Co. in Chicago.<\/p>\n
He then joined the Tribune\u2019s suburban reporting staff in June 1968. In Caputo\u2019s earliest years at the paper, he covered local goings-on in the near west suburbs for the Trib, a suburban edition that was delivered three times a week.<\/p>\n
He soon was promoted to be a general assignment reporter in Chicago and then was made an original member of the Tribune\u2019s investigative reporting task force.<\/p>\n
Caputo also showed signs of his future fame with a June 1970 Tribune Sunday magazine article about the landing of the first American soldiers at Da Nang, Vietnam, in early 1965.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy December of 1965, the \u2018splendid little war\u2019 had degenerated into that purposeless blood-letting, the war of attrition,\u201d Caputo wrote in the story.\u00a0\u201cWe found ourselves fighting for no cause other than our own survival.\u00a0And to survive, we often were as ruthless as those who sought to destroy us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Retired Tribune reporter William Mullen, who later served on an investigative task force with Caputo, recalled that Sunday magazine article.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was so terrific. I took him out to lunch and said, \u2018Good Lord, you should have written that for The New Yorker,\u2019\u201d Mullen said. \u201cThat got him thinking maybe he should write something more about Vietnam. He was always a swashbuckler. He was an impressive guy, full of drama, and he was a wonderful writer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unable to communicate with Tribune editors as they evacuated Vietnam, Tribune foreign correspondents Ronald Yates and Philip Caputo messaged to say, “All okay,” on April 30, 1975. (Chicago Tribune)<\/p>\n
In 1973, Caputo was part of a five-person investigative reporting team that won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for its investigation of Chicago\u2019s scandal-ridden primary election in March 1972.<\/p>\n
He was part of the award-winning reporting task force, along with Currie, Mullen, George Bliss and Pamela Zekman, that examined lists of registered voters in precincts that had had a history of fictional registrants, known as ghost voters.<\/p>\n
The task force mailed more than 5,400 registered letters to suspected ghost voters to see how many letters were returned because addressees had moved, had never lived at the voting addresses in question or were dead. Task force members then went undercover, taking jobs as poll workers and election judges in precincts with reputations for corruption-ridden elections.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, the team\u2019s work resulted in uncovering documentary evidence of more than 1,000 incidents of ghost voting, forgery and other forms of vote fraud.\u00a0That led to a federal investigation indicting 79 election judges and precinct captains, nearly all of whom pleaded guilty.<\/p>\n
A May 1973 Tribune article about the Pulitzer Prize noted that Caputo, along with Currie and Zekman, had played major roles in the campaign to expose vote fraud, under Bliss\u2019 guidance.<\/p>\n
In November 1972, Caputo was assigned to the Tribune\u2019s Rome bureau, from which he covered the Arab-Israeli war. He was the first American correspondent to reach the banks of the Suez Canal after the war started in October 1973, and the Tribune awarded him an Edward Scott Beck Award in December 1973 for his foreign news reporting.<\/p>\n
In November 1974, Caputo transferred to Beirut, Lebanon, to serve as the Tribune\u2019s Middle East correspondent, and he ventured to Vietnam in 1975 to cover the fall of Saigon.<\/p>\n
Caputo\u2019s work as a foreign correspondent came with hazards. In May 1973, he was seized on the road to the airport in Beirut by the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and held prisoner in the outskirts of Beirut. He was released after five days and wrote a six-part series, \u201cPrisoner of the Fedayeen,\u201d about his captivity.<\/p>\n
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Chicago Tribune correspandent Philip Caputo, left, with his driver Zuhair Fakhreddine after their release from five days of captivity in a Palestinian guerrilla camp near Beirut. (AP)<\/p>\n
Amid a civil war in Lebanon between gunmen representing Christian and Muslim residents of the country, Caputo was shot in both feet by anti-Western militia members of the Nasserite faction in Beirut in October 1975 after leaving the Reuters news agency office in Beirut, where he had just filed a story. He eventually recovered from his injuries.<\/p>\n
Caputo became the Tribune\u2019s Moscow correspondent in 1976.\u00a0\u00a0He left the paper the following year to become a freelance writer. That year, Caputo published \u201cA Rumor of War,\u201d conveying in raw fashion both the meaning of the Vietnam War and his generation\u2019s disenchantment with the war.<\/p>\n
In the book, Caputo\u2019s initial pride and arrogance soon give way to a more contemplative spirit, followed by degeneration. Having faced direct hostile fire, he wrote: \u201cFor the first time in my life, I had the experience of being shot at by someone who was trying to kill me specifically. It was not horrifying or terrifying or any of the things it is supposed to be. Rather, it was perplexing. My first reaction, rooted in the illusion that anyone trying to kill me must have a personal motive, was: \u2018Why does he want to kill me? What did I ever do to him?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
From there, Caputo writes, Marines once bearing pride and discipline descended to depths seemingly unimagined, including cutting off the ears of a dead enemy combatant and proposing to parachute into Laos to slaughter members of the Viet Cong on their way back to Da Nang.<\/p>\n
In a May 1977 piece in the Tribune, reviewer James Park Sloan wrote that \u201cA Rumor of War\u201d was \u201csimply the finest and most accurate piece of narrative on the Viet Nam War. This is what it was like to be in Viet Nam. Blessed (or cursed) with a memory that censors nothing, Caputo has written of Viet Nam for all those who were there.\u201d<\/p>\n
The book was adapted into a two-part miniseries for CBS in 1980. In 1991, former New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury wrote in the Tribune that \u201cA Rumor of War\u201d captured the Vietnam War\u2019s agony, heroism and trauma \u201cwith so sure a hand it evoked comparisons with such Great War fiction as Stephen Crane\u2019s \u2018The Red Badge of Courage\u2019 and Ernest Hemingway\u2019s \u2018A Farewell to Arms.’\u201d<\/p>\n
In the late 1970s, the Tribune\u2019s Mullen arranged a meeting in Chicago between Caputo and a friend of Mullen\u2019s, Vietnam veteran and author Ron Kovic, whose memoir \u201cBorn on the Fourth of July\u201d became a bestseller and eventually a film. Though the men had distinctly different temperaments, Mullen said, \u201cThe camaraderie of two Marine combat veterans who had experienced the horrors of war was instantaneous, plus they shared the unique experience of becoming famous authors.\u201d<\/p>\n
Caputo wrote two other memoirs: \u201cMeans of Escape\u201d in 1991 and \u201cThe Longest Road<\/a>\u201d in 2013. He wrote four nonfiction books, including \u201c13 Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings\u201d in 2005, and 12 fiction books.<\/p>\n![\""The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/ctc-88360759.jpg\")
“The Longest Road,” by Philip Caputo, July 2013. (Bill Hogan\/Chicago Tribune)<\/p>\n