Philip Caputo Remembers His Idealism (1965)

On March 8, 1965, as a young infantry officer, I landed at Danang with a battalion of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, the first U.S. combat unit sent to Indochina.
For Americans who did not come of age in the early sixties, it may be hard to grasp what those years were like – the pride and overpowering  self assurance that prevailed. Most of the thirty-five hundred men in our brigade, born during or immediately after World War II, were shaped by that era, the age of Kennedy’s Camelot. We went overseas full of illusions, for which the intoxicating atmosphere of those years was as much to blame as our youth.

War is always attractive to young men who know nothing about it, but we had also been seduced into uniform by Kennedy’s challenge to ”ask what you can do for your country” and by the missionary idealism he had awakened in us. America seemed omnipotent then:  the country could still claim it had never lost a war, and we believed we were ordained to play cop to the Communists’ robber and spread our own political faith around the world.   Like the French soldiers of the late eighteenth century, we saw ourselves as the champions of “a cause that was destined to triumph.”  So, when we marched into the rice paddies on that damp March afternoon, we carried, along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions that the Viet Cong would be quickly beaten and that we were doing something altogether noble and good. We kept the packs and rifles;  the convictions, we lost.

The discovery that the men we had scorned as peasant guerrillas were, in fact, a lethal, determined enemy and the casualty lists that lengthened each week with nothing to show for the blood being spilled broke our early confidence. By autumn, what had begun as an adventurous expedition had turned into an exhausting, indecisive war of attrition in which we fought for no cause other than our own survival.

From A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo, excerpts from pp. xii-xx. Copyright 0 1977 by Philip Caputo.