“People want to hear from you!” was Patagonia Public Library Assistant Jade DeForest’s answer when author Phil Caputo asked why she was inviting him to speak at the library at the end of March. “It’s a stressful time. We want to hear from each other, and especially from people like you.”
Indeed, DeForest was correct: Cady Hall was full, with over 90 listeners eager to hear Caputo’s words and wisdom.
“I am gratified as well as amazed at how many people showed up,” Caputo said. “By the way, this is my favorite town in the whole world!”
That’s saying a lot, considering that Caputo has traveled to 58 countries throughout his long career as an international journalist and author. His 18 novels and non-fiction books include “The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America from Key West to the Arctic Ocean,” about an epic road trip that covered 17,000 miles in four months. In other words, the guy has been places!
Caputo grew up in the western suburbs of Chicago, and got his start in journalism in 1968 as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, after a 16-month tour of duty in Vietnam. Four years later, he became a foreign correspondent for the Tribune, covering Rome, Moscow, the fall of Saigon, and the Lebanese civil war. He left journalism to focus on writing books in 1977 after being seriously injured in the Beirut conflict zone (see below).
When asked by an audience member, “How did you get to Patagonia?” Caputo credited his close friend and fellow author, the late Jim Harrison, whom Caputo knew from their bird hunting days in Michigan. Jim and his wife Linda had been wintering in Patagonia for several years and they invited Phil and his wife Leslie to visit in 1998. “The Town of Patagonia is unusual,” Harrison told them. “Not your typical Mayberry.”
Leslie and Phil found that to be true—and made an almost immediate decision to make Patagonia their winter home, too.
Harrison and Caputo remained close friends, sharing hunting trips and drinks at the Wagon Wheel until Harrison’s death in 2016. “Being friends with Jim was something of a job,” Caputo said. He recounted one of their adventures in his article “One Night in the Canyon” in the PRT shortly after Jim’s passing.
At the Library Author Talk, Caputo (now age 84) said, “in advancing age, one wonders if one’s life has added up to anything.” The talk encompassed his thoughts on that question, with reflections on three incidents in his career.
The first was about capturing his first scoop as a cub reporter for the Chicago Tribune. It involved overcoming his fear of heights to scramble the 200-foot-high fire escape and catwalks of the prestigious Palmer House Hotel to circumvent the police blockade of the hotel room where a murder had taken place. Caputo reached the window, saw the whole scene, and quickly wrote up the gory details for the paper’s next edition.
Determined to show that he could do whatever it took to get the story first, he knew he also had to fiercely protect his scoop. And so the poor competing journalist who had caught on to what Caputo had done found himself locked in the hotel’s phone room until after his paper’s deadline. “I had proved that I could run with the big dogs,” Caputo said.
A few years later, Caputo said, “I was a Big Dog” as a foreign correspondent in the Tribune’s Middle East bureau during the Lebanese civil war. In the conflict between Christians and the Palestine Liberation Organization, Caputo saw the “worst kind of fighting between people,” and developed a kind of “emotional flak jacket” to deal with the trauma happening around him.
Caputo’s second life reflection was about a particularly gruesome incident where a rocket landed nearby and killed 13 women who were standing in line to buy bread. At the time, Caputo had to compartmentalize their fates as “collateral damage” as he pursued news about the war’s power players and their strategies.
The third incident came four months later, when Caputo was assigned to cover a new phase of the war. To him and his fellow correspondents, it was basically a suicide mission into high-conflict territory.
Sure enough, they were stopped by Muslim militants. After a disagreement about their press cards, they were let go, but were followed by two gunmen. As they ran zigging and zagging, Caputo was hit by shrapnel, then by a bullet that shattered his ankle.
Luckily, Caputo had fallen in a Christian-held street, where he crawled into a building and miraculously found a vascular surgeon taking shelter there. He eventually reached a hospital in the middle of the war zone, where he was treated with no anesthesia. The pain was like nothing he’d ever felt before or since.
Eventually, he was evacuated back to his parents’ house in the same Chicago suburb he’d been so eager to leave as a young adult. During his rehab time, as he progressed from wheelchair, to crutches, to a cane, Caputo wrestled with the big question of Why? Why was I shot? Why did this happen to me?
He eventually realized that it was up to him to supply the answers, and in fact “Why?” was not the important question. “What was important was what I made of it,” Caputo said.
One thing he made of it was his first book, his best-selling Vietnam memoir, “Rumors of War.” He got the book contract and finished the manuscript in nine months while recovering.
Reflecting further on his traumatic incident, Caputo said that having to wrestle with loss, injury and anguish can call forth the best in us, too. He recalled the 13 women in the breadline, whom he had “callously dismissed as collateral damage.”
“I concluded that I had been wounded to know what suffering really meant,” Caputo said. “I had been meant to relearn compassion.”
Caputo is now working on another book, a collection of short stories called “Wandering Souls,” which will be published in late 2025 or early 2026. His other books are available at the Patagonia Library, and are described on his website, PhilCaputo.com, along with his “Dispatches”of current political commentary.