Reflections of Another War

ONE VERY HOT DAY by David Halberstam. 216 pages. Houghfon Mifflin. $4.95.

Good or bad, a war novel usually proves that the eye and makeup of the beholder are at least as important as what he has witnessed. Each book is as fresh, or as stale, as the writer's response to his subject.

As a correspondent for the New York Times, David Halberstam won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his reports on war and politics in South Viet Nam during the Diem regime. He is serious, informed, thoughtful and troubled. His novel is not concerned with the war now being fought in Viet Nam; it goes back to the days before total U.S. commitment, the days when American advisers went along with Vietnamese troops only to provide combat know-how and to try to prevent the inevitable gaffes that would surely come when the shooting started.

Halberstam's soldiers are all from central casting. His two U.S. advisers, Lieut. Anderson, a West Point graduate, and a cynical, hard-drinking captain named Beaupre, are sorry figures of frustration. Their real enemy is "face." They must not really "advise"; they must constantly come up with new ways to make the Vietnamese officers think that every necessary move springs from Vietnamese savvy. The South Vietnamese troops are carefree, careless, guilty of battle errors that any G.I. fresh from basic training would avoid instinctively. Time after time, they make mistakes that end in ambush and death.

Even the patrol that supplies the major action is predictably doomed. The Viet Cong know well in advance which villages are to be "surprised"; back at South Vietnamese headquarters, one of their insiders may even have had a big hand in planning the mission. And then there is the inevitable ambush, the company decimated, one dead Viet Cong the sole trophy to offset the whole grisly disaster.

As a piece of reportage, Halberstam's account of the march, the ambush, the total ineptness of the South Vietnamese army is rendered with skill and conviction. But by now, the ground the author covers is drearily familiar. And the more familiar the war becomes, the more it needs the talents of a novelist to give the subject new vitality, to make it more than a mere reminder of yesterday's headlines. For all his talents as a journalist, that is what Halberstam has not been able to do.

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