Goodbye to All That

By LANCE MORROW

THE LIONHEADS

by JOSIAH BUNTING 213 pages. Braziller. $5.95.

The Lionheads is a valuable oddity --a small, intelligent Viet Nam book written by a career officer who in another time, another war, would be bending his disciplined mind to winning his stars. Instead, Josiah Bunting, a 32-year-old infantry major, has drawn up a novel --really a sort of fictionalized indictment--with the same shrewd logic he used to devote to planning operations in the Mekong Delta. The novel's interest, and the author's impulse, is not so much fictional as political. Because the author gives expert testimony, The Lionheads is a notable document of war.

Bunting's villain is a system gone sour. In a war whose moral impetus is ambiguous, even contaminated, Bunting suggests, the "grunts" die uncomprehendingly--"because they felt obliged to be brave in the presence of their buddies." For too many career officers, Viet Nam has simply been a place to get their professional tickets punched, or a proving ground for testing military hardware. Therefore death in Viet Nam has a special fatuity.

His complaints are not entirely new.

But by tracing one misbegotten minor combat operation from the division level to a single Pfc.'s subsequent death in a night "contact" with the enemy, Bunting offers a vivid case history. Dominating the story is Major General George S. Lemming, a brilliant division commander who represents in some ways the best and worst of the Regular Army. A literary cousin of Norman Mailer's General Edward Cummings in The Naked and the Dead, Lemming is a kind of Abercrombie & Fitch soldier who reads Lee's Lieutenants before he goes to sleep. He chides one of his brigade commanders for lack of ferocity by saying: "Your body count is a standing joke." The result of that comment is a microcosmic morality play. Lemming sends the commander's riverine force into an attack staged to impress a Secretary of the Navy who never appears. Almost whimsically, Lemming denies helicopter support for the operation. Men needlessly die.

Bunting has a cool eye for American ceremonies of machismo in Viet Nam, including the baronial protocol of General Lemming's briefings and the peculiar delights of a war-loving major's exotic gun collection ("The nice thing about this one is that it's got such a slow cyclic rate: they can feel each bullet going in"). Reflecting on the U.S. role in Viet Nam, the author quotes a passage from C.S. Forester: "In some ways, it was like a debate of a group of savages as to how to extract a screw from a piece of wood. Accustomed only to nails, they made one effort to pull out the screw by main force." They tried prying and using pincers with increasing force. But the secret remained intact.

Major Bunting is saying goodbye to all that. Now an assistant professor of history at West Point, he will resign from the Army in July. It will be a some what ambiguous end to his career: Bunting has signed a contract to teach military history and decision making at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.

He will also collaborate on a new book called Military Careerism.

Moral Growth. At 6 ft. 4 in., Bun ting has what is called "command pres ence." The son of a Haverford, Pa., real estate man, he was expelled from Penn sylvania's Hill School for "general trou-blemaking," and then, at 17, enlisted in the Marines. After two years, he en rolled at Virginia Military Institute, graduated in 1963 as first captain and third in a class of 1 85. He won a Rhodes scholarship and studied modern British history at Oxford, then settled down to a military career.

It was in Viet Nam, as a plans officer for the riverine force in the Delta, that his attitude began to change. "It was not a matter of seeing a massacre or anything like that," he explains.

"It was a slow, subterranean kind of change: a disgust with the arrogance and unapproachability of the officers, of watching men whose moral growth stopped at the age of twelve. I concluded that we had reached the point that whatever gains we could possibly make, there would never be enough to make up for the suffering we were inflicting."

Such opinions made him increasingly uncomfortable in the military. Some times he amuses himself at parties by playing a truculent young Patton ("If we could just blow out those goddamn dikes up North"). Privately his conversation runs to Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Browning. The night the B-52s started bombing Hanoi and Hai phong, Bunting said: "Can we react any more? I don't know. But this makes me physically sick." . Lance Morrow

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