Caputo's Military Career

Caputo began his formal service as a lieutenant in command of a reave platoon stationed in Okinawa, Japan. He recounts that his tenure on the base "did not fulfill" his "ever romantic" view of military action (31). In fact much of his duty seemed completely banal. Caputo describes how most(prenominal) senior officeh obsoleteers "had a reverence for the formalities of military bureaucracy" that extended to nearly laughable extremes (31). He describes being rebuked by a senior officer for using a macabre pen to fill out paperwork when regulations expressly stipulated black ink for all official documents (31). Later, at a staging point, the officers' statistical regression on seemingly unimportant details took on an virtually Helleresque absurdity. Caputo describes being ordered to mark the center of gravity on a set of military vehicles. When he asks the supervising officer how to find the center of gravity, the officer tells him that the center of gravity is all the way mark (49).

When Caputo does finally enter combat, he experiences a marked disappointment. He and his compevery spent several weeks in a makeshift base before their first engagement. With the constant bring to realign the position of defense encampments, the warfare took on the characteristics of " coerce labor" (60). The sporadic gunfire around his position seemed resonating of "disconnected firefights" as opposed to an organized "battle" (62). after(prenominal) his company's first extended mission, Caputo and his men returned to their ba

se "wondering if we had accomplished anything, suspecting that we had not" (94).

The war had started to renew Caputo's romanticism with a harsh realism, especially as he began to experience the horrors of combat-a soldier proudly displaying a set of benignant ears as a trophy and another torturing an old woman sabotaging a potential helicopter landing send (67, 90). His initial encounter with combat led him to conclude that the passage of arms in Vietnam was a "phony war" (65).

We fought a formless war against a formless enemy who evaporated like the morn jungle mists only to materialize in some unforeseen place...most of the time nothing happened, but when something did, it happened instantaneously (97).

Later experiences would digest this idea. For Caputo, the war appeared as a series of repeated uneventful patrols punctuated by sudden unexpected outbursts of violence.

The reality of the Vietnam War chop-chop subsumed all of Phillip Caputo's romantic notions about the conflict and war as a whole. After his honorable discharge, he had become unsure about the conflict where he was "both opposed to the war and emotionally tied to it" (342). His position is understandable. The horrors he witnessed would make any sane individual op
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