ALL’S REAL IN TRUE STORY OF VIETNAM POW AND HIS WIFE

Fair or not--and it’s usually not--every theatrical feature or TV movie with a Vietnam tinge is now destined to be measured against Academy Award-nominated “Platoon.”

So let’s get that behind us now and state unequivocally that “In Love and War,” airing at 9 tonight on NBC (Channels 4, 36 and 39) is not and wasn’t intended to be “Platoon.” Not even a distant cousin.

Although rooted in the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964, the story carries neither pressing moral messages about the United States bogging down in Indochina nor panoramic truths about men breaking down in combat under the crushing physical and emotional stress of war.

It will not be remembered as America’s movie of record about the Vietnam War, or even TV’s movie of record about government evasiveness during the Vietnam War. “Friendly Fire” cornered that market in 1979.

Nonetheless, “In Love and War” succeeds at what it is, a contained, small-framed, tightly focused story about love and courage during a conflict that polarized the nation and left ugly sores.

James Woods and Jane Alexander give splendid performances as true-life hero and heroine Jim and Sybil Stockdale, and Haing S. Ngor (“The Killing Fields”) is convincing as a cruel North Vietnamese prison commandant.

The Stockdales’ book, “In Love and War,” was the basis for this inspirational story, which Carol Schreder adapted and Paul Aaron directed for the small screen.

Navy Cmdr. Jim Stockdale spent 7 1/2 years as a Vietnam prisoner of war after his plane was shot down during a bombing mission over North Vietnam in 1965. He was leader of the prison underground during that time, and he was brutally tortured and interrogated daily in his first six years of captivity.

Meanwhile, his wife, Sybil, grew in influence as the outspoken leader of American POW wives.

A Jon Avnet/Steve Tisch production, “In Love and War” shifts between Hanoi prison front and U.S. home front, where Sybil campaigns to get the U.S. government to admit publicly that American POWs are being tortured by the North Vietnamese. Only after she goes public about the torture do the POWs get improved treatment from their public relations-conscious captors.

Not before Stockdale is broken, though.

“The public likes to believe that men with power and strength can undergo torture and not submit,” Stockdale, now 63, said by phone from his office at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford University campus. “There ain’t no such person. You can fight to a draw with them (your captors), but you never win.”

Stockdale is now working on two books, one on philosophy and the other on hostage behavior. Although his leg was broken during torture and he once attempted suicide to avoid giving information, he ultimately became friendly with some of his captors.

How would he greet them today? “I’d go up and shake hands and smile,” he said.

Woods and Alexander, meanwhile, are one of those rare TV couplings, hitting the right buttons and pulling the right levers. In a sense, Alexander’s Sybil is as much a victim as her husband--wondering, doubting, becoming increasingly obsessive and frustrated, trying somehow to juggle her roles as mother and activist. She’s spiny, gritty, pesty, strong.

Given the shape and emphasis of the story, though, “In Love and War” really belongs to Woods, at once an actor of aching tenderness and great force and energy. Fresh from his bravura work in CBS’ “Promise” last December, Woods conveys Stockdale’s ordeal--and defiance--with enormous intensity. It’s on his face, in his tunneled eyes and body language. Director Aaron crafts some powerful prison sequences with Woods that make you wince.

More than anything, “In Love and War” is an intensely personal story of strong wills and strong bonds, but one that had the chance to reach even higher and wider. Only hinted at, unfortunately, are the strong feelings and misgivings that the Stockdales have about U.S. conduct of the war and what they believe was government duplicity in escalating the conflict.

In a printed statement released by a press agent, Stockdale asks:

“So from these unique vantage points of ours, what do we see. . . ? On the public scene, we see a (Lyndon) Johnson government lose confidence in itself after committing a nation to war, and then bug out and leave a generation of Americans to pick up the pieces. We see, in their ‘keep quiet’ mentality at the highest levels of Washington, leaders who bragged that they could run wars like war games, without the destabilizing influence of public knowledge or sentiment. We see broken men, political men, who became victims of their short-run opportunism and total ignorance for the importance of moral leverage in issues of war.

“On the battle scene, and in the dungeons of Hanoi, we see loyal sons of America giving their all for each other. We see self-sacrifice and valor in sharp contrast to the cynicism that put them there.”

Does the statement reflect his true feelings? “It’s harsh, but it’s true,” he said on the phone.

Why is that point of view absent from the movie? “Because the movie is based on the book, and the book isn’t political,” Stockdale replied. “I wanted it that way.”

Yet he believes that the still-controversial and mysterious Gulf of Tonkin incident--in which two U.S. destroyers were allegedly attacked by North Vietnamese craft--was intentionally blown out of proportion by the U.S. government.

It was a convenient provocation by some “rag-tag (North Vietnamese) torpedo boats that shot a couple of torpedoes,” Stockdale said--one that gave Johnson what he needed to push through Congress a Tonkin Resolution authorizing U.S. bombing of the North. The resolution was a virtual declaration of war.

A carrier pilot who had been flying secret missions over Laos, Stockdale says he personally sank two of the three North Vietnamese craft that were said to have attacked the Maddox and C. Turner Joy in the Gulf, precipitating the resolution.

The Johnson Administration “already had the Tonkin Resolution in draft,” he said. “So it was a case of filling in the blanks with a provocation so that they could get Congress to endorse the war.”

Hence his argument that the Administration “cut corners” and had no “moral” case for bombing the North.

“Governments can make mistakes,” Stockdale said. “Big bureaucracies bumble. And we’re not exempt.”

If that, too, were in this movie, then “Love and War” would be as important as it is moving.