AHAB'S HARPOONERS

By LANCE MORROW

CAPTAIN SCOTT O'GRADY HAD THE grace to blush when America welcomed him home with the kind of publicity once lavished on Douglas MacArthur. O'Grady had eaten grass and ants for six days of adventurous Bosnian discomfort.

On the other hand, Navy pilot John McCain, shot down over Hanoi in 1967, spent 5-1/2 years in enemy captivity, including 31 months in solitary. Brutally beaten and otherwise tortured, repeatedly on the edge of death, McCain survived by drawing on some fierce inner resource. When the North Vietnamese--knowing that McCain's father was the famous Admiral Jack McCain, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific forces--tried to release the young flyer early on as a propaganda gesture, McCain, crippled and skeletal, spat in their faces and let loose such an outpouring of naval obscenity that the startled North Vietnamese dignitaries flew backward out of McCain's cell like tumbleweed.

Well, what is a hero? When finally released with other POWS in 1973, McCain was welcomed home, all right (he leaned forward on his crutches and thanked Richard Nixon for everything including the Christmas bombing that had rained all around the "Hanoi Hilton" while he was a guest there), but McCain's was not a feel-good denouement. A rotten script. One of the lessons of Vietnam was that political context counts--that it may, in fact, be everything. Boys who went off to Vietnam with John Wayne movies screening in their minds returned to Deer Hunter America, to be spat upon and cursed themselves.

McCain, now the senior Senator from Arizona, is one of five Annapolis graduates and Vietnam veterans--distinguished or infamous--whose interbraided destinies make up the story of The Nightingale's Song (Simon & Schuster; 543 pages; $27.50), a tough and fascinating study of war, heroism, politics and the American psyche at a profound cultural divide. The other protagonists: Robert McFarlane, John Poindexter, Oliver North and James Webb.

Author Robert Timberg, now deputy Washington bureau chief of the Baltimore Sun, is himself an Annapolis graduate and Marine veteran of Vietnam. Covering the Reagan White House as the Iran-contra affair unfolded during the 1980s, Timberg "kept picking up echoes of Vietnam ... I remember thinking that perhaps Iran-contra was at least in part the bill for Vietnam finally coming due." Timberg had been told that the nightingale cannot perform unless it first hears a few notes from another nightingale. His conceit is that in the '80s, Ronald Reagan sang the nightingale's song of patriotism and military pride and honor and sacrifice, a traditional American hymn of duty and manhood that Vietnam had silenced, or turned obscene. Timberg thinks three of the five men--North, Poindexter and McFarlane--got tangled up in the Rube Goldberg contraption of Iran-contra in part because the scheme (arms for hostages, profits going to the freedom fighters of Nicaragua) gave them back some of the lost notes, a snatch of the melody they had been denied.

The Nightingale's Song cannily differentiates its five main characters, whose portraits have a novelistic fascination. North, for example: an authentic battlefield hero (brave, focused, cool under fire) who is also a hot dog and, suggests Timberg, perhaps unhinged in some surreal way that involves a dangerous mix of self-dramatization and stupidity. McCain: a raunchy screw-up and party boy who graduated near the bottom of his Annapolis class but magnificently rose to the occasion later. Poindexter: a brilliant student at the Naval Academy who suffered afterward, in Timberg's rendering, from a blind-side naivete about politics. McFarlane: a saintly self-diminisher, subverted by thoughts of his own unworthiness but cherishing immense ambitions. When McFarlane attempted suicide in 1987 under the strain of Iran-contra, it was by the strangely unmartial means of a Valium overdose.

Neither McCain nor Webb had anything to do with Iran-contra. Webb, another true battlefield hero (Navy Cross, Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts), was no hot dog but rather, in many ways, the smartest and best of the bunch. After the typically bitter homecoming from the war, he forged a career as a novelist, writing the best battlefield novel of Vietnam, Fields of Fire. During the Reagan Administration, he had a brief and stormy tenure as Secretary of the Navy.

These questions hum in the background of Timberg's text: Does America need a warrior class? When? How trained? How protected from their own politicians? Should they be kept belowdecks like Ahab's harpooners and brought up only when there is a white whale to be killed? Vietnam was the white whale, sure enough.