Philip Caputo

Philip Caputo serves as the narrator and the main character of the novel. At the tender age of twenty, Caputo enlists in the Marines in the hopes to end his dreary days of comfortable living in the small mid-western suburban town of Westchester, Illinois. He enters the war with romantic notions of being a hero, with thoughts of ending the war within a few short weeks or months and returning home to a parade of patriotic countrymen that will slap him on the back and ask him to tell them another heroic tale of his adventures in Vietnam. What he finds, however, is a rude awakening to the realities of a battle fought in the middle of the jungle with Viet Cong who refuse to play by the rules he has learned at Officer's Training School.

Throughout the novel, Caputo struggles for his personal identity as well...