SHALLOW GRAVES: TWO WOMEN AND VIETNAM by Wendy Wilder Larsen and Tran Thi Nga (Random House: $16.95; 225 pp.)

Will the Vietnam conflict be the first war recorded better by women than by men? I do not disregard the moving brilliance of Michael Herr’s “Dispatches,” nor the severe parable of “Going After Cacciato,” but a story of war is not the same as a story of men at war; there are wider connections. For these, I think of Frances Fitzgerald’s “Fire in the Lake,” Gloria Emerson’s “Winners and Losers,” Bobby Ann Mason’s “In Country,” and now this dual memorial written by two women, one American and one Vietnamese.

Why should it be so, if it is so? Is it because this was a war more truly perceived, at least by Western eyes, through its cost than through its plot? Agincourt, related by those who came to strip the armor and bury the dead, instead of by Shakespeare’s King Harry? “Hamlet,” told by Fortinbras?

For America, it was a war neither of victory nor, strictly speaking, of defeat. We have neither Achilles pursuing Hector around Troy, nor Hector fleeing; respective exploits, if you like, along the ascending and descending cycle of prowess. What you have is the trampled ground over there, and the trampled sense of national purpose over here.

We do not find it congenial to think of ourselves as subject to history. No nation does, of course; and political discourse everywhere is triumphalist one way or the other; even the discourse of pacifists and ecologists. Even Thoreau’s. But while France’s rulers, say, proclaimed various shades of gloire, the people listened and kept something under the mattress, just in case.

We still think history can be what we want it to be; we absorb what enhances us and ignore the rest. Which is why the Vietnam veterans came back in silence. It took Emerson, 10 years ago, and Mason, last year, to look at them. It took a woman artist to conceive the black marble trench--a feminine symbol, if ever there was one--that commemorated their dead.

Wendy Wilder Larson is a poet who spent several war-time years in Saigon as the wife of Time magazine’s bureau chief. Tran Thi Nga was the bureau’s bookkeeper, and Larson would turn to her for help and counsel. After the war, they met in the United States, where Nga was a refugee, and the roles, to a degree, were reversed. “Mrs. Nga is coming toward me/on the Avenue of the Americas,” Larson writes. “She’s wearing a red nylon ski parka/She looks small and alone/beside all the reflecting glass.”

Together, they wrote “Shallow Graves,” a story of two complementary displacements that, taken together, record an avalanche of history. In Saigon, reaching out to a strange civilization that her people were helping to destroy while trying to save, Larson was Ba Larson. In Cos Cob, Conn., reaching out to a strange civilization that had replaced her own, Nga is Mrs. Nga. The two displacements were not symmetrical. Larson’s was temporary and by choice; Nga’s was permanent and unavoidable. Asymmetrically, then, like bow and violin, they draw out a grave and elegiac theme for our times.

In the first part, Larson relates in unadorned but graceful verse, a succession of vignettes and reflections. They convey her despairing sense of being the outsider at a precious and tragic ceremony; part of some collective Gulliver whose kindest gestures kill. In the second part, Nga tells her own long and astonishing voyage from a sheltered, Mandarin-like childhood to the ghostless chill of an American suburb. Her rich and compelling narrative has been set out as verse by Larson; an operation that is not entirely successful.

In her own story, Larson’s poetry, transparent and understated and punctuated with flashes of irony and wonder, serves her marvelously well. The editors are heavy-handed, I think, in stressing its painlessness. In fact, it clarifies and enhances; and the only times that it can be slightly obtrusive is when it goes out of its way to be plain and matter-of-fact.

Her theme, essentially of a single-minded American presence in a complex and highly developed culture, gets a great deal out of incongruity. Briefed before departure by a Time editor: “Any questions? he asked/What about the water?/People do live there, he said.” She looks at his wall map, stuck with pushpins for his correspondents. “In a peninsula floating in green/stood two red ones./One of them would be us.”

In a poem entitled “Learning the War,” she recites the jargon new arrivals had to learn. “We learned to rate hamlets/praise Ruff-puffs/recognize Kit Carson scouts/laugh at white mice./We learned it all/and couldn’t speak to anyone/when we got home.”

She writes about shopping expeditions for local artifacts, about consciousness-raising sessions for American wives. There is a terrible freight aboard her details. She writes of an American rural adviser who brings along a Golden Retriever that the village children fall in love with. When he leaves, he shoots it. It is one of her themes. Americans do not simply use things, they use them up.

But irony is not all of her purpose. Larson is setting all the verbal and material accoutrements of American presence at a distance from herself. Alongside, she sets the bits and pieces of the Vietnamese spirit that she is able to gather. She is stripping herself, in other words, to understand. Much of her understanding, and ours, comes through her course in English literature given to Vietnamese students. The filtering back of our literature through their sensibility is achingly revealing. A student comes to her after reading “Romeo and Juliet”; the scene puts two contrasting cultures on a single public canvas. The girl, it seems, was in love with her cousin:

“Such love was forbidden by the church./Should she kill herself like Juliet?/She drank the Coke I offered./From the balcony we watched/magnesium flares fall beyond the harbor.”

She teaches Blake’s terrible poem about London: “I wandered through each charter’d street/Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,” and assigns her class to transpose it to Saigon. “Where is the Pearl of the Orient?” a student writes. “Large foreigners live in her houses./Men in green uniforms patrol her streets, sleep with her women/Juveniles, uprooted from their families, steal from her people./The rush of disorder shows on every face.”

In her own story, Nga tells of her pampered but strictly controlled childhood as the daughter of a provincial official. Her house was virtually a palace; but the hard times seeped through. An aunt was executed by the French for underground activity. The Japanese came; then the Chinese. A Chinese general, hearing her sing, virtually abducted her. Later, she returned, married a man she had always loved, who was also married to her sister. Against her family’s wishes, she got an education and went to work, first for the government and later for Time magazine. She made it aboard an evacuation plane, along with her children; and began the long, painful process of taking up an exile life.

Nga’s shrewd and remarkable story is an extraordinary picture of a way of life tormented and dying over generations. The verse form seems imposed, though. Larson has used Nga’s words as much as possible, and they are very moving; but they would probably work better as prose.

The intention, however, is to bring the two voices together; and in this, “Shallow Graves” is profoundly successful. A sisterhood has been forged that tells us of one of the tragedies of our time in words and images that we have not seen and that make it understandable in a way we have not known; and more unbearable for all that.