The first memoir of the Vietnam War and an all-time classic of war literature
|40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION|
In March 1965, Marine Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo landed in Danang with the first ground combat unit committed to fight in Vietnam. Sixteen months later, having served on the line in one of modern history's ugliest wars, he returned home - physically whole but emotionally destroyed, his youthful idealism shattered.
A decade later, having reported first-hand the very final hours of the war, Caputo sat down to write โsimply a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to themโ. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest war memoirs of all time.
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โA singular and marvellous work โ a soldierโs-eye account that tells us, as no other book that I can think of has done, what it was actually like to be fighting in this hellish jungleโ The New York Times
โUnparalleled in its honesty, unapologetic in its candour and singular in its insights into the minds and hearts of men in combat, this book is as powerful to read today as the day it was published in 1977. Caputo has more than earned his place beside Sassoon, Owen, Vonnegut, and Hellerโ Kevin Powers
โTo call this the best book about Vietnam is to trivialize it. A Rumour of War is a dangerous and even subversive book, the first to insist that readers asks themselves the questions: How would I have acted? To what lengths would I have gone to survive? A terrifying book, it will make the strongest among us weepโ Los Angeles Times Book Review
โCaputoโs troubled, searching meditations on the love and the hate of war, on fear and the ambivalent discord warfare can create in the hearts of decent men are amongst the most eloquent I have read in modern literatureโ New York Review of Books
โSuperb. At times it is hard to remember that this is not a novelโ New Statesman