In March 1965, Marine Lieutnant Philip J. Caputo landed in Danang with the first ground combat unit committed to fight in Vietnam. Sixteen months later, having served on the line in one of modern history's ugliest wars, he returned home - physically whole, emotionally wasted, his youthful idealism shattered. A decade later, Caputo would write in A Rumor of War, 'This is simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to them'.

It is far more then that. It is, as Theodore Solotaroff wrote in the New York Times Book Review, 'the troubled conscience of America speaking passionately, truthfully, finally'. It is the book that shattered America's deliberate indifference to the fate of the men it sent to fight in the jungles of Vietnam, and in the years since it was first published it has become a basic text on that war. But in the literature of war that stretches back to Homer, it has also taken its place as an esteemed classic to rank alongside All Quiet on the Western Front and The Naked and the Dead.