Week 11 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Week 11 - Essay Example 2.) Caputo admits to joining the Marines for two reasons: he was incredibly bored in the suburbs where he had grown up; and he was swept up in the romanticism of John F. Kennedy’s Camelot. Caputo’s basic training experience was, like all Marines, even today, one of character and physical strength building. Creating a sense of camaraderie and loyalty and, most importantly, a willingness to sacrifice one’s own life for the virtues of America (God, Corp, Country). By the time Caputo did his second tour and was reassigned to headquarters, he had already begun to have an â€Å"affected† take on the war and the government and society. Once assigned to headquarters, his job was to make sure that there was a â€Å"body count.† A count that was fact or fiction in the favor of the American victory and success in Vietnam. Caputo was completely disillusioned. 3.) Caputo had a loyalty to his men, his corp, because that was what had been drilled into him during his basic training experience. Even when his feelings about the military and government began to sour, as a leader in the Marines, Caputo was concerned about the men with whom he was charged to lead; and developed the bonds of men together in a war environment. 4.) Caputo’s experience as an inexperienced young lieutenant was one rooted in fear; fear of losing control, fear of losing a man, fear of losing his own life. He was completely – and admits to it – unprepared for the reality of the environment and the experience of war. It was nothing, he wrote, like the way they rehearsed it in the woods of Virginia or North Carolina. In this way, his experience was somewhat like that of Frederic in A Farewell to Arms. 5.) From Caputo’s book it was possible to gain a sense of what the mood in America was before, during, and after the war – and from a hindsight is 20/20