By Bob Goldsborough

FOR THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Philip Caputo was a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune before going on to pen bestselling books, including his acclaimed 1977 memoir, "A Rumor of War," which laid bare his searing experiences as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps in Vietnam near the start of the Vietnam War.

The book, which sold more than 1.5million copies and has been published in 15 languages, provided readers with one officer's raw insight into the mindsets of Marines during the United States' protracted involvement in Southeast Asia, and it has become widely considered a classic.

Caputo subsequently published numerous other books, including ones that continually returned to aspects of the Vietnam War and its harrowing after-effects.

"Phil was always very intent on being a writer, and he was a very good writer," said former Tribune investigative reporter and assistant city editor William Currie. "As far as being a war correspondent and a foreign correspondent, he was top-notch."

Caputo,84, died of complications of esophageal cancer on May 7at his home in Norwalk, Connecticut, said his son Marc Caputo, a White House reporter for Axios.

Phil Caputo, who also had a home in Patagonia, Arizona, previously had bladder cancer and prostate cancer and also had been dealing with Parkinson's disease.

Philip Joseph Caputo was born in Chicago and lived with his family in Chicago and Berwyn before moving to a home on Suffolk Avenue in Westchester. After attending Fenwick High School in Oak Park, he attended Purdue University before leaving school. He got a bachelor's degree in English from Loyola University Chicago in 1964.

In his late teens, Caputo began freelance fiction writing. He had a desire-owing to a fairly conventional suburban upbringing -to explore, and to write about it. "It was a simple malady in my boyhood, easily diagnosed," Caputo wrote in a memoir, "Means of Escape." "I wanted to wander the great world."

From 1964 until 1967, Caputo served in the Marine Corps -including 15 months in Vietnam -where he was recommended for a court martial before the charges against him were dropped.

In "A Rumor of War, "the incident was described in detail as being rooted in pressure from higher-ups to produce high body counts of enemies. Caputo authorized the killing of two Vietnamese villagers, one of whom turns out to have been a U.S. informant.

In1967, Caputo hitchhiked around the U.S., Mexico and Europe before taking a job as an assistant sales promotion manager for National Advertising Co., a subsidiary of 3M Co. in Chicago.

He then joined the Tribune's suburban reporting staff in June 1968. In Caputo's earliest years at the paper, he covered local goings-on in the near west suburbs for the Trib, a suburban edition that was delivered three times a week.

He soon was promoted to be a general assignment reporter in Chicago and then was made an original member of the Tribune's investigative reporting task force.

Caputo also showed signs of his future fame with a June 1970 Tribune Sunday magazine article about the landing of the first American soldiers at Da Nang, Vietnam, in early 1965.

"By December of 1965, the 'splendid little war' had degenerated into that purposeless blood-letting, the war of attrition, "Caputo wrote in the story. "We found ourselves fighting for no cause other than our own survival. And to survive, we often were as ruthless as those who sought to destroy us."

Retired Tribune reporter William Mullen, who later served on an investigative task force with Caputo, recalled that Sunday magazine article.

"It was so terrific. I took him out to lunch and said, 'Good Lord, you should have written that for The New Yorker,'" Mullen said. "That got him thinking maybe he should write something more about Vietnam. He was always a swashbuckler. He was an impressive guy, full of drama, and he was a wonderful writer."

In 1973, Caputo was part of a five-person investigative reporting team that won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for its investigation of Chicago's scandal-ridden primary election in March 1972.

He was part of the award-winning reporting taskforce, along with Currie, Mullen, George Bliss and Pamela Zekman, that examined lists of registered voters in precincts that had had a history of fictional registrants, known as ghost voters.

The task force mailed more than 5,400 registered letters to suspected ghost voters to see how many letters were returned because addressees had moved, had never lived at the voting addresses in question or were dead. Task force members then went undercover, taking jobs as poll workers and election judges in precincts with reputations for corruption-ridden elections.

Ultimately, the team's work resulted in uncovering documentary evidence of more than1,000 incidents of ghost voting, forgery and other forms of vote fraud. That led to a federal investigation indicting 79 election judges and precinct captains, nearly all of whom pleaded guilty.

A May 1973 Tribune article about the Pulitzer Prize noted that Caputo, along with Currie and Zekman, had played major roles in the campaign to expose vote fraud, under Bliss' guidance.

In November1972, Caputo was assigned to the Tribune's Rome bureau, from which he covered the Arab-Israeli war. He was the first American correspondent to reach the banks of the Suez Canal after the war started in October 1973, and the Tribune awarded him an Edward Scott Beck Award in December1973 for his foreign news reporting.

In November1974, Caputo transferred to Beirut to serve as the Tribune's Middle East correspondent, and he ventured to Vietnam in 1975 to cover the fall of Saigon.

Caputo's work as a foreign correspondent came with hazards. In May 1973, he was seized on the road to the airport in Beirut by the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and held prisoner in the outskirts of Beirut. He was released after five days and wrote a six-part series, "Prisoner of the Fedayeen, "about his captivity.

Amid a civil war in Lebanon between gunmen representing Christian and Muslim residents of the country, Caputo was shot in both feet by anti-Western militia members of the Nasserite faction in Beirut in October 1975 after leaving the Reuters news agency office in Beirut, where he had just filed a story. He eventually recovered from his injuries.

Caputo became the Tribune's Moscow correspondent in 1976. He left the paper the following year to become a freelance writer. That year, Caputo published "A Rumor of War," conveying in raw fashion both the meaning of the Vietnam War and his generation's disenchantment with the war.

In the book, Caputo's initial pride and arrogance soon give way to a more contemplative spirit, followed by degeneration. Having faced direct hostile fire, he wrote: "For the first time in my life, I had the experience of being shot at by someone who was trying to kill me specifically. It was not horrifying or terrifying or any of the things it is supposed to be. Rather, it was perplexing. My first reaction, rooted in the illusion that anyone trying to kill me must have a personal motive, was: 'Why does he want to kill me? What did I ever do to him?'"

From there, Caputo writes, Marines once bearing pride and discipline descended to depths seemingly unimagined, including cutting off the ears of a dead enemy combatant and proposing to parachute into Laos to slaughter members of the Viet Cong on their way back to Da Nang.

In a May 1977 piece in the Tribune, reviewer James Park Sloan wrote that "A Rumor of War" was "simply the finest and most accurate piece of narrative on the Viet Nam War. This is what it was like to be in Viet Nam. Blessed (or cursed) with a memory that censors nothing, Caputo has written of Viet Nam for all those who were there."

The book was adapted into a two-part miniseries for CBS in 1980.In1991, former New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury wrote in the Tribune that" A Rumor of War" captured the Vietnam War's agony, heroism and trauma "with so sure a hand it evoked comparisons with such Great War fiction as Stephen Crane's 'The Red Badge of Courage' and Ernest Hemingway's 'A Farewell to Arms.'"

In the late 1970s, the Tribune's Mullen arranged a meeting in Chicago between Caputo and a friend of Mullen's, Vietnam veteran and author Ron Kovic, whose memoir "Born on the Fourth of July" became a bestseller and eventually a film. Though the men had distinctly different temperaments, Mullen said, "The camaraderie of two Marine combat veterans who had experienced the horrors of war was instantaneous, plus they shared the unique experience of becoming famous authors."

Caputo wrote two other memoirs: "Means of Escape" in 1991 and "The Longest Road" in 2013.Hewrote four nonfiction books, including "13 Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings" in 2005, and 12 fiction books. One recurring theme in Caputo's writing -in both his memoirs and his novels -grew out of his experiences in Vietnam. In the 1980 novel "Horn of Africa," he wrote a tale of three men, one of whom was a Vietnam veteran, running armaments into a fictional Ethiopian province and training a tribe of Islamic desert warriors.

The1983 novel "DelCorso's Gallery" is partially set in Vietnam and has as its subject a war photographer haunted by his time in Vietnam, while "Indian Country," published four years later, deals with a Vietnam veteran in Michigan trying to purge himself of guilt from a battlefield incident.

"One of the reasons that 'A Rumor of War' endures as a classic is that it's not just about the Vietnam War," Marc Caputo said. "It's about the condition of humankind, and how war desensitizes both the civilian and the soldier a like." Two previous marriages, to Jill Ongemach and Marcelle Besse, ended in divorce. In addition to his son, Caputo is survived by his wife, Leslie Ware; another son, Geoffrey; three granddaughters; and a sister, Patricia Esralew.

Services are pending.

Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.