The 9th Expeditionary Brigade was deployed to Da Nang (formerly Tourane) on a "merely defensive" condition, primarily to set a perimeter around an airstrip that ensured arrival and departure of military goods and personnel.

The first skirmishes against the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong made it clear to Lt. Caputo and his comrades that their earlier impression about Vietnam war as small and unimportant were all wrong.

Lt. Caputo described senior officers as being more worried about trivial matters than strategy, movies being played in the open at night, risking potentially devastating mortar attacks.

Lt. Caputo describes his fellow Marines as having stopped wishing for epic, World War II-style battles; they had learned to detect boobytraps, to counter-snipe and to comb the jungle in search of enemy bunkers and their rations.

Caputo's book was filmed as A Rumor of War at Camp Pendleton and Churubusco Studios, Mexico with a cast featuring Brad Davis, Brian Dennehy, Keith Carradine, Michael O'Keefe and Christopher Mitchum.