Grey Flannel War

DON'T Go NEAR THE WATER (373 pp.) --William Brinkley--Random House ($3.95).

"I sing of arms and the man," wrote Virgil rather pointedly in The Aeneid. It remained for World War II to spawn the bards of basic training camps, staging areas, supply depots and paper-shuffling rear echelons. These latter-day laureates all agree that war gets funnier and funnier in direct proportion to its distance from the firing line, and sometimes prove it, e.g., See Here, Private Hargrove, Mister Roberts, No Time for Sergeants. Though it works harder for its laughs and gets fewer of them, Don't Go Near the Water may enjoy a like success. A Book-of-the-Month Club midsummer selection, this novel about a Navy public-relations crew stationed in the Pacific tickled Hollywood's fancy for a spectacular $355,000 plus royalties, and is nicely timed to catch readers with their hammocks up and guards down.

To Clinton T. Nash, peacetime stockbroker and wartime executive officer of the Public Relations Section of ComFleets command, his job, his staff, and the tropical island of Tulura constitute the hub of the naval universe. On his desk rests a three-inch shell casing full of paper clips, and a sextant which he tries in vain to sight; over it hangs the sign, "Think Big!" Nicknamed "Marblehead" because he lacks more than hair, Nash affects British knee-length shorts, carries a swagger stick, and talks a strange mixture of adman and old salt ("My hatch is open for ideas").

His staff is more accustomed to pouring its big ideas down its collective hatch at the officers' club. Besides, his men suffer noncombat fatigue from squiring Stateside VIPs around the island (their code word for the chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee is "God"). But with a wobbly assist now and then, Marblehead carries on. To give the home front "the little picture," he promotes what he calls a "Joe Blow of Kokomo" campaign to locate the typical young

Navy enlisted man, dredges up a Neanderthal boatswain's mate named Farragut Jones who speaks basic English, all of it four-letter unprintables. Marblehead copes with a case of "ultimate fraternization" or "love--by that I mean plain, raw, unadulterated sex" between a yeoman and a nurse. He sits out an enlisted men's "mutiny" (they want 14 bottles of beer once a week, rather than two a day) and a correspondent's revolt (he wants his sheets changed every day), but almost founders under the first news of the atomic bomb ("That Air Force propaganda mill is really something to keep up with").

Author Brinkley, 38, himself a Navy veteran of both Mediterranean and Pacific campaigns and currently an assistant editor of LIFE, laces in an implausible South Pacific idyl between a Harvard man and a high-bred island girl named Melora. But at novel's end, old Marblehead is back at stage center, having finally mastered his sextant: "Really it's very simple, isn't it ... unlike Public Relations. Why, ANDany meathead could be a seagoing officer."

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