Philip Caputo mainly explains his motivation to attend the Vietnam War and his experience of being trained to be a lieutenant both in school and in real fights. He was to a large extent swayed by Kennedy’s patriotic propaganda—“ask what you can do for your country,” combined with an urge to prove his courage, toughness and manhood. Instead of returning home regarded as “an irresponsible boy” by his parents, he determined to join the Marines Corps. He said, “By the time the battalion left for Vietnam, I was ready to die for considerably less, for a few favorable remarks in a fitness report.”
It’s quite understandable for a 20-something man to join the military to prove his masculinity and patriotism, but shocking to hear “Anyone who fought in Vietnam, if he is honest about himself, will have to admit he enjoyed the compelling attractiveness of combat.” As searching deeper into the book, I found out that Caputo actually had a complicated and mixed feelings toward the war. For one thing, he found it hard to resist the thrill of war that activated his every cell and sense; for another, commensurable fear and torments inflicted on him, physically and psychologically, which exhausted his strength and drained his conscience. It seems that there’s nothing better than war for men to unleash their inherent power to destroy. With keen observance, Caputo also noticed that the Vietnam War was “a peculiar war” mixed with “the paradoxical kindness-and-cruelty.” They caressed Vietnamese infants with the same hand they used to kill millions.
Although there abound numerous examples attesting to the crimes American troops committed and thus the cruelty and inhumanity of the American soldiers, we should not forget that they themselves were also victims of the war, the propaganda, the politics behind and the hindsight—“It was a disaster. I wish we have understood more clearly and done less in the Vietnam War,” said McGeorge Bundy, the director of Vietnamese affairs at that time. Eight years of killing, millions of casualties, and thousands of broken families only to arrive at this “I wish…” Even though we know now how absurd the Vietnam War is viewed now, I still highly doubt that the U.S. would cease the track to wade into wars abroad—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and the list can go on in the future. According to Caputo, because of the unexplainable happiness a man felt in the war, “every generation is doomed to fight its war, to endure the same old experiences, suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.”
The chant of war never ends, no matter how feeble and ridiculous it may seem.
