Philip Caputo's brilliant and influential 1977 memoir of his experience fighting in the Vietnam War, A Rumor of War is not merely an act of witnessing about the brutality and trauma of war, it is also a moving account of the author's life as a young Lieutenant in the US Marine Corps in 1965. This paper deals especially with Caputo's second chapter, which relates his hexperience as the ―Officer in Charge of the Dead; ‖ that is, as the official in charge of the gruesome task of cataloging and counting the dead and tallying up the Marines' ―kill ratio‖ during the early stages of the conflict in Vietnam. This is also the section of the book that focuses on Caputo's private reflections on the war, its traumatic effects on him, and his irrational desire to return to the jungle to rejoin the fighting. My analysis of this section of the work relies chiefly on Leigh Gilmore's (2001) work on traumatic autobiographical writing—i.e., those works which ―explore representations of personhood that are skeptical of dominant constructions of the individual and the nation [and are] concerned with the interpenetration of the private and the public, and how its impact is registered in personal, aesthetic, and legal terms.‖ Much recent trauma theory focuses on the role of witnessing (Laub 2009) and the psychic importance of claiming one's role as a survivor (Caruth 1996); however, Gilmore's approach allows us to situate the work of the traumatic memoir within the scope of literary and juridical history, and to understand traumatic identity as a form of aesthetic self-reinvention. In Caputo's case this self-reinvention relies on a modernist narrative style that undermines official military discourse by resorting to ironic self-distancing—i.e., by giving himself the moniker ―officer in charge of the dead‖ he is able to see himself differently and re-write a self capable of accepting his role as survivor.