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A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo During all my years of opposition to the United States war in Vietnam, I always knew that my cause, the cause of an antiwar activist on the home front, and that of the American soldiers in Vietnam were one and the same. It was in all of our interests to end the violence that was destroying both American ideals and American lives. But not until I read A Rumor of War did I fully understand how similar our antiwar convictions were and how parallel our journey to those convictions had been. Philip Caputo's account of a soldier's life in Vietnam taught me that whether we fought in Vietnam or not, the generation of 1960s shared a common experience. We all had been inspired by the words of John Kennedy into believing in the nobility of personal sacrifice, enticed into thinking that Americans should make that sacrifice in order to remake the world in our own image, and shocked into recognizing that each nation in the world has its own values and so has no desire to adopt ours. Caputo concludes that every generation is doomed to experience the loss of its illusions. A Rumor of War reminds us all that in Vietnam that the patriotic idealism of my generation was sacrificed and the doctrines that would guide future generations defined. -- Stephen Maizlish |
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