Answer: because the Vietnam War was fought in an especially brutal and untraditional way.
Explanation:
This is an excerpt from A Rumor of War (1977), a memoir written by Phillip Caputo who served in the United States Marine Corps at the beginning of the Vietnam War.
In this book, Phillip compares the way the Vietnam war is approached by the authorities to the actual experience of fighting in the war. The authorities did not attach particular importance to it, and people did not have any information about the involvement of the United States in this war. Phillip could not have imagined that he would participate in such a violent conflict. When he was sent to Vietnam, he saw for himself that people were dying and were often captured and tortured by the North Vietnamese forces. As it turned out, rumors of war were more reliable than the official information given by the government, which explains why Phillip chose this title for his book.
