By Marc Caputo
Philip Caputo never wanted it to end this way: peacefully and in his own home. He hoped to die in the manner in which he lived—dramatically and with panache—as a writer, adventurer, warrior, sportsman, and raconteur.
But cancer claimed him in his bed at home in Norwalk, CT, at 10:15 p.m. on May 7. He was 84.
As a U.S. Marine, Caputo was among the first Americans to fight in the Vietnam War and then, as a reporter, was among the last civilians evacuated from Saigon as it fell — helicoptered out from an airfield.
Caputo then authored the best-selling book A Rumor of War, a memoir of his time in Vietnam, a classic assigned in history classes to this day.
He also shared a Pulitzer Prize at The Chicago Tribune for investigative reporting of Mayor Richard Daley’s infamous voting fraud in 1972.
As a foreign correspondent for the paper, Caputo covered wars from Africa to Afghanistan to the Middle East, where he was captured and held hostage by Palestinian militants. In 1975, he was shot in Beirut by another faction of militants during Lebanon’s civil war.
“It was a simple malady in my boyhood, easily diagnosed,” he wrote in Means of Escape, his second memoir. “I wanted to wander the great world.”
No surprise that he spun spellbinding stories of his adventures.
Caputo caught a leviathan-sized blue marlin off Cuba’s shores, hunted big game in Africa, roughed it in Australia’s outback, cast fly lines in the world’s oceans and streams from Alaska to New England, and read books as voraciously as he wrote them: 12 novels, four works of nonfiction, and three memoirs.
He palled around with singer Jimmy Buffett in Key West and Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson in Saigon. He got lost with novelist Jim Harrison near Temporal Canyon. He studied the heavens as an amateur astronomer. He attended Latin mass at St. Mary Catholic Church and was a winter parishioner at St. Therese in Patagonia. And he lived and died by the Stoic teachings of Marcus Aurelius.
CHAPTER ONE: IN THE BEGINNING
Caputo was born in Chicago in 1941 to Joseph and Marie (Napolitan) Caputo. He was restless from the start, hopping a freight train to escape the suburbs (he got 100 yards before hopping off, concerned that his parents would worry), skating with friends far down frozen streams, and using bedsheets, cardboard, and a card table to create a rocket ship in which he flew his sister to, he wrote later, the “boundaries of the solar system.”
CHAPTER TWO: BABU
Caputo put family first, and is survived by his wife and life’s love, Leslie Ware; sons Geoffrey and Marc, daughter-in-law Erin Caputo, and granddaughters Livia, Anastasia, and Sofia. He also leaves behind sister Patricia Esralew; sister-in-law Jennifer Ware and her husband, Joseph Falco; and niece Lindsay Ellis.
His requests to loved ones could prove challenging. For decades, he prepared his wife and sons for the time of his death, asking that they help him spend his last days in innovative ways: left on Mount McKinley to die; lashed to a boat’s bow and sent into an Atlantic hurricane; done in by hitmen.
That way, he wouldn’t die a more prosaic death in hospice.
The gallows humor underscored Caputo’s blend of stoicism, love of irony, and Marine Corps grit: He not only survived Vietnam and Lebanon as a young man, he also cheated death in middle age when he hid with the Afghan mujahideen behind a bush from two patrolling Soviet Hind helicopter gunships—and then, just before he turned 60, he flatlined in a tent in Kenya while researching the man-eating lions of Tsavo.
It was there, Africa, that he heard the term “Babu,” an honorific for a gentleman. And since “grandpa” sounded too old, he insisted his granddaughters call him Babu. He claimed the word was Swahili, and he liked the way it sounded. When told the word was Hindi in origin, he conveniently forgot that again and again.
Babu’s granddaughters gave him great joy. He spent every summer with them, from Montana to Key West, where he told them stories of the war and of sailing and how and why a green flash could light up the sky as the sun sets over the ocean.
CHAPTER THREE: THE HIGH DESERT
Caputo loved the vast vistas near the Patagonia adobe where he and Leslie spent the past 23 winters. He relished hunting, even unsuccessfully, with their beloved English setters. Arizona’s night skies fascinated him, and a favorite activity was driving to the San Rafael Valley and gazing up, identifying planets and stars to anyone willing to brave freezing nighttime temperatures. He loved hiking too, the farther and more remote the location the better. On forced marches with Leslie through mesquite thickets, he would poke fun at himself: “When you’re dumb, you gotta be tough.”
As a father, he taught his boys early that “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog.” Teddy Roosevelt was an inspiration, after all. So was Muhammed Ali. Caputo was taking boxing lessons at the age of 78.
While he lived very much in the present, he brought the past to life, a bygone era of risk-taking reporting, Kiplingesque adventure and raising a good glass of Macallan’s.
“We smoked too much, drank too much,” he wrote of the good old days of journalism. “We dramatized ourselves as history’s assault troops, because self-drama is necessary when you risk your neck for something so evanescent as a news story. Yet we were fired with a conviction that we were messengers who brought the light of truth to places where thugs and dictators tried to extinguish it.”
CHAPTER FOUR: THE THINGS HE CARRIED
Vietnam haunted him. A list of the fallen men of his company was printed on yellow legal paper (he preferred to write longhand before typing) in his perfect cursive on the wall of his home office, squared away with Marine fastidiousness.
Nor did he ever forget the two villagers killed by his men for being suspected Viet Cong, though they were likely innocent, just before his tour ended. It resulted in court martial proceedings, though he received an honorable discharge.
“They had taught us to kill and had told us to kill, and now they were going to court-martial us for killing,” he wrote in “Rumor of War,” a searing account of America’s greatest military folly.
“We kept the packs and rifles; the convictions, we lost,” he wrote.
He remained, however, deeply patriotic. He snapped to attention when the Marine Corps Hymn played. He believed America is an idea as much as an ideal.
He carried another thing back from Vietnam: Agent Orange exposure. In tandem with the toxic drinking water of Camp Lejeune, the defoliant played a role in two prior bouts of cancer before he detected pain in his esophagus in January. By then, it would be too late.
In the final days, he spent his few waking hours talking to one friend about the meaning of consciousness and to another about casting one last fly line. He appreciated the beauty of a crabapple tree outside the bedroom window and hoped to get a last glimpse of yellow-crowned night-herons in a nearby marsh. And he told his family of a dream in which his parents were calling him home.
“We are all of us marching inexorably to the grave,” Caputo wrote when he was in his fifties, “and it may be that the whole point of our lives is the grace and dignity with which we meet our last moment.”
And when that time came, he reminded everyone that, as Aurelius said, “it is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”