Beyond Cynicism War Games

186 pp. $4.95.

ONLY the Indochina War-described recently by a veteran as "the biggest nothing in history"-could have produced a book like James Park Sloan's War Games, a callous yet strangely sensitive autobiographical narrative of a young "tough-minded" soldier's attempts to cope with the brutally absurd war.

In person, Sloan speaks quietly and intelligently of his war experiences, vainly attempting to sort them into some logical philosophical system. He realizes, however, that this war bows to no systemization. An opportunist, Sloan decided to profit as much as possible from Vietnam and soaked the corruption, bureaucratic idiocy, and brutality for whatever he could gain.

"I was a supercilious, silly intellectual," he declares, recalling an army exploit in which he turned over his sergeant's house trailer (with the man's wife inside) and destroyed all of the NCO Club furniture. "I was mean as only an intellectual can be mean in confronting the threateningly democratic, over-bureaucratized army." A demonic grin flashes quietly across Sloan's face. "Yes, I'm a revolutionary. But I stopped my revolution because nobody joined in."

Sloan is an infidel, refusing to accept a God who denied him a horse when he was a prayerful South Carolina child of six. In 1961, he came to Harvard as a freshman and remained three years with mediocre grades. He spent his hours drinking cases of beer in front of the Adams House TV and pissing in the sink of a nearby art room when his bladder beckoned. One night, he fondly recalls, the janitor locked the art room and Sloan was forced to deposit his urine in the House's ashtrays.

In 1964, Sloan left Harvard, "with no respect for pro forma education." hoping that the Army would teach him how to improve his Harvard performance. After serving in Korea and Vietnam, he returned to Cambridge and in 1968 garnered a magna for a history thesis on Nixon. Except for scientists, Sloan admires few academicians, imagining the thoughts of the professors who gave him his magna: "Here's a promising young off-shoot of our own bull-shit."

After graduation, he married an art teacher who was the heiress to the fortune of the inventor of the little red wagon. He tried some courses at the Business School, some accounting jobs, and a stint at housewifery before becoming a teacher in a suburban high school. "A Harvard degree is never good if you stay in one place too long," he cautions. "Rather than becoming dully competent to a task you should play the role of the well-mannered but restless whiz kid."

He thought of selling his A.B. back to the College for $15,000. "deducting some for what I've milked it for." But it was non-negotiable, he says: "They wouldn't take it." So, he wrote his first book, War Games.

WAR, as Sloan observes in his book, is no longer tied down by facts and has become metaphysical. "War is no longer waged merely to achieve ends; it is waged as proof of its own possibility." Sloan's war-a small war, as a colonel laments to him, but the only war we have-is a brutally mechanistic game which feeds upon its own data and upon the bodies of the data-collectors. Within the game's gaunt stupidity individuals play only peripheral roles, stepping quietly here and there so as not to disturb the data. Sloan the amoralist believes himself only "an actor whose inhumanities are necessary to the plot. Whose victims are straw people. The point of a drama is not its carnage but how the hero turns out."

As an individual, Sloan's hero is a quietly brash, intellectually aloof fighter compulsively plotting the means to exploit the corruption and stupidity of the "midgets" he has been deployed to defend. For him, the war is no more than a hastily-built bureaucratic contraption within which the warrior must eke out a petty and sadistic existence profiteering promotions, medals, and love-making. Wry but bitter, Sloan's hero constantly visits the base's dentist while worrying about continual gonorrhea, and enjoys pissing into the flak around his helicopter gunship. Amid the war's psychic viciousness the hero maintains his uneasy sanity by means of his crudely cynical opportunism and angry mischief.

To Sloan, the powerful delude themselves in their reliance upon facts and systems. They receive most of Sloan's simple and finely-crafted sarcasm. In one incident, Sloan accompanies a congressman newly arrived in Vietnam and compares the man's admiration of the military equipment with the attitude of small town tourists who are impressed with the furniture, rugs, and woodwork of a New York hotel:

They wonder what it costs and whether the company would ship like material to their town. They ring bells to see if attendants will come. The actual bellboy, because he has a face, and consequently imperfections, is not at all what they would have suspected. But even though he is not the butler on television, they are impressed. The general, remembering that I do not drive, said that he enjoyed driving and got into the Iriver's seat himself. Highest paid chauffeur you'll ever have, he said to me. This manner made quite a hit with the congressman.

"So this is the Mekong Delta. It all started here."

"Yes," said the general. "That's what they say in the briefings."

"Well, I guess that makes this some sort of historic spot."

Over the headquarters gate are the Roman numeral four and some words in Vietnamese. The congressman asked if Kublai Khan had built the area. The general said he understood it had been the French. Must be hell to have everything in your country built by somebody else, said the congressman.

SLOAN'S war is sadistic, culminating in his killing of an entire Ranger unit that is attempting to rape the survivors of a napalm attack on a village. Pulling his carbine's trigger, he observes with curiosity the jerking marionette-like motions of his victims: "It never ceases to seem incongruous that real guns make only a vague clack rather than the bang and echo represented in movies," Receiving the Cross of Gallantry, he returns to the States.

War Games makes up in introspective bravado what it lacks in characterization or martial grandeur for a dirty little war, it is a stylishly dirty little book.