Philip Caputo, Who Wrote Blistering Vietnam War Memoir, Dies at 84

“A Rumor of War,” about his service as a Marine Corps infantry officer and published in 1977, relentlessly detailed “the things men do in war and the things war does to them.”Philip Caputo in 1987. “To call it the best book about Vietnam is to trivialize it,” the novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne wrote in his review of “A Rumor of War.” “Heartbreaking, terrifying and enraging, it belongs to the literature of men at arms.”