Philip Caputo Analysis

War: Stories and Change

“It is said that our most evocative sense is the sense of smell, and after the names of the villages and the numbers and the dates have grown dim in your memory, the thing you can never forget about a battlefield is the smell.” – Philip Caputo The most evocative of senses, smell, keeps war alive in the minds of soldiers and those around them, and the smell of war is never a good one. It tramples over every fiber of one’s being, screaming that all the surroundings are evil and dirty. However, people who have never been to war cannot fathom the atrocities the nose confronts on the battlefield if they have not been told about them. People learn from stories. History is the story of the people in the world, science
In his coverage for that story, Caputo wrote of both the sights and sounds of war. But above all, he was affected by the smell of it. He wrote, “maps and the distant grumbling of shells and bombs told us we were miles from the front, but the wind was easterly and the stench it carried deceived us into thinking we were much closer” (Caputo). The stench made Caputo and the people he was with uneasy. The group was far from the real danger, but the smell said otherwise. After they turned a corner, they came across the source of the unsettling stench. It was an abandoned battlefield. There seemed to be thousands of corpses everywhere in various states of decomposition, and “their stink made [the group] gag and [their] eyes burn and wove itself into [their] clothes” (Caputo). They could not handle the raw smell of putrefying flesh, smoke, diesel, and burning tanks. However, that is the smell of war. It’s a shock to those who have never smelt it, and it is unpleasant for those who are used to it. Caputo writes, “I wish it could be bottled and the bottles placed on desks in the White House, the Capitol, the Washington think tanks, the editorial board rooms of magazines and newspapers.” Many have watched war films. They have seen what a battlefield looks like, but they have never smelt one. Once
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