The Class of Viet Nam

  

Phil Caputo died this week past.  The obituaries all led with A Rumor of War, which is fine, it’s a very good book, but he wrote a dozen more.  My personal favorite of his novels is the first, Horn of Africa, and of his combat journalism, Means of Escape.  He was, of course, a Marine veteran of Viet Nam, and he went back ten years later to cover the fall of Saigon.  I think it was Bogdanovich who said John Ford was the laureate of lost causes and last stands, but Phil Caputo knew the vanities of command and the fatigue of the battlefield as well as anybody, and over the years, he went to war in our place many times. 

There are, at last count, something like thirty thousand books written about the U.S. war in Viet Nam.  If you study it with any attention, you’re going to read Bernard Fall, and Frances Fitzgerald, and Neil Sheehan, for strategy and the political stakes, but I was thinking, when I learned Phil Caputo was dead, that there are in fact an essential few books that were written by guys who were there.  A Rumor of War is one; Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July; and the indispensable Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato, If I Die in a Combat Zone, The Things They Carried.  Michael Herr’s Dispatches – although he was a reporter, not a combat soldier - and Frank Snepp’s Decent Interval, Snepp not uniformed military either, but CIA counterintelligence, stationed in Saigon. 

We might call them the Class of Viet Nam.  They were roughly of an age, and roughly my age, Caputo a couple of years older, Tim O’Brien a year younger.  They were shaped by the common experience.  If you read their stories, you catch a glimpse of something seen at right angles, not just the loss of innocence, or adrenaline and endorphins, their immediate reaction to the threat environment, but something inward and unspoken.  These are kids, or not far removed, trying to understand their own natures, but they’re not at football practice, or working a summer job at the DQ, or trying to get bare tit in the back of a ‘60 Chevy.  This is a different ordering of the world.  And what they found there, what they weren’t equipped to reason with, was the random math, the arbitrary cost-benefit ratio, the fact that it didn’t make any difference to the plot who lived or who died, because it wasn’t their storyline.    

The other thing being, that each of these people – every one of whom wrote about it later, whether or not they recognized at the time that it would later become necessary to write about it - were engaged emotionally, and perhaps not entirely consciously, with the consequences of how they each individually managed their own lived experience.  I’m not going to pretend to their self-knowledge; they can speak perfectly well for themselves.  The point of Caputo’s book, or any of the others, though, is that they’re trying to articulate that experience to themselves.  The reader is bearing witness.

Caputo suggests some men are drawn to war.  Not all, of course, and not all of them men, either.  Martha Gellhorn comes to mind, Christiane Amanpour.  But for himself, Caputo admits to a fascination with the mechanics of war, the psychological disconnect, the cautious formalities, the price of a man’s ears.  He’s in a place of heightened awareness, but he seems at the same time detached.  We suspect he’s come too close, that he needs to regard war as theater, that if he invests his feelings, he’ll weaken. 

I may be full of baloney.  We can’t truly imagine ourselves into another man’s Furies, but perhaps he can try and tell us.  Caputo and those other guys who wrote about Viet Nam came back from the dead, and they did their best to tell us how it was on the far side of the curtain.