Remembering Philip Caputo, who wrote an unflinching Vietnam War memoir

This is Fresh Air, I'm David Biancoley. One of the most unflinching and acclaimed memoirs of the Vietnam War was about a young lieutenant, one of the first Americans to fight in the war, leading a marine platoon through the jungle. A rumor of war was written by Philip Caputo, who died last week at the age of 84. In reviewing the book in 1977, John Gregory Dunn described it as, quote, heartbreaking, terrifying, and enraging. It belongs to the literature of men at war, unquote.

The book became a bestseller and was adapted into a TV miniseries. After the war, Caputo became a journalist and was part of the Chicago Tribune Pulitzer Prize winning team that uncovered violations of voting procedures in a March 1972 primary. While a foreign correspondent in Lebanon during their civil war, he was captured by Palestinian militants and held for a week. Later, in another incident, he was shot multiple times by a different group of militants in Beirut. He returned to the States, and during convalescence for his injuries, he wrote a rumor of war.

Caputo went on to write two other memoirs, ten novels, two short story collections, and four works of nonfiction. His love of adventure is detailed in an obituary on his website which reads Caputo caught a leviathan sized marlin off Cuba's shores, hunted big game in Africa, roughed it in Australia's outback, cast fly lines in the world's oceans and streams from Alaska to New England, and read books as voraciously as he wrote them. We're going to listen to Terry's 2005 interview with Philip Caputo. At the time he had written the novel Acts of Faith, set in war torn Sudan about aid workers and missionaries there.

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