Means of Escape: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Life and Death in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Vietnam

Means of Escape: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Life and Death in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Vietnam

by Philip Caputo
Means of Escape: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Life and Death in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Vietnam

Means of Escape: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Life and Death in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Vietnam

by Philip Caputo

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Overview

"A riveting memoir of years of living dangerously."—Kirkus Reviews

For the countless readers who have admired Philip Caputo's classic memoir of Vietnam, A Rumor of War, here is his powerful recounting of his life and adventures, updated with a foreword that assesses the state of the world and the journalist's art.

As a journalist, Caputo has covered many of the world's troubles, and in Means of Escape, he tells the reader in moving and clear-eyed prose how he made himself into a writer, traveler, and observer with the nerve to put himself at the center of the world's conflicts. As a young reporter he investigated the Mafia in Chicago, earning acclaim as well as threats against his safety. Later, he rode camels through the desert and enjoyed Bedouin hospitality, was kidnapped and held captive by Islamic extremists, and was targeted and hit by sniper fire in Beirut, with memories of Vietnam never far from the surface. And after it all, he went into Afghanistan. Caputo's goal has always been to bear witness to the crimes, ambitions, fears, ferocities, and hopes of humanity. With Means of Escape, he has done so.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781429921848
Publisher: Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 03/31/2009
Sold by: Macmillan
Format: eBook
Pages: 400
File size: 472 KB

About the Author

Philip Caputo is the author of the New York Times bestseller A Rumor of War and the novels Indian Country, DelCorso's Gallery, and Horn of Africa. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 as part of an investigative team for the Chicago Tribune, and his coverage of his experience as a captive of Palestinian guerrillas won him the Overseas Press Club's George Polk Citation.


Philip Caputo is an award-winning journalist—the co-winner of a Pulitzer Prize—and the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including A Rumor of War, one of the most highly praised books of the twentieth century. His book, The Longest Road, was a New York Times bestseller. His novels include Acts of Faith, The Voyage, Horn of Africa, Crossers, and Some Rise by Sin. He and his wife, Leslie Ware, divide their time between Norwalk, Connecticut, and Patagonia, Arizona.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

ESCAPE VELOCITY

It started with trains and fanciful flights to the moon.

I am talking about restlessness, go-fever — call it whatever you like. It afflicted me most of my life, coming and going like chronic malaria. I still suffer recurrences, although the intensity of the episodes has diminished and the intervals between them have lengthened. It was a simple malady in my boyhood, easily diagnosed: I wanted to wander the great world. Later on, as I see it now, it became a symptom of a deeper, more complicated disease: a phobia of everyday life, with its ruts and routines, its predictability that seemed first cousin to death. Whenever I went to sleep knowing I would wake to a day without surprises, whenever a familiar voice, of a wife, child, parent, or friend, made me grind my teeth, or a domestic Sunday stretched before me as long and dull as all eternity, the season in my soul changed to late autumn and a voice cried in my head, "This is it, this is how it'll be for the rest of my life!" My remedy was to pack a bag and head for the nearest airport or train station, or for the open road. If that sometimes led me to the wrong places, it was an improvement over neighborly adultery, alcoholism, drug addiction, and most of the other means people use to escape the desperation of their clock-wound lives, including a bullet in the temple.

Where I went was not always important, as long as it was There and not Here. Of course, if I stayed long enough, the most remote, exotic There became a humdrum Here, compelling me to move on. That was why the journey mattered more than the destination. I was a pilgrim for whom the pilgrimage was the shrine.

I had never gone on the bum, except for a brief period when I hitchhiked and rode the rails through the Southwest and Mexico, but I was only a dilettante hobo. Most of my rovings were as a middle-class nomad, gainfully and more or less respectably employed. I would not be ashamed to admit that to the most sun burnt knight of the road. The hobo is not a superior breed of wanderer simply because he travels without money or knowing where his next meal is coming from. Refugees do that all the time. Anyway, the self-portrait I wished to paint was not of a tramp but of a romantic figure taking risks in far-off places, and that seemed to require some form of employment. If I had been born in Melville's or Conrad's day, I would have signed on board a whaler or tea clipper, but the sea had ceased to be a calling and sailors had become little more than hourly laborers on oceangoing warehouses.

And so I joined the marines and went to war. After I'd recovered from that experience, I took up a foreign correspondent's itinerant trade and spent five years vagabonding through lands with intemperate climates and politics. Those two terms, "marine" and "foreign correspondent," bore a powerful magic. They signified the glamour I was after, shouted above the noise of commuter traffic, TVs, and weekend lawn mowers — the whole quotidian racket — that it was still possible for an adventurous young man to live out a myth. There were other reasons for choosing those professions, if that's what they were. They took me into the blank spots of the human interior, which I was also curious to see. Carrying a rifle in Vietnam or a portable typewriter in the Middle East and Africa, I explored extraordinary situations as well as extraordinary places. Journeying into those states of extremes that lay people bare and force them to reveal the secrets of their minds and hearts was another way of escaping the everyday.

My geographical wanderings showed in my passport, thick as a paperback from the extra pages stapled into it by gray-faced consular clerks, the pages filled with stamps and visas written in the tongues of some thirty-six kingdoms, republics, and dictatorships. The stamps did not reflect every place I'd been; I'd slipped over a border or two without telling the authorities I was visiting.

There were no documents for my travels into the psychological Theres. The record of those border crossings was written in my dreams, and most of them were not good dreams. Oh, I saw courage, saw kindness in the meanest circumstances, saw a few people rise above the muck to show the angel that should be in us all, but I'm afraid I saw more of the devil that is definitely in us all. I saw him in the grin of a Chinese Nung who was making a fashion statement with a necklace of human ears, in the eyes of teenage apprentice terrorists who couldn't wait to blow up their first airliner, in the violent gestures of a Zionist fanatic outlining his plan for a Final Solution to the Palestinian problem. One or two times — and it was one or two times too many — the Dark One gave me a red-eyed wink in the mirror.

I am nearing fifty now, and I'm not looking for any more visas except the tourist kind, nor do I seek terra incognita. There are no terrae incognitae left, at least not in the world that appears in atlases. These days, you'll hear transistor radios around the bedouin fires instead of the songs of Harun al-Rashid, and you'll find the natives upriver wearing souvenir T-shirts. As for those terrae incognitae of the human interior, well, there's no end to them, but I've visited enough to know that you don't have to steam up the Congo to find the heart of darkness — it's probably right in your own backyard. The world, which seemed in my boyhood full of beauty and mystery spiced with a bit of danger, has in my manhood lost most of its beauty and mystery while gaining more than a seasoning of danger. I don't know if this represents a change in the world or in my perceptions. I do know that the glamour's gone. I have been wounded by gunfire, captured by terrorists, knocked flat by unknown fevers, and I now think Pascal might have been on to something when he said that the unhappinesses of men are caused by their inability to be at peace in a room. In short, I have settled down, which doesn't mean I've lost all curiosity and wanderlust. There remain moments when I cannot stand by a shore without wanting to cross the water, or hear a plane without wishing I were on it, or look at a highway without wondering where it goes.

*
I WAS SIX weeks past twenty-eight when I heard his voice crackle from the Sea of Tranquillity, his words converted to radio signals shot across a quarter million miles of space to be captured and restored to words by the television set in my parents' suburban basement, its screen showing a blurry Neil Armstrong climbing down the Eagle's ladder to make a footprint on the printless lunar dust.

"What did he say?" my grandmother Rose asked. She was seventy-five years old, her hearing wasn't what it used to be, and she had missed Armstrong's message.

"He said," I told her, " 'That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.' "

She glanced at me from the leather easy chair usually occupied by my father, then turned back to the TV. Buzz Aldrin descended the ladder and pogoed against a backdrop of ice-castle mountains to join Armstrong beside a plastic American flag flying stiffer than a flag in a thirty-knot wind.

"Men on the moon! I don't believe it!"

My grandmother's expression of disbelief was no figure of speech. She remembered wagon clatter on the cobblestoned streets of Chicago, where she was born in 1894, the news of the Wright brothers and of Geronimo's death, the day when she was a young bride and workmen came to her flat to pull out the gas lamps and install electricity.

My father, half prone in the recliner alongside the easy chair, was not as awed. He had been a machinist and was now a technical troubleshooter for Continental Can Company. He had worked with machinery all his life and knew that achievements that struck his mother as miraculous were really matters of understanding certain principles and physical laws, then translating those understandings into a design, design into test model, model into prototype, and so on. This is not to say he was blasé about the scene unfolding before him. He was mightily impressed because he had at least a glimmering of how difficult a feat it was. The know-how that must have gone into it! The engineering! The sheer elegance of a rocket burn timed to deliver the precise thrust needed to reach escape velocity, the graceful calculus that sent the command module on a 250,000-mile parabola to intersect the moon's trajectory at the one point where its gravity would snare the module and sling it into lunar orbit as smoothly as an outfielder catching a pop fly and tossing it home.

My father had gone to college to study engineering, but had dropped out after only six months; my grandfather's business had failed, a Great Depression casualty. College was out of the question for my father. He had to look for work. There wasn't much in the 1930s; he dug ditches for the Public Works Administration, then found a construction job, and was delighted when the company gave him a nickel an hour raise. Those experiences so early in life had made him a cautious, pragmatic man, as well as one who revered education. I suppose it is a law of human nature that fathers always seek to live through their sons, fulfilling vicariously ambitions thwarted by circumstance or their own limitations. Mine wanted me to be an engineer, and though he was never pigheaded about it, he had made it clear that he would be very pleased to see me one day design the machines he could only repair.

I wanted to be an engineer, and not just because it was what my father wanted. I truly wanted it. My main ambition in grammar school and high school was to become a test pilot. Take the stick of some jet-powered, rocket-assisted needle-nosed bird, ram the throttle to the fire wall, and blast off through ozone and stratosphere to realms where blue sky darkened into black. I knew all about Chuck Yeager long before a book and a movie made his name as common as household detergent. I believed in manned space flight long before men flew there. "Believe" is the proper verb; in the early 1950s, only a handful of specialists like Yeager and Wernher von Braun, rocketry's high priest, had the facts, knew where the technology was headed. For them, the idea of sending human beings into orbit or of landings on other planets was not science fiction. For most everyone else it was little more than a Ray Bradbury fantasy.

But I kept the faith. I not only believed men would one day walk on the moon; I believed I would. That was why I felt only envy as I sat in a pine-paneled basement in Westchester, Illinois, watching Armstrong and Aldrin bounding across the Sea of Tranquillity. A waterless sea on an airless world more silent than the Antarctic, and whiter, and colder, and emptier, a virgin world where not even a single cell had wriggled and divided in primordial slime. It should have been me up there out there, free from earth's gravity and all the powers binding me to the suffering blue sphere shining in the lunar sky.

I HAD FLOWN to the moon and beyond years before Armstrong, the engine of my imagination fueled by early television series like Captain Video and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and by two books, The Conquest of the Moon and Across the Space Frontier. I loved those titles. The words "conquest" and "frontier" rang like gongs in the temple of my American soul. If I had been born in the past century, I would have gone up the wide Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or into the Rockies with Jim Bridger and Kit Carson. I regretted that I had come along much too late for such adventures. One of my great-grandfathers had immigrated to America in the early 1880s and laid track for the Great Northern across the Dakotas and Montana. He had seen buffalo, Indians, and the last of the Old West.

I wished I had. I wanted to make tracks on the trackless, chart the uncharted. I wanted to light out for the territory, but the territory was gone. The vast plains where my great-grandfather had drilled spikes were vacant of buffalo and Sioux and filled up with farms, ranches, towns, and shopping centers. So I looked to the sky, the high frontier. My eyes were literally on the stars.

Often I tried to picture what it looked like out there. Chesley Bonestell showed me. Chesley Bonestell did the illustrations for The Conquest of the Moon and Across the Space Frontier. What illustrations! Beautiful, beckoning artist's conceptions of white, wheelshaped space stations twirling far above a haloed earth, of the moon's surface shaded in subtle pastels of cream and green, of interplanetary ships voyaging to Venus and Mars, with cutaway drawings to show the crews floating weightless through passageways, peering at distant constellations through Plexiglas domes. To hurtle through the black unknown in such a shell would be thrilling.

I COULDN'T WAIT to go. With Bonestell's illustrations for blueprints, I built my own spaceship. The place of its construction was the same basement where I would watch Armstrong and Aldrin many years later; the date was several months after we moved to Westchester, late in the fall of 1951.

Westchester was a suburb of people dead in the middle of the middle class — skilled tradesmen, office workers, housewives, young couples starting off. I am convinced my parents' decision to move there made all the difference in my life. The town was the manger of my restlessness.

It had begun as a dream of Samuel Insull, the London-born utilities king whose holdings were worth three billion dollars in a time when billionaires were almost unheard of. One of his companies was Chicago's Commonwealth Edison, and he decided to use some of his vast fortune to build a replica of an English country village on the prairies west of the city. It was incorporated as Westchester, the streets plotted and given British place-names. A few houses went up, most conforming to Insull's architectural tastes — square Georgians, counterfeit Tudors, ersatz Stratford-upon-Avon cottages — but Insull never fulfilled his vision. Construction stopped in the early 1930s, when his financial empire collapsed and he was indicted for mail fraud and embezzlement. Six years later, the billionaire from Dickensian London died broke. There were then more rabbits and pheasants than people living in his fantasy village. Weeds and brambles overtook the sidewalks, the lampposts tumbled, knocked down by storms or by the weight of the wild grapevines that had coiled around them like strangler figs.

Westchester did not revive until the postwar housing boom, a land rush that changed the face of America almost as radically as the settling of the frontier. The new communities bore no resemblance to the upper-class bedroom suburbs established earlier in Winnetka, or Scarsdale, or on the Main Line. The residents of those places had been insulated by social position and old family money from the worst effects of the Depression. The suburbanites of the fifties were mostly working stiffs who had been at the epicenter of that economic temblor and had no sooner crawled out of the rubble, dusty and bruised, than they were thrown into World War II. Now that they had a leg up on life, they flocked to the Westchesters of America with low-interest loans from the Veterans Administration or, if they weren't veterans, with down payments carefully hoarded over the years. Theirs were not the big dreams of a Sam Insull. They were modest people with modest means and visions to match. A home of their own with a garage, appliances, and the proud green badge of a lawn were all they wanted, along with good schools for the kids.

It was the era of the Organization Man and the cold war, conservative suits and backyard bomb shelters. Security was the watchword of the day. Military security for the nation, job and financial security for ordinary men and women. After what they had been through, from Black Friday to V-J Day, they did not want adventure, nor did they have hearty appetites for risk. They welcomed the calm of the Eisenhower era. They helped create it.

And calm was the atmosphere in Westchester in the years I grew up there, from 1951 to 1959, when I left for college. Westchester lounged like a man on a lawn chair on Sunday afternoon, in what I have seen described as "drowse of the accustomed." And that stifling drowse eventually awakened in me a hunger to live intensely. Instead of the accustomed, I sought the unaccustomed, the strange instead of the familiar, the extremities of experience instead of the middle ground.

In a phrase, I was bored. So were most people my age, for most were raised as I was. If our parents' generation welcomed and helped create the tranquillity of the Eisenhower years, we their children welcomed and helped create the turmoil of the sixties. Vietnam. How we needed it, patriots and protesters alike, warriors and antiwarriors. It gave us the conflict and drama so absent when we were growing up. In Dispatches, Michael Herr wonders if "Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods." I don't think so: Vietnam was what we had because we had happy childhoods. Certainly that was true of me. It took a war to get me out of the suburbs and keep me out.

(Continues…)



Excerpted from "Means of Escape"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Philip Caputo.
Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Author's Note,
1. ESCAPE VELOCITY,
2. CITY ROOM,
3. THE DESERT,
4. THE CITY,
5. FIRST CASUALTIES,
6. THE OLD COUNTRY,
7. BYE-BYE, EVERYBODY,
8. STATES OF EXTREMES,
9. THE GREAT GAME,

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