THE FIELDS OF BATTLE, BETWEEN ARMIES, BETWEEN FATHER AND SON

Author: By David Mehegan, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, February 16, 1997

Page: N18

Section: Books

Yes, it happened. We are seeing that generation opening up more and more now, in books as well as in private. The late Moritz Thomsen did so last year in ``My Two Wars'' (Steerforth, $25), which was half about his lifelong psychic war with his father and half about his harrowing 30 missions as an Air Corps bombardier. Social historian Paul Fussell has written much about World Wars I and II and their absurdities, but not until last year did he write in detail of his own experience as a platoon leader in Europe, in ``Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic'' (Little, Brown, $24). Fussell's rage at the stupidity of military leaders, and the needless suffering it caused (he was wounded himself), made him permanently distrustful of authority.

Near the end of the just-published ``Before Their Time'' (Knopf, $22), a quiet memoir of an appalling, suicidal infantry attack in France in October 1944, novelist Robert Kotlowitz explains why he and one of the two other men who survived the attack recently met for the first time to talk about it: ``Most urgent, I think, was the unspoken sense between us of how little time there was left -- not only for us but for every ex-GI.'' Kotlowitz writes that more than half the men who served in World War II are dead.

With poignant and gathering tension, Kotlowitz dwells on the intimate personal details of the men in his platoon with whom he trained and was shipped overseas: their attitudes, personalities, ways of talking, their hygiene or lack of it, even their smells. Hubbell, Willis, Keaton, Barnato, and especially slovenly and irritating Ira Fedderman. Even after 50 years, he writes, ``I get a little heated when I write the names out like this. A small tremor of nervous agitation seems to go through me, and I shiver a little.''

Except for Kotlowitz and two others, everyone in the platoon, about 40 men, was killed when some fool who had never heard of Bunker Hill or Fredericksburg ordered them to attack a dug-in German position on higher ground. Later, Kotlowitz was assigned to sort through the duffel bags of the dead, and when he found Fedderman's messy bag, he felt, weirdly, a twinge of the old irritation. He never found out who ordered the attack and the regimental history does not say. So he has tried to make his own record, one that gives ``the full resonance of what happened, the elusive personal dimension of it, the private griefs and regrets.''

Another war and age, another soldier, this one novelist Albert French, whose powerful new memoir, ``Patches of Fire: A Story of War and Redemption'' (Anchor Books, $22.95), was also written as a way to deal with the demons that tormented him after his service in Vietnam. It is raw, cinematic and thick with the language of soldiers. French's novels, ``Billy'' and ``Holly,'' are agonizingly graphic and intensely emotional, but this is the book he wrote first, the one that gave him the confidence to write the others. Although French participated after the war in talk-it-out therapy with other Vietnam veterans, for him the ``redemption'' in the title came from the successful effort to write the story in his own words. It allowed him to break though his depression.

Though his is very much the black soldier's experience, and Chu Lai is far from the foothills of eastern France, one recognizes in Albert French many of the same emotions as in Robert Kotlowitz: the not-always-agreeable intimacy with comrades, the terror and confusion in battle, and especially the lack of understanding of what they are asked to do and why. In an attack across an area of rice paddies, French was wounded in the neck and his buddy Vernon Carter had to go on without him. Later he learned that Vernon was killed, and in a strange parallel with Kotlowitz's account, he was asked to go though a pile of brown bags to identify the contents. But these are not duffel bags; they contain bodies, including that of his friend.

As infantrymen, Kotlowitz and French knew the horror of combat, but they did not know the fear of command, a principal theme of ``Father, Soldier, Son: Memoir of a Platoon Leader in Vietnam'' by Nathaniel Tripp (Steerforth, $26). This will stand as one of the finest soldier memoirs of the Vietnam War. Tripp today is a film producer and part-time farmer in Vermont, but in 1968 he was a lieutenant during one of the bloodiest periods of the war, just after the Tet offensive, in such deadly places as the Ho Bo Woods, the Iron Triangle, and along jungle-lined Highway 13. After early failures of nerve over his own fitness for command, Tripp gradually regained confidence in himself. He learned to love his men and to be devoted to their safety above all else. He also came to love the Vietnamese people and though he made relentless war on the Viet Cong, he seems to feel no rancor toward them.

If all that has been written about the war in Vietnam, in fiction and nonfiction, has made it seem a familiar story to some, Tripp overcomes cliche by individualizing every well-known fact. The increasing decay of morale and discipline as the men in the field came to believe that no one at home or at higher echelons cared about them or believed in the cause. The extraordinarey determination, intelligence and skill of the Viet Cong. The terrible damage to the civilians caught in the cross-fire. The ice-cold toleration of, sometimes zest for, the relentless killing. Tripp's description of one heart-stopping night on a lost patrol in the jungle, with the enemy's whispers only a few feet away, is unforgettable.

Like Kotlowitz, Tripp has nothing but contempt for ambitious midlevel officers who issue foolhardy orders to further their own careers. And like Moritz's ``My Two Wars,'' half of ``Father, Soldier, Son'' is about Tripp's own tormented father, who had had some kind of psychotic breakdown in the Pacific in World War II and could not go ashore with US forces in the invasion of Saipan. Fathers play a part in each of these books; perhaps they must in every memoir of war. Kotlowitz's father covered his eyes and would not look at his son the day he left for the war. French sought out his father, whom he had never known, to tell him that he had behaved well in battle, but learned that he had died. The elder Tripp opposed his son's Vietnam service, and the troubled relationship between the two men haunts this book, in the same way that memories of the war haunt the author and his relationship with his own sons.

``One after another,'' he writes at the end, ``my own three sons have discovered my old fatigues and put them on. . . . I might have burned the clothing or buried it long ago, but I couldn't do so any more than I could bury the ghosts of Vietnam. . . . Sometimes, in the evening, that same light returns. The hills are cast half in shadow, half golden light. We are at peace, we are at war. There is movement in the bushes by the barbecue. Shadows lengthen. The voices of my sons ring like bells as they attack phantom enemies.''