Philip Caputo > Quotes

“Before you leave here, Sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War

“Directly overhead the Milky Way was as distinct as a highway across the sky. The constellations shown brilliantly, except the north, where they were blurred by the white sheets of the Aurora. Now shimmering like translucent curtains drawn over the windows of heaven, the northern lights suddenly streaked across a million miles of space to burst in silent explosions. Fountains of light, pale greens, reds, and yellows, showered the stars and geysered up to the center of the sky, where they pooled to form a multicolored sphere, a kind of mock sun that gave light but no heat, pulsing, flaring, and casting beams in all directions, horizon to horizon. Below, the wolves howled with midnight madness and the two young men stood in speechless awe. Even after the spectacle ended, the Aurora fading again to faint shimmer, they stood as silent and transfixed as the first human beings ever to behold the wonder of creation. Starkmann felt the diminishment that is not self-depreciation but humility; for what was he and what was Bonnie George? Flickers of consciousness imprisoned in lumps of dust; above them a sky ablaze with the Aurora, around them a wilderness where wolves sang savage arias to a frozen moon.”
― Philip Caputo, Indian Country: A Novel

“The essence of the Marine Corps experience, I decided, was pain.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War

“And men who do not expect to receive mercy eventually lose their inclination to grant it.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“Anyone who does not acknowledge the darkness in his nature will succumb to it...the lamp of conviction needs to be shaded by doubt, or it burns with a blinding light.”
― Phillip Caputo

“We had survived, but in war, a man does not have to be killed or wounded to become a casualty. His life, his sight, or limbs are not the only things he stands to lose.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War: The Classic Vietnam Memoir

“So I guess 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.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War: The Classic Vietnam Memoir

“Belief is a virus, and once it gets into you, its first order of business is to preserve itself, and the way it preserves itself is to keep you from having any doubts, and the way it keeps you from doubting is to blind you to the way things really are. Evidence contrary to the belief can be staring you straight in the face, and you won't see it... True believers just don't see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn't be true believers anymore.”
― Philip Caputo, Acts of Faith: A Novel

“I saw their living mouths moving in conversation and their dead mouths grinning the taut-drawn grins of corpses. Their living eyes I saw, and their dead eyes still-staring. Had it not been for the fear that I was going crazy, I would have found it an interesting experience, a trip such as no drug could possibly produce. Asleep and dreaming, I saw dead men living; awake, I saw living men dead.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War

“Ten days passed, ten days of total idleness. The novelty of our surroundings wore off and the battalion began to suffer from a spiritual disease called la cafard by the French soldiers when they were in Indochina. Its symptoms were occasional fits of depression combined with an inconquerable fatigue that made the simplest tasks, like shaving or cleaning a rifle, seem enormous. Its causes were obscure, but they had something to do with the unremitting heat, the lack of action, and the long days of staring at that alien landscape; a lovely landscape, yes, but after a while all that jungle green became as monotonous as the beige of the desert or the white of the Arctic.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War: The Classic Vietnam Memoir

“As a rule he had found it useful as well as prudent to trust his fellow man to do the right thing only when the wrong thing failed to present itself.”
― Philip Caputo, Acts of Faith: A Novel

“Two friends of mine died trying to save the corpses of their men from the battlefield. Such devotion, simple and selfless, the sentiment of belonging to each other, was the one decent thing we found in a conflict otherwise notable for its monstrosities.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“General Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition also had an important effect on our behavior. Our mission was not to win terrain or seize positions, but simply to kill: to kill Communists and to kill as many of them as possible. Stack ’em like cordwood. Victory was a high body-count, defeat a low kill-ratio, war a matter of arithmetic.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“The combination of exhaustion, anxiety, alcohol, and drugs had the inevitable effect: I had a nervous collapse and spent the next several days in the psychiatric ward of an East Coast hospital, drugged on Thorazine yet happy that no one could get to me.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“There was so much human suffering in these scenes that I could not respond to it.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War: The Classic Vietnam Memoir

“that the greatest happiness lies in living for others. The self and its appetites, the satisfaction of which only yields deeper hungers, are to the soul as mooring cables to an airship. To cut them willingly and without regret is to know true emancipation, the kind that cannot be granted by constitutions, proclamations, manifestos. Yes,”
― Philip Caputo, Acts of Faith

“Once in a while, I found flint arrowheads in the muddy creek bank. Looking at them, I would dream of that savage, heroic time and wish I had lived then, before America became a land of salesmen and shopping centers.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“Another thing I had learned in Vietnam was that there are worse things than death, such as not being able to look anyone straight in the eye, especially the man in the mirror.”
― Philip Caputo, Means Of Escape: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Life and Death in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Vietnam

“It is often said that Vietnam, with its quotidian cruelties and pointlessness broadcast on the nightly news, caused Americans to lose their innocence about war. I don’t deny that this is true. The immediate power of the moving image is well attested to. It does, however, call to mind a quip I once heard: “The Americans have lost their innocence, but don’t worry, they’ll find it soon.” The power of the written word has the capacity to counteract this tendency, a value of which broadcast television is at best less capable. It provides every reader with a permanent opportunity for a private encounter with the reality of experience. So perhaps someone reading this book, now or many years in the future, will encounter a passage about a wounded Marine with “the hurt, dumb eyes of a child who has been severely beaten and does not know why.” Or they will read about an experienced NCO’s assessment that “one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“No writer ever truly succeeds. The disparity between the work conceived and the work completed is always too great, and the writer merely achieves an acceptable level of failure.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“We left Vietnam peculiar creatures, with young shoulders that bore rather old heads.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“You can thank us by doing something serious with it”
― Philip Caputo, Hunter's Moon: A Novel in Stories

“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.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“As the citizens of a democracy, the noisy patriots and protestors had a right to their opinions about Vietnam but not, it seemed to me, to the smug righteousness with which they voiced them, because they hadn’t been there.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“The marines in our brigade were not innately cruel, but on landing at Danang they learned rather quickly that Vietnam was not a place where a man could expect much mercy if, say, he was taken prisoner. And men who do not expect to receive mercy eventually lose their inclination to grant it.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“The beaver dam had been constructed on the ruins of a man-made one, built by the CCC back in the thirties and later dynamited by an irate Finn who'd objected to the government's meddling with nature.”
― Philip Caputo, Indian Country: A Novel

“That is what I wanted, to find in a commonplace world a chance to live heroically. Having known nothing but security, comfort, and peace, I hungered for danger, challenges, and violence.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“Dog Soldier Raid at New Scandinavia—1869,”
― Philip Caputo, The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean

“with the great love of the unknown and vast dreams of dominion and power,”
― Philip Caputo, The Voyage: A Novel

“What finger-shaped Florida lacks in breadth it makes up for in length; Tallahassee is 480 miles from Miami (farther than New York City is from Cleveland).”
― Philip Caputo, The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean