Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
In my mind this is one of the first really well-written books that describe the moral ambiguities and difficulties faced by a young Marine officer in this particular war, Vietnam.
Tell me about A Rumor of War.
Philip Caputo was a marine who later became a very well-known journalist. In my mind it’s one of the first really well-written books that describe the moral ambiguities and difficulties faced by a young marine officer in this particular war. Before that you had World War II when they took Iwo Jima and, OK, there was horrendous fighting, but it was much more clear-cut. Caputo was the first one to describe the terrible ambiguities. He got into trouble over something that happened, I can’t remember what, but he spoke very honestly about the difficult part of trying to be a man leading troops in combat in a difficult war.
Moral ambiguity sounds like a euphemism for something. Are you talking about atrocities?
No. I think it’s that there wasn’t the clear-cut good versus evil that you had in the Second World War. It wasn’t clear. We were involved in fighting the North Vietnamese, who weren’t nice! They committed terrible atrocities themselves. And we were involved in supporting a government, the South Vietnamese, and they weren’t nice and, obviously, getting thrown into the situation when it’s like – what really is going on here? And, quite frankly for my generation, when we were little boys in the 50s we were raised on the knights in shining armour idea – we’re going to go and defeat evil Nazis. Vietnam didn’t have that. That’s what I meant by the ambiguity. There were no white knights on either side any more.
That must have been terribly distressing.
It was difficult, yes. But what happens, and I think it’s important to understand that when you commit to something like joining the military these issues are important, but when you’re actually fighting you are no different from World War II soldiers. My own father was in Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge and my uncles fought in Italy and the Pacific and they all said that we didn’t think once about whooping fascism or anything of the sort. It was just: ‘How do we get out of this alive and help our friends get out of this alive and not let them down?’ It quickly boils down to those around you so there’s a point at which the issue of who’s the white knight disappears.
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Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes was a Rhodes Scholar and Yale graduate. He served as a Marine in Vietnam and was awarded two Purple Hearts, the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two navy commendation medals for valour and ten air medals. In 1977 he began writing his novel about his experience of combat in the jungle. The book ended up taking Marlantes 30 years to write while raising a family of five children and working full-time in the newly emergent field of energy consultancy both in the US and internationally.
