Caputo served as a casualty reporting officer during the Vietnam War. This role required him to record in extensive detail all enemy and friendly casualties, no matter the cause of death. He had to use clinical and euphemistic language preferred by the military to describe wounds and deaths. Caputo found this job distressing as it gave him bad dreams and destroyed his romantic ideas about war. He felt like "death's bookkeeper" due to the immense number of deaths he had to record each day.

1. Ben Smith
Senior Seminar p.4
November 10, 2011
Caputo Notes
3 to 4 hours of work a day rest of time spent looking for entertainment or reading
Usually stood watch from 12 – 2 or 2 – 4 by monitoring radios
Fighting increased and he became the casualty reporting officer, which gave him bad dreams
and destroying and “silly, abstract, romantic ideas” he had about war
His job was to report all casualties; enemy and friendly no matter what the cause of death, be it
friendly fire or being run over by a tank
He said that all the reports were long and complicated, and “had to be written in that clinical,
euphemistic language the military prefers to simple English.”
He discusses how the language used was not always perfectly accurate, for instance, “traumatic
fragmentation” would be more precise to say than “traumatic amputation”
It was necessary for him to record all of the different types of wounds or deaths on a board in
his officer’s room meticulously.
The measure of how well an army was doing is not how far it had advanced, but how many
enemy soldiers it had killed.
Caputo refers to himself as “death’s bookkeeper” because of the immense number of deaths he
was required to record daily.
The military uses euphemistic language frequently when referring to a casualty or injury in the war. I
believe that this is to make the families of the soldiers that have been injured or killed feel more at ease.
The euphemistic language somewhat softens the effect of learning a piece of information such as that.