American writer and journalist Philip Caputo, great witness to the Vietnam War, died at 84

Former American writer and journalist Philip Caputo, known for Rumor of warhis war memoirs in Vietnam, died Thursday May 7 of cancer, announced his son, himself a journalist. He “hoped to die the way he had lived – spectacularly and with panache – as a writer, adventurer, warrior, sportsman and storyteller“, wrote his son Marc Caputo on Facebook the evening of his death. But “cancer took him to his bed at home” in Connecticut, in the northeast of the United States, he said.

Part of a team that won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for reporting on election fraud in Chicago, Caputo also worked as a foreign correspondent, including covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He covered the fall of Saigon and the Lebanese civil war in 1975, during which he was injured in the ankle.

Two years later he wrote Rumor of war, an account of his experiences as a young U.S. Marine during a 16-month tour in Vietnam in 1964. According to his official website, the book has sold more than 1.5 million copies and his son, a White House reporter, described it as a “classic still used in history lessons todayi”.

Philip Caputo did “part of the first Americans to fight in the Vietnam War and then, as a journalist, he was among the last civilians evacuated from Saigon when it fell“, he said. The writer went on to publish a total of 18 books, including another memoir recounting an epic road trip of 17,000 miles (more than 27,000 kilometers) between the southernmost point of the United States and the northernmost.

An experienced adventurer, he “hunted big game and caught very large fish“, but he “put family first“, indicated his son.