No Heroes Without Combat : PETTIBONE’S LAW <i> By John Keene (Simon & Schuster: $19.95; 363 pp.) </i>

“Pettibone’s Law” is a novel for its time. Smilin’ Jack Rawlins, the Vietnam veteran anti-hero of John Keene’s first book, is a storyteller of the “new world order,” as George Bush has begun to define that in recent weeks. Keene’s narrator believes the kind of story Americans most value presents characters who are the narrator’s moveable pieces, plots and subplots that are as consciously controlled as “smart bombs,” and language that has the undiscriminating fury of napalm. His mission is completed in 363 pages.

The narrative alternately recollects Rawlins’ experiences as a fighter pilot in Southeast Asia, and an air-wing reservist, then defense-industry proposal writer in California. However, the novel’s multidirectional plot is not solely devoted to Rawlins. The other major story element provided by the omniscient narrator of “Pettibone’s Law” concerns three women who commit themselves to the anti-war movement of the ‘60s for sinister and/or naive reasons.

By the early ‘70s, they all have tailored their leadership in the movement to self-serving personal agendas. Their efforts culminate in an abortive peace march and a “media event” in Hanoi. The rope-weave structure binds the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s together as the eras of nihilism and new, improved nihilism. Military and civilian actions on “the field of dishonor” become progressively more unconscionable and horrible.

In the present action of the novel, Rawlins is trying to “learn something of what he wanted in life: where he belonged.” What he learns is that the lessons of military and civilian life are the same: “You had better watch your step very carefully out there or something will bite you, because the world is rife with, abounds in, folly, perversity, and misadventure.” This is the “law” of the novel’s title.

The most memorable parts of the folly, perversity and misadventure that constitute Rawlins’ story occur in the military sections. Descriptions of the pilot’s fear have extraordinary blunt power, as when Rawlins remembers missions in which fear multiplies second by second. In those passages, the reader is invited to intensely experience the fused exhilaration and terror of flying in the F-80s, A-4s and F4-Bs of the pilot fraternity. We feel firsthand the pilot’s illusion of transcending the laws of physics, human psychology and physiology, all the laws of nations and religions, and we understand that for people like Rawlins life always will divide into time spent as military gods and time spent as civilian mortals.

From Rawlins’ perspective, military training was a natural choice: “He remembered saying to himself sometime in the fifties, ‘I don’t have a war. How can I amount to anything?’ Without combat there were no heroes and how else could you distinguish yourself in a boring world?”

In passages that recollect the training of young Marine aviators in the 1950s, we are shown how the soldiers are brutally humiliated until their self-respect is erased, to be supplanted by an unblinking sense of duty. Needless to say, these boot-camp experiences have been exhaustively presented in war novels and movies (most notably “Full Metal Jacket”), but probably no contemporary work has conveyed as much rage about it as “Pettibone’s Law.” Readers who have come to admire the U.S. pilots of the Gulf War undoubtedly will feel provoked by Keene’s portrayal of the successful trainee. In this novel, airmen are uniform in their sense of loyalty to each other, their courage, and their determination, and they are uniformly amoral, juvenile, contemptuous and blood-hungry.

Our worst fears about the military hierarchy are played out through various subplots. We see how absolute corruption and incompetence rule at the highest levels. Rank is earned suspiciously and denied whimsically. The leaders of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era are no less corrupt in their actions than are our national and military leaders. So that we do not underestimate Rawlins’ contempt for the women organizers of SLUR (Socialized Labor’s Unrelenting Revolt), their names serve as reminders: Barbie Belheur, Polly Esther Proudbird, Mrs. Gunnery Sergeant O’Flynn and Electra Gunhammer. The names of military figures (Colonel Morgankrank, Major Poltroun, Colonel Creed, Captain America, Captain Braveheart) in the novel similarly establish them as caricatures.

As a veteran, Rawlins finds no peace in his job with the aerospace industry funded through trillion-dollar defense contracts. Coerced into participating in hawkish Political Action Committees, he begins to understand at yet another level the war machine’s predictability of wasted human potential, of the individual’s conscience traded away for supposed “national security.”

This predictability helps the integrity of “Pettibone’s Law” as a polemic, but it does not always serve it as a story. The quiet moments when the reader might hope to be surprised by the internal development of characters are presented only perfunctorily, so that the author can engage us again in external events.

Character relationships all are brief, unchanging. Rather than allow any one moment between characters to subtly, fully deepen our involvement with them, Keene always is inclined to recount an amusing anecdote unrelated to present action. Some of these anecdotes are very long, and only mildly amusing.

On the rare occasions when a single scene is presented more expansively, it involves dialogue that is indistinguishable from the narrative voice. In one of the last sections of the novel, Rawlins and his friend Harley have a “debate” that is more than 20 pages long. Their contrived puppet-show dialogue reviews all the arguments of the novel. These problem scenes are few, but they diminish the reader’s emotional involvement.

At the end of “Pettibone’s Law,” we read that Smilin’ Jack Rawlins “began in earnest to examine his life.” The honesty in that is representative of the best qualities of this novel. John Keene has reminded us that after the horrible price is paid in war, we are always led back to where we started: the new, unsettling alignments and unexpected estrangements (“the new world order”), the many short- and long-term plans for reparations, and, finally, the negotiations that previously seemed too morally compromising and intolerably lengthy and too threatening to our national pride.