Marine Lt. Philip Caputo landed at Da Nang in 1965 with the first U.S. ground combat unit committed to fight in Vietnam. After a 16-month tour of duty, he returned home, though he was later to return to Vietnam as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, eventually covering the fall of Saigon in 1975. As he put it: "I was with the first American combat unit sent to the war ... then I was among the last Americans to be evacuated from the place." Caputo is the author of "A Rumor of War," a highly acclaimed memoir of his experiences in Vietnam. He was interviewed for the COLD WAR series in June 1996.

On landing in Vietnam with the U.S. Marines in 1965:

Our expectations were, we were going to stay there a month to 90 days, help the South Vietnamese recover, and then we would get out. And sometime -- I don't know if it was right then, the day of the landing -- but sometime later on we got this idea that the United States was invincible. Not unjustifiable, we thought, because we'd never lost a single war we'd ever fought. I think we'd fought 12 or 13 wars before then and we'd won every one, including the one against ourselves.

I can remember one of my squad leaders, when we were leaving our base in Okinawa to go down to the airfield to get on the plane to take us to Vietnam, and he said: "Hot damn, Vietnam." We were all kind of hot to go, hot to get into something -- do something that was other than train and drill. And there was a kind of feeling -- I don't know if anybody ever said this -- a sort of feeling that, being U.S. Marines, our mere presence in Vietnam was going to terrify the enemy into quitting.

Our general expectations were, I think, [that] we were going to be there 30 to 90 days, something like that. So 10 years later that certainly proved to be incorrect.

On his first impressions of Vietnam:

It was the astonishing heat, the incredible and exotic beauty of the country, and that it didn't look as I imagined a nation at war should look: it didn't have those black-and-white flickering World War II images of bomb craters and barbed wire all over the place, although there was certainly barbed wire and shell craters. But it was actually kind of pacific-looking when we landed there, although the plane that I was in, a C-130 transport, actually took ground fire when we came in: We had four holes in the wings.

And as the weeks rolled on, we began to wonder what we were doing there at all. The most action that I think we saw for the first month or six weeks were a few sniping incidents. I did have a corporal who stepped on a booby-trap and lost part of his foot; and we ran a couple of small-scale patrols into the villages immediately surrounding the airfield; and every now and then you'd hear mortar fire thumping in the distance. But it seemed as though we weren't really necessary at that time. At least, as I say, for the first month or six weeks.

On his first experiences in combat:

After this month or six-week period passed we were given a change in operational orders, moving from a purely static defensive posture to a more active defense -- which meant helicoptering out into the bush or walking out into the bush on patrols or on small-scale ... operations. And then one began to get an idea of how different this conflict was from those others Americans had fought in and how difficult it was going to be.

I can remember one of those very first patrols that I was on, taking something like eight or nine hours to move my platoon a kilometer through this swamp and this dense jungle -- [a] bamboo forest that we were hacking at with machetes -- and actually almost losing a squad leader of mine in something like quicksand. I remember he took a step and he disappeared up to his neck in mud, and we were just able to pull him out before he went in completely.

I would say that initially the terrain and the climate and the attendant diseases were more of an adversary than the Viet Cong were. I mean, we had ... God, there was one patrol we were in and we took one single casualty from enemy action (and quite a minor one, literally a flesh bullet wound in the hand) and 33 casualties or some number like that from heat exhaustion and heat stroke. It was 117 degrees that day and we were lumbering out there with 30- and 40-pound packs, 20-pound flak jackets and another 10 to 20 pounds of rifles and ammunition. You can imagine what effect that's going to have [on] people who are sort of accustomed to temperate climates.

There was a strain of malaria over there that the malaria pills were not very effective against ... and another [illness] that we used to called "F-U-O," which meant ... "fever unknown origin." It wasn't very serious but it would put people out of action for a day or two days or three. ...

Sometime around September of 1965, when the monsoon set in -- and what happened then was that with the coming of the rainy season, that suppressed our ... 100 percent air superiority; [the rains] kept the helicopters and the jet fighter bombers down --- the Viet Cong were able to move about with greater freedom. And so they began an offensive during the monsoon season of 1965 and the weather, the heat, was like something none of us had ever experienced before. I mean, it would rain 24 hours a day for a week, two weeks, sometimes three at a time. You were constantly drenched, and now you had people out of action with "immersion foot" or "trench foot," as it used to be called. Running the patrol was extremely difficult, because half the time you were swimming rather than walking. And casualties began to get somewhat serious, without any kind of compensation in the sense that you saw that you were accomplishing something. ...

In a three-month period, out of about a thousand men, [my] battalion had 440 casualties -- which by World War II standards, over that amount of time, wasn't very much -- but you weren't achieving anything. You were just constantly walking out over the same ground and the enemy that you were supposed to be defeating statistically kept coming back for more and kept inflicting more casualties. ...

On fighting a guerrilla war:

As soon as we began to go on these more offensive operations, we were pretty much told, "What you're supposed to [do is] go up there, just kill the enemy." That was it. ... "We can't gain ground here, we can't gain and hold ground here; we've just got to kill more of them than they can withstand." A war of attrition. And so the gauge of that of course became the number that you killed.

And then the problem with that was that [with] so many of their forces, especially in those early days, being insurgents, they were often indistinguishable from the general population out there. So how do you distinguish a civilian from a Viet Cong? Well, of course he shoots at you or he's armed. But how about what happens after a firefight and you find bodies out there, but no weapons? And we were told ... "Well, if it's dead and Vietnamese, it's VC." Those were the exact words. So I'm quite sure that out of those rather impressive statistics, although they did suffer casualties I think that no Western army would have ever tolerated, a lot of those statistics were civilians. I'm sure of it. ...

We required this kind of instant hair-trigger alertness ... and this sense of suspicion would develop. I mean, it got to a point where outside of certain areas, you simply trusted absolutely no one. I mean, from a 5-year-old kid to a 75-year-old woman; I mean ... you never did see people in between those age groups too much, because if they hadn't been drafted into the South Vietnamese Army, they were off fighting with the Viet Cong. But you didn't and couldn't really trust them. [That] doesn't mean that you went and summarily shot them or something, or took them prisoner, but you did develop this intense suspicion. You were constantly watching them, and that got to be kind of wearing after a while.

I remember one time I made something of a fool of myself. I [was] running a patrol back from an area of particularly hostile villages, where we had been in a pretty hot firefight and actually killed three North Vietnamese regulars in this scrap. And well, about [a] couple of kilometers away from this village, [as] we were getting back closer to a friendly area, I saw this [thing that] looked like a line or a rope or a jungle vine across the trail. And my immediate thought was: booby trap.

And this old Vietnamese woman came out of the village and I backed everybody off and I took my pistol out and I told her, I said: "You pick [it] up." And I backed off myself. I said, "You pick up that vine." And she looked at me and made some kind of comment and picked up the vine and then started laughing at me. You know, I felt like a complete fool, but that's how your suspicion grew after awhile.

On the enemy:

Their fighting spirit did impress me. I'll say that the local guerrillas and even some of the main force units were absolutely -- even without air power, without artillery, just one to one, man-to-man so to speak -- were no match for us. We were much better than they were. But when you got up a level there, their fighting spirit and morale and abilities I think were quite impressive. We used to having a saying. You know the [letters] "VC" [stood for Viet Cong]; the military radio call sign for that is "Victor Charlie," so his nickname became Charlie to us. And we used to say that he's Charlie to you before you fight him, and he's Mr. Charles afterward.

On his worst moments in Vietnam:

I remember [one] night dug in outside this village where we'd had this firefight, and we weren't really dug in -- there wasn't really time. And if you've ever tried to dig a fox hole in this clay -- that's all I can describe it as, it was next to solid -- and I guess 120 mm mortars started to fall near us, and all I can remember was hearing this awful sound before those shells hit. Just before they hit they'd make a noise that sounded like a mill-saw going through a log, and then these rending explosions and the shrapnel just pinging overhead and we were down in these little trenches.

We ran into an ambush as we came back. ... A guy right behind me was hit in the back of the neck [but] I didn't get hit. My flak jacket got shredded in the back and I had one sergeant with his leg all shot to pieces; another guy with his chest blown in, breathing blood out of his mouth; one of my machine gunners was lying there, somehow conscious and talking, with his arm hanging by a single tendon half the width of my little finger. And all of this in this tremendous monsoon downpour, and in a flooded rice paddy with bamboo crates, poisonous [snakes] swimming around through the whole damned thing, you know.

I guess the next worst was a helicopter assault against the North Vietnamese regiment of regulars. As we were coming in, the landing zone was hot and under 60- and 80-mm mortar fire, and being swept by machine fire. And almost our entire battalion headquarters -- our battalion commander, our artillery officer, our operations officer, our operations chief, radio men and everything -- [were] all either killed or wounded.

My company almost escaped unscathed from that one, but the company on our flank had 30 or 40 casualties. And I remember being on this bridge that my platoon was responsible to take and hold, and we were up there and the mortars were coming in over our heads ... [to where] the rest of the battalions [were] landing. I remember looking back and I actually remember seeing three or four radio men from battalion headquarters ... flying through the air from explosions as they were knocked down and killed.

Then the Viet Cong started to walk the mortars toward my position. And I remember my radio man just threw his arm over me and he says, "Jesus Christ, lieutenant," he says, "we're going to die in this [expletive] tin of a hill." And I said, "Shut your [expletive] mouth, nobody's going to die on this hill." And I called in an air strike on where I thought the mortars were. And I frankly didn't give a damn. There was a village nearby and I called this air strike in and we just laid waste to the whole area, and as the napalm was coming in, there were a couple of Viet Cong -- and they were armed people -- came running out of the trenches from this village and we dropped them with machine gun fire. Anyway, that was not a ... that was not a pleasant moment, I guess.

On war:

As wretched, awful and savage as any war can get, all wars have this element of thrill and excitement in them, I think without which probably everybody in combat would probably kill themselves. That can't be denied. I can recall a time once when we surprised some Viet Cong, or maybe North Vietnamese regulars in this village. And I came under fire, and my point-fire team came under fire, and I was down on the ground and there were automatic weapons kicking up dust all around me and stuff like that.

And I called the platoon up, told everybody what to do, where to get the machine guns, where to get the rockets placed and they all came up and it was like choreography. They deployed themselves perfectly in this rather difficult situation, [and] laid down the fire. In all, it was sort of like if this was choreography, I was the dance master -- except this was literally a dance of death. And it was as though the nine, 10 months of training that I'd been under at officers' candidate school and officers' basic school and jungle warfare training and the six, seven months I'd been in Vietnam -- all of that came together in that 10 seconds, it was like all of that was for that 10 seconds, because we didn't take a single casualty.

On morale:

I've got a lot of friends who were four or five years younger than I, who were there in the later years, when the whole object of it was get through the 13 months, just get through it, survive, by any means necessary. And that attitude was with us, but I think up until the Tet Offensive in '68, there was at least some idea in the back of our minds that we could win this thing, though that hope, you know, diminished exponentially. ...

I remember sitting at this wretched little outpost one day with a couple of my sergeants. We'd been manning this thing for three weeks and running patrols off of it. We were grungy and sore with jungle rot and everything else like that, and [we had] taken about nine, 10 casualties on a recent patrol. This one sergeant of mine, Prior was his name, said, "Lieutenant," he says, "I don't see how we're ever going to win this." And I said, "Well, Sarge," I says, "I'm not supposed to say this to you as your officer -- but I don't either!" So there was a sense, at least in my platoon and maybe in the whole company in general, that we just couldn't see what could be done to defeat these people.