American Public University System A Rumor of War by Phillip Caputo Paper

Please answer one of the following questions in an essay of five pages (not less than four and not more than six).  The essay should be constructed using formal essay guidelines and part of your grade will depend on grammar, spelling, and mechanics.  Please include the number of the question that you are answering in the paper.  Be sure to use parenthetical citations whenever you include information that is neither common knowledge nor your own.  If you do then please include proper citations in either a Works Cited page at the end of your essay or Chicago style footnotes.  Otherwise, parenthetical citations will suffice and neither a Works Cited page nor a bibliography is necessary.

1. Philip Caputo writes, “My mind shot back a decade, to that day we had marched into Vietnam, swaggering, confident, and full of idealism.  We had believed we were there for a high moral purpose.  But somehow our idealism was lost, our morals corrupted, and the purpose forgotten” (Caputo, 345). What caused this transformation in Caputo?  Did Americans go through a similar transition over the course of the war?  How and why?2. Can one soldier’s experience shed light on America’s war in Vietnam?  How does Philip Caupto’s experience (from enlisting to training to deployment and throughout his time in the war) help us understand the experience of other soldiers in the conflict?   What problems might using one person’s story to generalize about others pose?