Philip Caputo never wanted it to end this way: peacefully and in his own home. He hoped to die in the manner in which he lived—dramatically and with panache—as a writer, adventurer, warrior, sportsman, and raconteur.

But cancer claimed him in his bed at home in Norwalk, CT, on Thursday, May 7. He was 84.

As a U.S. Marine, Caputo was among the first Americans to fight in the Vietnam War and then, as a reporter, was among the last civilians evacuated from Saigon as it fell—helicoptered out from an airfield.

Caputo then authored the best-selling book A Rumor of War, a memoir of his time in Vietnam, a classic assigned in history classes to this day.

He also shared a Pulitzer Prize at The Chicago Tribune for investigative reporting of Mayor Richard Daley’s infamous voting fraud in 1972. As a foreign correspondent for the paper, Caputo covered wars from Africa to Afghanistan to the Middle East, where he was captured and held hostage by Palestinian militants. In 1975, he was shot in Beirut by another faction of militants during Lebanon’s civil war.

“It was a simple malady in my boyhood, easily diagnosed,” he wrote in his second memoir, Means of Escape. “I wanted to wander the great world.”

No surprise that he spun spellbinding stories of his adventures.

Caputo caught a leviathan-sized marlin off Cuba’s shores, hunted big game in Africa, roughed it in Australia’s outback, cast fly lines in the world’s oceans and streams from Alaska to New England, and read books as voraciously as he wrote them: 12 novels, four works of nonfiction, and three memoirs.

He palled around with poet Jim Harrison and Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, studied the heavens as an amateur astronomer, prayed Sundays to the God of his Catholic faith, and lived and died by the Stoic teachings of Marcus Aurelius.

Caputo put family first, and is survived by his wife and life’s love, Leslie Ware; sons Geoffrey and Marc, daughter-in-law Erin Caputo, and granddaughters Livia, Anastasia and Sofia. He also leaves behind sister Patricia Esralew; sister-in-law Jennifer Ware and her husband, Joseph Falco; and niece Lindsay Ellis.

His requests to loved ones could prove challenging. For decades, he prepared his wife and sons for the time of his death, asking that they help him spend his last days in innovative ways: left on Mount McKinley to die; lashed to a boat’s bow and sent into an Atlantic hurricane; done in by hitmen.

That way, he wouldn’t die a more prosaic death in hospice.

The gallows humor underscored Caputo’s blend of stoicism, love of irony, and Marine Corps grit: He not only survived Vietnam and Lebanon as a young man, he also cheated death in middle age when he hid with the Afghan mujahideen behind a bush from two patrolling Soviet Hind helicopter gunships —and then, just before he turned 60, he flatlined in a tent in Kenya while researching the man-eating lions of Tsavo.

It was there that he heard the term “Babu,” an honorific for a gentleman. And since “grandpa” sounded too old, he insisted his granddaughters call him Babu. He claimed the word was Swahili. He liked the sound of that. When told the word was Hindi in origin, he conveniently forgot that fact again and again.

Babu’s granddaughters gave him great joy. He spent every summer with them, from Montana to Key West, where he told them stories of the war and of sailing and how and why a green flash could light up the sky as the sun sets over the ocean.

He loved his English setters, too, and the vast vistas near his adobe cabin in southern Arizona he shared with Leslie. On forced marches with her through the high desert, he would poke fun at himself: “When you’re dumb, you gotta be tough.”

As a father, he taught his boys early that “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog.” Teddy Roosevelt was an inspiration, after all. So was Muhammed Ali. Caputo was taking boxing lessons at the age of 78.

While he lived very much in the present, he brought the past to life.

“We smoked too much, drank too much,” he wrote of the good old days of journalism. “We dramatized ourselves as history’s assault troops, because self drama is necessary when you risk your neck for something so evanescent as a news story. Yet we were fired with a conviction that we were messengers who brought the light of truth to places where thugs and dictators tried to extinguish it.”

In the final days, he spent his few waking hours talking to his friend Gary Schpero about the meaning of consciousness in the universe and the vestigial beauty of the crabapple tree blossoms outside his bedroom window. He asked to hear Marc read the story of a 17^th century sea battle in the Caribbean. He told his family of a dream where his parents were calling him home.

“We are all of us marching inexorably to the grave,” Caputo wrote when he was in his fifties, “and it may be that the whole point of our lives is the grace and dignity with which we meet our last moment.”

And when that time came, he reminded everyone that, as Aurelius said, “it is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”

• New York Times obituary
• Read more about Phil on Wikipedia
• Find out more about all of his books here.