What can be said? This is the hardest review I have ever had to write. Okay: there are three options. I can hang it up now, at sentence four. Or I can tell you that A Rumor of War is the most daunting and significant personal account yet generated by our great dishonor, Vietnam—which Rumor is: full stop: no qualifications—and end my assessment, my responsibility, there. Yes, but would that be enough? Would you read it? Oh, I’d like to have authority over your life. For just this moment. To hit you across the mouth, take your first-born child, invalidate your credit cards, whatever, if you don’t read A Rumor of War. Now. I am that sick with passion for this book.
Or, option three, I can tell you what happened to Marine Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo in Vietnam. My review might then astonish you—but never as the book would astonish. Because its force depends on a slow acceptance: an acceptance, by you, of Lieutenant Caputo —half fearful soldier, half courageous soldier; half cynical, half enthusiastic —and, after three hundred pages, you will accept. Caputo is brash, intelligent, attractive, human: bitterly honest. I was friends-at-war with him. And, having made that choice, I had to pick up the tab for those last, terrible fifty pages. No way out. We are known by the company we keep. They haven’t been previewed, those last fifty, in Holt, Rinehart’s jacket blurb: for that reason. I’m a writer: I can’t give Caputo’s ending away. Its 60-mm shock is too important: not just for the reader: for the whole damned nation. So my account of Caputo’s account will have to be a eunuchoid thing. A groping, stupid thing. I don’t know how else to handle it.
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