AFTERMATH : FORTUNATE SON, <i> By Lewis B. Puller Jr. (Grove Weidenfeld: $21.95; 389 pp.)</i> : REMEMBERING HEAVEN’S FACE: A Moral Witness in Vietnam, <i> By John Balaban (Poseidon: $21.95; 336 pp.)</i>

Vietnam veterans like to say that there were as many Vietnams as there were soldiers who fought there, but what all soldiers in Vietnam had in common was the experience of war itself. For better or worse, the landscape of war appears to have, for all who come there, many of the same scarifying features. How else to explain some of the remarkable similarities in the otherwise remarkably dissimilar accounts of Lewis B. Puller Jr. and John Balaban?

Puller, author of “Fortunate Son,” an autobiography, is a decorated combat veteran, a Marine whose tour ended when he detonated a land mine, losing both legs and part of both hands. Balaban, author of “Remembering Heaven’s Face,” a record of a life “threaded through the needle of Vietnam,” was a conscientious objector who chose alternative service in Vietnam, and, after his initial wounding, returned to Vietnam not once, but three more times.

After the war, both men have essentially the same recurrent dream. Both dream that they are back in Vietnam, once again utterly helpless and impotent in the face of enormous, uncontrollable forces. Puller misses an essential but unnamed object, unable to protect himself or his men; Balaban misses the contents of his dossier, unable to help the wounded and burned Vietnamese children who are his charges.

In both dreams, the missing object seems to represent this loss of personal power, the shattering of the self’s illusion that it is indestructible, that it can, in fact, matter at all. Both Balaban and Puller survive enormous traumas in Vietnam, but it is this trauma to their sense of self that they must overcome to find meaning in their lives again. This is, I think, clearest in Puller’s lucid, brave, and understated view of himself.

When he came “into country,” Puller, a green lieutenant, took in stride vicious and unpredictable enemy attacks. He was able to control the behavior of his edgy, armed teen-agers who played with heads of corpses and had to be restrained from mutilating enemy bodies. But when he realized that “our first two kills had absolutely no say in the manner and timing of their deaths,” he felt “vaguely unclean in an unidentifiable way . . . . (He) wondered if it was a soldier’s lot always to fall victim to circumstances beyond his control.”

Back from the field, safe once more, Puller momentarily identified with the enemy he had helped to kill. His sudden, unwelcome knowledge of his own helplessness in the face of a universe randomly dealing out death temporarily unmanned him. He was not ready to believe that in war there is no personal choice, no control over one’s destiny. The evidence, however, was there and would soon become incontrovertible.

It was there for Balaban, too, but he seems to have chosen another way of seeing, a way of rationalizing (or neutralizing) the terrifying randomness. He was wounded by a chance “snippet” from a cluster bomb exploding on the edge of town, yet remained intent on finding personal meaning, relevance and purpose in this random event:

This snippet “had nevertheless strayed my way, as if to remind me of the pure cheekiness of standing close to so much pain and death and expecting I would come out whole; it was as if Death had taken a step closer to whisper in my ear, to say: ‘My young American friend, my little do-gooder, do you think you are less dear to me than the smallest child? This is what I have done to you. You know I could do more.’ ”

The way these two men react to sudden, irrevocable knowledge of their own powerlessness allows us to see into the nature and effect of war, to see that, for the combat soldier and the conscientious objector alike, war does not end with the cease-fire or the return of the troops. Grass may cover the scarred, bomb-cratered landscape of Vietnam, but for those who were caught up in war, the war still goes on. Participants and witnesses are only a dream or an impinging memory away from Vietnam.

Does how well someone survives depend on how well he accommodates to knowledge of his own powerlessness? Readers of “Remembering Heaven’s Face” and “Fortunate Son” may well conclude that it does.

If Puller (whose father, “Chesty” Puller, was the most decorated man in the Marine Corps) felt dissatisfied with his performance as a military man in Vietnam, he need give ground to no one in his fight to regain a place on the home front. After two years in hospital rehabilitation wards, Puller, permanently confined to a wheelchair, resumed family life, graduated from law school, served on President Ford’s clemency panel, and finally ran for Congress. When news of his candidacy reached the doctor who had treated him on the battlefield, the doctor wrote him the following astonishing letter:

“Never had I seen more severe traumatic injuries in a patient who had lived, and I wondered at the time if I was doing the right thing by allowing you to live. Your survival had seemed to me a miracle of dubious value which severely tested the moral imperative of my Hippocratic oath. Your running for the House of Representatives ten years after our meeting in Vietnam reaffirmed the worth of my service there and is a source of great personal satisfaction to me.”

What is the source of Puller’s fortitude, both physical and spiritual, that so astounds and humbles the doctor who treated him after giving serious thought to letting him die? We never really know.

When America turned against the war and its warriors, Puller, like so many others, came to feel “used up and discarded.” He was disillusioned with the country’s leaders, men whom, before Vietnam, he unthinkingly revered. Yet he did not turn on life, although he came dangerously close: After he lost his election, overwhelmed once more by his sense of powerlessness, he sank slowly into alcoholism. Still, he again saved himself, this time “from an alcoholic death.”

Puller appears to be what, for lack of a better word, we might call an idealistic realist. “I had seen firsthand,” he says, looking back at Vietnam during the peace protests, “the calculated acts of cruelty and vengeance of which men at war were capable, and if nothing else, I knew that there were very few lofty ideals at the level of conflict I had experienced.” He also knows (in his own body) “the enormous personal sacrifice that is demanded by war.”

The miracle of Puller is that he was able to make such sacrifices and still want to make more, this time serving his country through political action. He not only survives, he does so magnificently. His story of his early life as the son of a military hero, his tour of duty, his return home, is, quite simply, inspirational, his survival miraculous. We cannot account for miracles. We can only be grateful for them--and to Puller, who has lived to tell us of them in this remarkable and unusually moving book.

Balaban’s odyssey, described in “Remembering Heaven’s Face,” is a much more complicated affair. Unlike Puller, Balaban never really accepts the dreadful blows dealt by war. After the war, his life seems to become an attempt to regain a sense of personal control over his destiny, so much so that he invokes a passage from the Vietnamese “The Tale of Kieu” at almost every turn to explain his often amazing decisions.

“ ‘Happiness or misfortune,’ we are told paradoxically in ‘The Tale of Kieu,’ ‘are prescribed by the law of Heaven, but their source comes from ourselves.’ The sentiment is a Buddhist, karmic version of Sartre’s ‘Man chooses himself.’

“In Vietnam, under the prospectus of Heaven, the scrutiny of Mr. Sky, Gitelson (the author’s murdered friend) had achieved a life of fateful clarity, redolent with moral choice, with risk, and with human purpose. It is hard to pity him for that, even if the life he chose invited his murder.”

This freedom to choose one’s destiny, even if such a choice courts death, is what Balaban insists on for himself. After he is wounded and sent home, Balaban decides to return to Vietnam, this time to help wounded children. “I was choosing my fate,” he says. “It was a powerful feeling.”

Here is the disturbing element in Balaban’s account. His return to Vietnam, his decision to help burned and wounded children, seems noble, even heroic. Yet the good work is hardly selfless.

As he risks his life, he has a growing sense of himself as bearing “fateful witness,” a growing sense of his own importance. Balaban is certainly not unaware that these good deeds are balm to the wounds that his ego had suffered.

In a later passage that many veterans will find unbearably patronizing, he advises “troubled vets” to “Go visit (Vietnam) if you can, and do something good there, and your pain won’t seem so private, your need for resentment so great.” This is, alas, a case of one patient offering his own prescription to another without first consulting a physician. Most soldiers who served in Vietnam have no desire whatever to return. The people they saw killed and maimed in Vietnam were other Americans with whom they served. Many of these veterans are troubled, but many of them are doing good here, in this country, helping other troubled veterans, many of them still confined to VA hospitals.

It would be easier for me to accept Balaban as a Sartrean hero (capable, through his own choices, of turning the hellish landscape of the Vietnam he once knew into the heavenly country he evokes in the last section of his memoir), were it not for the unmistakable stamp of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) on his behavior. His alienation from his countrymen, his flashbacks, his increasingly dangerous, violent outbursts, his view of civilian life as somehow insignificant, his suspicion that no one at home cares about the tragedy he has seen, his compulsive need to repeat his war experience as a means of cleansing himself--these are all features of PTSD. Balaban seems to acknowledge this when he says, “I realized, to my horror, that I missed the war.”

Of course he misses it, contemptuous as he is of daily life in peacetime: “But personal tragedies common to middle-class Americans were pretty easy to come by, weren’t they? Michael’s acne, Debbie’s crooked teeth, Granny’s demise. And, more important, did they open up Americans to the pain of others?”

When he returns to the United States--after two stints of alternative service--he meets and marries a young woman, but soon takes her, pregnant, back to Vietnam, where he intends to collect specimens of cao dao , Vietnamese poetry in the oral tradition.

In Hawaii, on the way back, he loses control of his increasingly violent temper and gets into a brutal fight with a street tough and is lucky to escape with his life. In Saigon, when he is kicked by a teen-age street tough, he responds once more with enormous, uncontrollable rage. As a result, his very pregnant wife must flee to find help.

He almost loses his life in the fight; shortly afterward, his severely frightened wife does lose their baby and for 16 years they remain childless. Is this loss of his own unborn child his reparation for all the babies he saw wounded or killed, babies he had tried to save but could not?

Is he aware of the severity of his own flashbacks, of his own addiction to war, of his increasingly uncontrollable violence? Perhaps, for he says, “And now, twenty years after these events, I can’t imagine how I could ever have thought I could look on that carnage of children and not be hurt forever by what I saw.”

But a short time later, Balaban recants. GIs were damaged by Vietnam. He was affected : “Affected, I’d say, not damaged.”

There is, throughout Balaban’s account--subtitled “A Moral Witness in Vietnam”--an unsettling lack of moral or psychological self-awareness. In war, of course, moral confusions abound, as Balaban himself shows so well. But this moral confusion is, occasionally, married to a disconcerting moral smugness, as when Balaban comments on the GIs who did fight in Vietnam:

“These poor guys, I thought--here in innocence, here out of ignorance, here out of patriotism or out of family honor--day after day, until their tours are up, they are sent off in tanks, in choppers, in boats, and on foot to kill people, mostly civilians, mostly children.”

Puller would not be the only combat veteran surprised to learn that he had spent his tour fighting --and killing--mostly women and children.

In “Saint Joan,” George Bernard Shaw has Joan of Arc ask if it is necessary that a Christ be crucified in every generation to save those who have no imagination. Perhaps it is. War may simply be unimaginable. There are no peacetime equivalents for it and when we try to imagine war, we are really doomed to fail.

What emerges from a reading of these two books is how difficult it is for anyone to think about war, how difficult this is even for those who participated in it. It may be impossible for anyone who has not been (to use the terrible military term) “blooded” to really understand what war does or what it means.

Thinking about war, that primeval chaos, is like thinking about our own deaths. We think about war, our egos still unassaulted by the forces that war unleashes, and we think we are thinking about war, but it is not war. It is something else altogether: a greatly intensified version of what we already know. But war is not an intensification of something we know. It is something other, the kind of existence that comes into being when survival becomes--for most--the primary value.

Anyone who reads these two books will find for himself the enormous difficulty--the almost unendurable complexity--of thinking about this enormously disturbing subject and the moral questions it raises. We may not be able to understand in our own minds and our own bodies what war means, but we can, by proxy, understand war’s consequences.

If we value peace but want to understand what happens when that precious and fragile peace is disrupted by that cataclysm we know as war, books like Lewis B. Puller Jr.’s “Fortunate Son” and John Balaban’s “Remembering Heaven’s Face,” both of which bear passionate, essential witness, are truly indispensable.