War in the Catamaran (John Cale, May 1980)
“Military intelligence isn't what it used to be," chanted John Cale in the nightclub of San Diego's Catamaran Motor Hotel, somewhere around midnight. "But—so what? Human intelligence isn't what it used to be, either!"
I was primed to respond to lines like that. A couple of hours before, up in my tenth-floor room in the Catamaran, I'd watched Bill Moyers' Journal, which documented the transformation of Philip Caputo's Vietnam memoir, A Rumor of War, into an upcoming TV movie. The book ends with a mini–My Lai, as Caputo and some of his troops commit a certified atrocity—Caputo faced charges for the murder of innocent civilians—and that was the focus of the program: after all, the atrocity was the hook. The question of the film about the film was, in essence, "How could good, normal American boys do such a thing?," and Caputo had lots of answers.