Volume 24, Number 11 · June 23, 1977
A Farewell to Arms
By William Styron
A Rumor of War
by Philip Caputo
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 346 pp., $10.00
A short time ago, while talking to a group of students at a college in Virginia I was seized by a dismal insight. The subject of war literature had come up and I said that it occurred to me suddenly that at the age of fifty-one—perhaps a mellow age but one I refused to regard as being advanced or venerable—I had lived through three wars, in two of which, both as an officer and as an enlisted man in the Marine Corps, I had been an active participant. I reviewed the wars in reverse order. Although I had been spared the war in Vietnam, except as an outraged and frustrated onlooker, I had been involved in the war against the Chinese and the North Koreans as well as the Japanese in World War II (the Marines have in recent years specialized in Oriental foes); as a matter of curiosity I threw in the fact that the First World War—that pointless and heartrending conflict—ended only seven years before my birth.
Review, 3752 words
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