["A Rumor of War," Caputo's personal account of the Vietnam War, is] the true story of the transformation of one of "the knights of Camelot," whose "crusade" was Vietnam and whose cause could only be "noble and good" into a vindictive, desperate and chronically schizoid killer in a war he had come to realize was futile and evil. As Emerson put it, "the lengthened shadow of a man is history": Caputo would no doubt agree, for the course and character and damage of America's involvement was registered on his altered body, mind, nerves and spirit.

The causes and stages of his transformation form the spine of his narrative. It begins with Caputo's account of his summers at Quantico, where officer's training differed little from the fabled sadism of Marine boot camp. (p. 9)

With each month he appears to have more fury to burn, more moral numbness to account for in needlessly destroyed villages and hamlets. He wrestles with the mockeries of the "rules" of engagement…. He concludes that military ethics seemed to be a matter of killing people at long range with sophisticated weapons. But the actuality was the official American strategy of "organized butchery." In his final month of duty, the commander of his half-decimated company is offering a can of beer "and the time to drink it" for any enemy casualty.

Caputo's book is not as relentless as I am making it seem. It is not meant to be one long damning indictment, or an endless chronicle of demoralization and brutalization. There are the repeated accounts of the tender, unshakable loyalty and concern of men bonding together not just for survival but to preserve their humanity. There is their gentle behavior as well as brutal: Two grunts rubbing salve on a baby's jungle sores while their officer threatens to pistol-whip the uncooperative mother. There are the close, brilliant accounts of the exhilaration and tension of combat: the heightening of the senses and mind to a pitch of acuity. There is the almost "orgasmic" pleasure of leadership when Caputo's company responds perfectly under the stress of battle. There is the transcendent moment when Caputo's virus of fear disappears….

Indifferent to his own death, he is still ravaged by anxieties and deleriums of violence about his steadily dwindling company. When a village boy reports that he knows of two Vietcong in an adjacent but, and when nothing is done about it, Caputo frantically decides to snatch them. He sends in a team of his most reliable sharpshooters: "If they give you any problems, kill 'em." As he then admits, "In my heart I hoped Allen would find some excuse for killing them and Allen had read my heart." When the two bodies are duly brought in, one of them is the boy who gave the information.

What was Caputo's degree of guilt? By the time one reaches this culminating incident, we believe him when he says, "Something evil had been in me that night." One also believes him when he says, "The war in general and U.S. military policy in particular were ultimately to blame for the death of Le Du and Le Dung." One wants to see Caputo exonerated, as he was. For the ultimate effect of this book is to make the personal and the public responsibility merge into a nightmare of horror and waste experienced humanly by the Caputos and inhumanly by the politicians and generals. Out of the force of his obsession with the war and his role in it, Caputo has revealed the broken idealism and suppressed agony of America's involvement. "A Rumor of War" is the troubled conscience of America speaking passionately, truthfully, finally. (p. 21)

Theodore Solotaroff, "Memoirs for Memorial Day," in The New York Times Book Review, May 29, 1977, pp. 9, 21.