Chamblee54

PG was in a break room in Smyrna GA, reading A Rumor of War. On page 196, a sentence made him put the book down. “There were three corpses, but only five boots”.
There was a newspaper insert for J.C. Penney on the table. PG picked it up, began to study the picture on the front page. A woman was pushing a man back, with her finger over her mouth saying shhh. The man pushed back, with five boxes wrapped in red paper. The woman wore a man’s watch, which page had displayed for sale. Every element of every picture was gauged to sell merchandise.
Before long, PG was back to AROW. Lieutenant Caputo was working in an office. One of his jobs was the write reports on the casualties, American and Vietnamese. If there were more of their guys than our guys, we were winning.
Lieutenant Philip Caputo lived, and later wrote, A Rumor of War. He signed up to join the Marines when he was in college, when Vietnam was a trivia question. On March 8, 1965, he arrived in South Vietnam, near DaNang. Originally, his unit was supposed to guard the air base from a rumored Viet Cong attack. After a while, he was sent into action.
The second part of his Vietnam experience was when he was sent to work in a base office, away from the fighting. This ceased to be enjoyable when he knew one of the dead soldiers he wrote a report for. He requested a transfer back into the fighting, and got it. There were scenes of fighting the enemy, the jungle, and the weather. Caputo broke under pressure, and ordered a raid into a village. When some people in the village were killed, there was trouble, and Caputo was facing murder charges. That was cleared up, and Caputo was sent home.
War looks different to the men who are fighting. Vietnam was controversial while it was going on, and only slightly less so today. It is likely that all wars are as full of misunderstanding as this one.
Musings on Iraq has a quote about war. “Saddam Hussein looked down upon the United States’ military might, seeing it as a paper tiger. He saw the American defeat in Vietnam as a sign of its weakness. Saddam pointed out that the U.S. lost 58,000 soldiers in that war, and then gave up, while Iraq lost 51,000 in just one battle for the Fao Peninsula in the Iran-Iraq War.” This is from a country with 27 million people, fighting a land war with a next door neighbor.
Pictures are from The Library of Congress.