Phillip Caputo: The Vietnam War

The Vietnam war was one of the most controversial wars that the USA was in, citizens of the USA were outraged about the Vietnam war as the America sent 540,000 troops over to Vietnam killing many Vietnamease children and elderly. The Vietnam War started in 1954 and ended in 1973 which is the setting of the book. The war is completely relevant to the book as that is all the book is about. Phillip Caputo was in the Marine Corps to prove something to his parents. He wanted to do something that his family would most likely go against. Phillip Caputo was in the war, he was on the battlefield and he was on the frontlines during the war. The book depicts the terrible things that went on such as the many deaths he had to witness when his job
There were many conflicts in the story that Caputo had to deal with, one being his ethics. After seeing what napalm or other types of attacks do he became disattached from reality to the point that all he wanted was to die. “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.” This is an example of the things he saw out in Vietnam, this is what caused his pain and suffering. This was one of the biggest internal conflicts of the story saying that he had to go through that everyday which caused him lots of pain. “Ethics seemed to be a matter of distance and technology. You could never go wrong if you killed people at long range with sophisticated weapons.” This is just another example of the conflict of ethics. Ethics is one of the main things that Caputo had to deal with throughout the war, it is also one of the main issues citizens of the USA had with the