BOOK REVIEW : Sorting the Spoils From Peace Corps Battles : WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR COUNTRY; An Oral History of the Peace Corps <i> by Karen Schwarz</i> , Morrow $21, 288 pages

For those of us who still regard the Peace Corps as a gang of idealistic young college graduates at war with hunger, disease and illiteracy in the bush or the barrio, consider the experience of Elizabeth Jones, a Bush-era volunteer who is now teaching English in Hungary.

“My apartment is beautiful,” she told Karen Schwarz, author of “What You Can Do for Your Country.”

“There’s a large bath and a super-nice kitchen. I’m so comfortable--right down to the sheets and towels. So here I sit watching British MTV and eating ice cream. Am I in the Peace Corps or on an all-expense-paid two-year vacation?”

Schwarz has collected the reminiscences of several dozen Peace Corps volunteers, past and present, and she puts these fragments of firsthand testimony to good use in shattering illusions about the Peace Corps.

“The Peace Corps . . . is a kind of modern-day myth that projects an idealized portrait of the American character,” writes Schwarz. “But from the outset, the organization’s noble goals have been tethered to diplomatic relations and the political process.”

As Schwarz shows us, the statement is no less accurate today than it was during the glory days of the Peace Corps under the Kennedy Administration, the war years under Lyndon Johnson (when Peace Corps volunteers who opposed the war in Vietnam were “drafted out” by the Selective Service) or the Watergate era of Richard Nixon (whose hit man, Pat Buchanan, was directed to “investigate the Peace Corps . . . with an eye, as we understand it, to doing away with the thing”).

Of course, many of the volunteers quoted at length here are moved by the stirring sentiments that first energized the Peace Corps and still cling to its rather tattered reputation: “It was the most profound experience of my life” is a phrase that Schwarz heard so often in her interviews that she characterizes it as “the Peace Corps mantra.”

But Schwarz is impatient with mere nostalgia, and her oral history of the Peace Corps is unsparing and mostly unsentimental.

“Programming was throwing darts at a map,” a former official recalls of the early days. One volunteer was assigned to be the string bassist in the Dominican Republic National Symphony until someone realized that it would put a local musician out of work: “The Peace Corps gave me a volleyball,” says Karen Clough, “and told me to go play with the children in order to ingratiate myself in the barrio.”

All too often, Schwarz reports, the volunteers were given the ambiguous assignment of “community development” and left to their own resources to figure out what it really meant. Most Peace Corps volunteers, who confront human suffering on an immense scale with only meager resources, are forced to console themselves with what little they can accomplish: “You learn,” says Becky Raymond, a nutrition educator in Niger in the late ‘70s, “to accept small successes.”

Sometimes, the volunteers spent their time and ingenuity figuring out how to survive the wars and rebellions that raged around them.

“This is our revolution,” scolded a local at a hospital where one volunteer was treating the wounded during the fighting in the Dominican Republic in the early ‘60s. “What are you doing here?”

There are moments of real charm and rugged good humor here. Jonathan Kwitny, who taught English in Nigeria, despaired of the only available teaching materials, which consisted of works by Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen: “I really wanted them to read something that was written in a more current use of English,” he recalls, “because you’d get in their essays, ‘I take pen in hand in the year of our Lord . . . .’ ”

For all of her revisionist scholarship and her relentless truth-telling, Schwarz, too, is convinced that the Peace Corps can truly “make a difference.”

“When and if a new world order emerges,” she concludes, “the Peace Corps could well become the United States’s lead scout.” Still, her book is a healthy caution to the latest generation of bureaucrats and politicians who are giving the latter-day Peace Corps its marching orders.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Force of Gravity” by R.S. Jones (Viking) .