MILESTONES

PLEADED GUILTY. CAPTAIN DERRICK ROBERTSON, 31, to consensual sex, sodomy, adultery and conduct unbecoming an officer; in Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. Robertson, the first officer sentenced in the Aberdeen sex scandal, was booted out of the Army, and will serve four months in prison.

AILING. SCOTT HAMILTON, 38, Olympic gold-medal skater; with testicular cancer. Doctors say Hamilton will undergo chemotherapy treatment.

DIED. CARLO FASSI, 67, coach who guided Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill, John Curry and Robin Cousins to Olympic gold medals; of a heart attack; in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he was accompanying his current skaters, including American Nicole Bobek, at the World Figure Skating Championships.

DIED. JACQUES FOCCART, 83, leading architect of French policy in Africa and adviser to four French Presidents, including Charles de Gaulle; in Paris. An important figure in the Gaullist movement, he operated in clandestine circles to maintain France's power in its former African colonies.

DIED. ROBERT SAUDEK, 85, pioneer in the golden age of television; in Baltimore, Maryland. Saudek was the creator of the critically acclaimed Omnibus series, which ran from 1952 to 1961.

DIED. WILBERT AWDRY, 85, British reverend and children's author who created Thomas the Tank Engine; in Stroud, England. Awdry's books were inspired by his childhood spent near his beloved, and noisy, pufferbellies.

DIED. VICTOR VASARELY, 88, a master of Op Art, a type of abstraction based on optical illusions and displayed in popular paintings that combines bright colors and geometrical forms; in Paris.

DIED. V.S. PRITCHETT, 96, writer, critic and all-around British man of letters; in London. Literally a child of this century, Sir Victor (he was knighted in 1975) turned out pithy, highly polished prose in a variety of genres, including travel writing, memoirs (A Cab at the Door, 1968), biographies, novels (Dead Man Leading, 1937) and numerous collections of literary criticism and short stories. He was a rare book reviewer who could also create memorable fiction. His stories, comic but sympathetic renderings of the antic aspirations of ordinary people, remained refreshingly old-fashioned and essentially timeless and enduring, given all the literary fads he lived through. Pritchett expressed his credo in the preface to his Collected Stories (1982): "I have always thought it the duty of writers to justify their people, for we all feel that for good or ill, we are exceptional and justified in being what we are."