A Farewell to Arms
One of the indispensable features of Caputo's narrative [A Rumor of War] is that he is never less than honest, sometimes relentlessly so, about his feelings concerning the thrill of warfare and the intoxication of combat. At least in the beginning, before the madness. After sixteen months of bloody skirmishes and the ravages of disease and a hostile environment, after the psychological and emotional attrition, Caputo—who had begun "this splendid little war" in the jaunty high spirits of Prince Hal, was very close to emotional and physical collapse, a "moral casualty," convinced—and in 1966!—that the war was unwinnable and a disgrace to the flag under which he had fought to such a pitch of exhaustion.
There is a persuasive legitimacy in this hatred of a war when it is evoked by a man who has suffered its most horrible debauchments. But perhaps that is why we are equally persuaded by Caputo's insistence on a recognition that for many men, himself included, war and the confrontation with death can produce an emotion—a commingled exultation and anguish—that verges on rapture. It is like a mighty drug, certainly it approaches the transcendental. After becoming a civilian, Caputo was engaged for a long time in the antiwar movement. But, he says, "I would never be able to hate the war with anything like the undiluted passion of my friends in the movement." These friends, he implies, could never understand how for him the war "had been an experience as fascinating as it was repulsive, as exhilarating as it was sad, as tender as it was cruel." Some of Caputo's troubled, searching meditations on the love and hate of war, on fear, and the ambivalent discord that warfare can create in the hearts of decent men, are among the most eloquent I have read in modern literature. (p. 3)
What Philip Caputo demonstrates … in his ruthless testament is how the war in Vietnam defiled even its most harmless and well-meaning participants. His is the chronicle of men fighting with great bravery but forever losing ground in a kind of perplexed, insidious lassitude—learning too late that they were suffocating in a moral swamp. (p. 4)
Caputo writes brilliantly about … [the] early days around Danang, that period of eager expectation before the horrors descended and the war began to taste like something incessantly loathsome on his tongue. Even then, in that time of cautious waiting—a stationary war of skirmishes and patrols and skittish engagements with the Viet Cong—it was not pleasant duty, but after all this is what Caputo had bought and bargained for: the unspeakable heat and the mosquitoes, the incessant clouds of dust, the boredom, the chickenshit from upper echelons (often described with ferocious humor, in the spirit of Catch 22), the dreary nights on liberty in the ramshackle town, the impenetrably lush and sinister mountain range hovering over the flyblown domestic landscape, already smeared with American junk….
Boredom, inanition, a sitting war; drunken brawls in Danang, whores, more chickenshit, the seething lust for action. All this Caputo embroiders in fine detail—and then the action came in a powerful burst for Caputo and his comrades. Suddenly there were pitched engagements with the enemy. There were the first extended movements into enemy territory, the first helicopter assaults, the first real engagements under heavy fire, and, inevitably, the first shocking deaths. War became a reality for Caputo; it was no longer a film fantasy called The Halls of Montezuma, and there is great yet subtle power in Caputo's description of how—in this new kind of conflict, against a spectral enemy on a bizarre and jumbled terrain (so different from such textbook campaigns as Saipan or even Korea)—the underpinnings of his morale began to crumble, doubt bloomed, and the first cynical mistrust was implanted in his brain. These misgivings—which later became revulsion and disillusionment—did not arrive as the result of a single event but as an amalgam of various happenings, each one repellent, which Caputo (as well as the reader) begins to perceive as being embedded in the matrix of the war and its specifically evil nature….
In this book Philip Caputo writes so beautifully and honestly about both fear and courage, writes with such knowing certitude about death and men's confrontation with the abyss, that we cannot doubt for an instant that he is a brave man who fought well long after that "splendid little war" became an obscene nightmare in which he nearly drowned. But he was dragged downward, and indeed the most agonizing part of his chronicle is found not in the descriptions of carnage and battle—as harrowingly re-created as they are—but in his own savage denouement when, driven into a raging madness by the senseless devastation he has witnessed and participated in, he turns into a monster and commits that mythic Vietnam-stained crime: he allows the murder of civilians. Although he was ultimately exonerated, his deed became plainly a wound forever engrafted on his soul. It seems the inevitable climax to this powerful story of a decent man sunk into a dirty time, in a far place where he was never intended to be, in an evil war. (p. 6)
William Styron, "A Farewell to Arms," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXIV, No. 11, June 23, 1977, pp. 3-4, 6.
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