The First Amendment; Vietnam

The First Amendment and the Free People Weekly examination of civil liberties in the media in the 1970s produced by WGBH radio Boston in cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University. The host of the program is the institute's director Dr. Bert it will be. My guest on this edition is Philip Caputo the author of a rumor of war originally published by Holt Rinehart and Winston in hardcover and now being published in soft cover. My valentine books. After leaving the Marine Corps 1967 Phil computer oh join the Chicago Tribune and 1072 was part of a team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting as the paper's wrong correspondent he moved on to the Middle East where his reporting of his experiences as a captive of the Palestinian guerrillas won him the Overseas Press Club George Polk citation returning to Saigon in 1975 Kapoor allowed other reporters to the front. That same year once again in Beirut he was wounded by machine gun

fire and returned to the United States. He is now working on a novel. Philip Caputo let me just start by saying this We have read every kind of polemic about the Vietnam War and every kind of history about the Vietnam War from all points of view. But your book a rumor of war and without building your lily is an extraordinary interpretation because it is like. The Red Badge of Courage. A story of a soldier's perspective on great events and also a basic story or study of psychology of human beings caught up in the vortex of fear and dismay and ideals that are crushed all around. The heat gets them the Flies get them and so on and so forth. Is that the way you see your own book. That's precisely why I couldn't phrase it any better myself. That

was the kind of book that I wanted to write the macrocosm of a large conflict as seen through the eyes of one soldier. I want to at the same time to get at those truths about the experience of war that are true of all wars and we're not just peculiar to Vietnam. The peculiarity though or the odd or the eccentric part of your own experience beginning 965 when you're a green fresh idealistic young Marine Corps lieutenant sent to Vietnam with a group of people going to what you called a splendid little war. And suddenly you find the heat oppressive the insects oppressive the fact that you are within a perimeter all the time and the enemy keeps coming in and out and you seem to be going nowhere at all oppressive. This really broke you down and broke you down rather quickly. Not only as individuals but as a group. Yes it did and I think that that was a unique aspect of the

Vietnam War or if not unique. Certainly a phenomenon that's found in few other wars I think some of those elements were found say in the South Pacific campaigns during World War Two. It seems to be a phenomenon that overcomes men at war in tropical climates but certainly there is there was a one I can only describe as a relentless assault on one's senses and on one's mental balance by almost everything in existence though as you just mentioned the weather the land itself the nature of the enemy the nature of the conflict the jungle and the leeches and the insects and everything just seemed designed to tear away all of the civilizing influences that had been built up for. An individual soldier is 19 or 20 years for however long he'd been alive and there was no support system to galvanize a reorientation. You are in

effect human beings the flesh in the blood and lots of hardware that once you are sent there with your hardware your guns and equipment it seemed that the government of the United States had no support system for you they didn't understand that you are all alone in a foreign terrain. No I I think that the disparity between the front line soldier and the men who are running the war in Washington was far greater than it was in any other conflict that I'm familiar with. When I think back out in fact I was thinking about it last night for some reason. I was sitting in my hotel restaurant and I was listening to a couple of professors from Harvard were having dinner in the same place and an esoteric I'd say yes and I remember that it was if you'll excuse my saying this here in Boston a number of Harvard or at least Ivy League academics who who were running the war and I said probably while we were all over there picking leeches off of

ourselves and being sniped at these gentlemen may have been up here sipping wine and having the same sort of chats as I heard last night and there was such there was a gulf that made the whole experience surreal to me when I look back on it. I can get the feel of what you went through without having shared. Thankfully the experiences because as a very young man I was in the Philippines getting into that same kind of heat inter poor and and and malaria infested kind of area. The thing though that I didn't share tool was. The the total isolation of the individual you had one point where the officer in charge of identifying the bodies going from one body to another I was particularly struck by a line or two of yours where you said that you were thankful you gave praise because the man was killed by concussion. You were so shocked at seeing dismembered bits and pieces that you were a man just

fell over dead from the concussion you were thankful. Well again it goes back to what I had said earlier that the assault on the senses. Doing that kind of gruesome work. I was I was I was pleased to see someone who had gotten killed and who was whose body was still intact even though you know death admits to no degrees as the old saying goes but somehow seen one body after another dead dismembered in such a way begin you begin to lose your whole concept of what a human being is. And yet when you refer to this period you look back on this period you are struck at least in your writings or the fact that your attitudes toward the war were not necessarily coincidental with war protesters on college campuses or middle class America's burgeoning protest over the years could you explain a little bit of the difference.

Well I think that. The main difference has to do with the emotional impact of an experience like combat has on someone you feel a disassociation with. Everyone who is not sharing that experience and even if you yourself feel that as I had at that time or not in the way that I could articulate to myself at that time but a disagreement with what's going on even if that disagreement is shared with you by someone in the States it's shared intellectually it's shared in the abstract but the emotional sharing is only experienced with other men who are going through what you're going through. This goes back also to the sort of isolation you talk about the one thing about the soldiers who fought in Vietnam. Vietnam was it was a sense of isolation not only from the men who had sent them over there or who were running the war but really from the country as a whole. We often had this feeling of really being just thrown out

on the edge of the earth and more or less told survive or don't survive and we don't care one way or the other. At one point you took command of a squad of a new company and you saw in the front ranks the men who had fallen from your old company and as a matter thank you dedicate this to two comrades who perished in 1065 Marines. SULLIVAN And Levy tell us a little bit why you did that dedication. Well first of all the Sergeant Sullivan he was the first man in the company I was with to be killed in action and his death was it was really a profound shock to all of us this was very early in the war. In fact I was with the 1st infantry battalion sent into Vietnam to Denning right. And we went in there with an awful lot of I call it illusory baggage. And one of which was that we also thought we were going to live forever and and

Sullivan's death can showed us that we weren't going to. Levy was a close friend of mine going back to when I was training in the States and I had always found him to be a rather civilized gentleman especially so in comparison to your average Marine It was a bit of a roughneck is sometimes a case of life imitating art. And I always thought that his death was such a terrible waste. His very bright young man and just he was just shot down by a sniper while trying to rescue someone else who had been wounded and unbeknown to him Kip. And these these two deaths haunted me for years and years and years afterward. Wally all he had to do was lie flat and he would have been saved you say but he got up just to look around you could drag a person who was already dead he didn't know that and then he soon as he raised himself

he was mowed down. He was shot. Another aspect of his book they're saying is very important because you were there at the start of the war and then you went back on a tour some many years later at the at the end of the war. You you give me the impression now as you do in the book. Be civilized in the very best sense. Discreet warm hearted concerned individual. And yet this book shows how you take such people and within a very short time they they fragmented their psyches are all shot up and they can do almost anything. Well I think that was the thing that had affected me probably the most in the war. Beyond all the deaths and everything else it was that someone like me would go into the Marines you go nowhere in a war

thinking that the the main question is courage and manly courage in the old sense of the term. Will I behave properly in in times of grave danger. And most men discover that they do behave properly in moments of extreme danger and they don't run away or anything else like that. What I didn't realize and I don't think what a lot of us realized is that war also poses a moral challenge to someone. Will I behave properly when surrounded by violence when violent impulses begin to rise up in me and my own case and in several other cases of which I guess me lie was the most blatant. We didn't behave so well because I don't think we really prepared for that we were all prepared for the other thing because from the day your grow up in this country was as a young man with going off to various sports like football and boxing What are you prepared to be brave and tough and all that but not really prepared to face extremely difficult moral choices and

under great stress. And I think that that kind of moral collapse I call it and the swiftness with which it took place disturbed me very much that and disturbed me very much now. Well you make me rather sometimes skeptical about the nature of human nature. You know we like to talk about our problems with the Nazis in World War Two and we like to separate ourselves from them but under certain conditions of stress when people come apart they do the macabre No. You described one situation in which one Marine was at the end of his wits or the end of his. Confidence level or whatever you want to say from a psychological viewpoint and he said to another fellow I I don't think you've got the guts to shoot me in the other one said don't you say I don't have the guts to shoot me and shot him dead.

Yes right. Without apparently without a second thought without a second thought and you yourself when you were when you had enough when you were fed up you described a situation where an old woman came into your operation and you wanted to question her and suddenly you found her. You found yourself slapping this well how hard was it watching the slap wanting to slap that was that at that point I had translated the impulse into action but. But I felt the urge because of a universe the sort of stubbornness with which she refused to answer questions and feel a frustration built in and I actually had almost an image a vision of myself taking my pistol out and cracking across the face and this these things seemed to arise out of a sort of a depth in one's nature that one wasn't aware of before that happen. So there's a line in Hamlet. Yes Shakespeare says we know what we are but we don't know what we will become and what we will become you describe your unit or a neighboring unit

going into a place a village and they just decided they had enough with this village and their recalcitrance and their phony answers and whatnot and they just leveled like the village here. When you went to Japan on a rest and recreation tour your only one I gather in this period in this period of 1065 when you were there you reflected and you spend a good deal of time in this book a rumor war upon those reflections. I'm sure you are reflecting now about the disparity between being on our radar and what's going on with your unit. Yeah give us a little of the background to that startling shock that you received in Japan. Well I guess it was it was the sudden removal from a really brutal and elemental existence too to civilization. And I recall this this feeling of.

Of being normal again of not being afraid of something all the time and of people going about an ordinary human commerce and all and at first I felt a bit disoriented by it all and then very pleased by it and so pleased by that I had thought about staying there about vanishing disappearing deserving In other words the course I couldn't state in the book the main reason was that. That one felt a loyalty to one's own men and comrades in greater than in a way the loyalty to oneself that I had always felt and still feel that in war the man who deserts his unit wore the charge sheet in the Uniform Code of Military Justice I believe read something the effect of did willfully desert his unit or deserted his commanding officer but in fact what really happens is is that he deserts the men alongside him

and it's a betrayal of them. As a man who was I think still steadfast to the code of the Marine Corps as being one we're ready to protect the country. And and torn up by your own experiences which I guess describes you as the average American now wondering where do we go from here. What are the political consequences now if I could take you away from your book where you didn't do anything or nothing much with the political consequences what runs through your mind. What did we learn from from the average size. And you're certainly not an average guy but the experience in the field. Well I think what I don't really could go back to the book and it's not so much a political question as it is an ethical one and that the great tragedy of the war and it was an act in the field was that we had gone in for what we regarded as a high moral purpose

to the point that we were even self-righteous about that and discovered that rather severe means were needed to bring this purpose into reality. And in fact I mean the means became increasingly severe to the point that they destroyed the very good that they were being committed in the name of and then finally the means to the end became the end. I think that that that's might be a bit of an academic or vague or abstract answer but I think that's the ultimate ethical question as far as a political one goes obviously I am. I guess what's incumbent upon a political leader is to and I don't think the current incumbent the White House is doing it is to define what the interests of his nation are in his time and then go on to defend them vigorously and to stay out of

those areas of conflict that are not in the nation's interest or very peripheral to them. I would say that that's that's the lesson to be learned from it politically. Is it possible also that. We could again go to war without understanding why or what or even where or how. I think so. There's a good deal of talk nowadays about the Vietnam trauma as it's called. And I think some people complain that the nation's political leadership has become paralyzed from all action by the disaster in Vietnam. But I think that this is going to fade a bit one of the one of the interesting experiences I I had was about a year ago during the height of the Panama Canal controversy. Then again there was talk about if the Panamanians tried to take the canal or sabotage it we'd send in X hundred thousand troops and put them down.

And I was talking to a young man of about 23 at the time who said in so many words I can't quote him exactly that he'd be quite willing to go. And it was as if Vietnam had happened a hundred years ago rather than just a couple of years ago. So I think it's quite possible that that will happen again. I hope it won't. So I say to Thompkins conversations with the missionary and rain seemed to apply generally as to you know what are we doing here and why are we here as a reporter. Did you carry the lessons of your own experiences in Vietnam will you become more discerning did it help you sharpen your insights into what was happening where you were in Syria or in the Middle East in general. I think so. I certainly understood. On the dark side of human behavior more than

I would have had I not been. I know that some things that I've seen in the Middle East again in Southeast Asia that would probably shock others didn't shock be quite as much because I had seen it happen before in Vietnam and I'd seen it happen or been committed by men from a sub society that's certainly more developed than the ones I was covering. I think that helped. Certainly I did a lot of war correspondents and so far just the sheer practicalities of covering a war and understanding what goes on in a war I knew a lot more about it than someone who had not been in the military. I read of volume of the reports by Hemingway when he was a young reporter. And through the years until he did for whom the bills to and so on. And I have the same feeling with you when you said that you were writing a novel that you are now rising

above a certain kind of reporting into a greater kind of truth. And you are not satisfied with with. Delivering the news for the AM's in the PMS. Is there some substance to my impression certainly in fact I mean this this book though nonfiction was it was an attempt to get at what you call those greater truths which are very seldom gotten that through daily journalism. There really is a difference between a couple ation of the facts what I call bulletin board journalism and the truth. The truth has to do with things that I guess the journalist can't report on with states of mind with emotions with motives or the reasons why people do things or fail to do things and simply becoming a recorder of events. I felt that I played my string out this book a rumor of war.

And I imagine now that it's in paperback you've already gotten lots of reaction to it what have been the reactions from people in the press or political people. Well let me just answer that by saying that the greatest reaction has been from the reading public I've gotten quite a few letters from veterans from families of veterans wives of veterans some cases people that had nothing to do with the war at all. And I was very pleased to see that all of these letters. Without one exception where I were very favorable I the press as far as the press went the book was reviewed very very favorably in most of the major newspapers and magazines with a couple of notable exceptions political leaders not very much I did get a letter from one of President Carter speechwriters who complimented me on the book and thought it was quite good. But

I say the closest thing after that was I got I've gotten a letter from a former Well I guess you would still call him General James Gavin who who thought it was a very good book on war and he thought it was one of the better or best. I think he said the descriptions of an infantry man's experience that he had read. He's one of the more intellectual of the former military leaders. Is he right. Oh I think so and I think he's much more attuned to that sort of thing than our military leaders tend to be you know technicians rather than you know more well-rounded men like Gavin or in some cases like some European generals. Were aware of the human factor more than I think ours are. The Marine Corps from 1965 to this particular moment have stressed the physical fitness and becoming a Marine. Breaking down your civilian psychology in boot

camp and so on and so forth. How have the Marine Corps leaders learned the lessons of your experience that you're reporting a rumor or have they learned that human beings are not automatons. I rather doubt it. The characteristic of the Marine Corps as you probably know is one of a kind of iron almost Prussian sort of disapproval instructor. Right and that's what it's a paradox. In a way that's very deep human ising. It also tends to make. High ranking leaders say Colonel and above in general is rather arrogant or disdainful of the men who have to carry the orders out. But the paradox comes in in moments of extreme stress it seems that that only that iron discipline gets the job done. The battle of Tora was an example of which I studied rather closely the number of

observers of that battle had been astounded by the way the Marines had waded ashore under severe fire in water that was too deep for them to wade in and what many were being drowned that they kept their formation when it took the island so what's what does that say what that says is that that discipline is a good if what one is struggling against is as I have to oversimplify this is an evil. But it means that that the war in which one is involved that the moral choice of it has to be made by the political leaders. Really when you look at other books about the war what do you find most interesting who writes about the war and the experience that most closely coincide with your own interpretations. I've identified most closely with has been Michael Herr's dispatches. That's very interesting. Then there was a another novel that came out at the same time as my book called close quarters with which I doubt if I closely and I'm now reading a book by a novelist named Tim O'Brien

called going after catch Iago which is a blending of real ism and surrealism a fantasy in fact which at first I had thought to be a bit of a gimmick and a trick but now the more I read it the more I see that he's he's getting at a truth about war that that pretty close to my perception of it. Well I'll end this interview by saying that the Red Badge of Courage my crane deserves to be placed on the same shelf with this book. Again I will say that we're only interested in intellect on this program and what intellect can do to bring the truth to enhance the First Amendment. I think you are a major American writer. I think that you ought to be read by people who never read best sellers and I think you tell us something very fundamental and I thank you to look at beautiful writing. The rumor of war for this edition Bernard Reuben. The First Amendment and a free people weekly examination of civil liberties and the media

uniting several of the program is produced in cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University. I w GBH radio Boston which is solely responsible for its cartoon. This is the station program exchange.