The Windbags of War : RISING LIKE THE TUCSON, <i> By Jeff Danziger (Doubleday: $20; 358 pp.)</i>

Buddy, it’s the deal of the century. It will make us rich, lords of the land. But we’ve got to invest now, get in on the ground floor while property prices are low. See, once the United States wins the war, South Vietnam will be a gold mine. The place will be crying out for shopping malls, hotels and highways. And we’ll have the real estate locked up and be ready to roll as soon as President Nixon declares victory. How much do you want to lay down?

So goes the sales pitch by an enterprising real estate developer in “Rising Like the Tucson.” The deluded, doomed scheme to turn Vietnam into a shoppers’ paradise is the driving absurdity in Jeff Danziger’s bleak and funny evocation of the time when the American Army pulled out of Vietnam--supposedly turning over operations, bases and hardware to the willing and able Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Already, it ought to be clear that this is not a typical Vietnam novel, the formulaic recitation of an innocent’s baptism by combat that makes up the bulk of the war’s literature. Instead, political cartoonist Danziger has produced a rare and brilliant departure from the standard, narrowly personal viewpoint to write about the Vietnamization of the Vietnam War and the surreal official optimism and historical ignorance accompanying that charade.

Yet while he has written with a refreshing sense of historical perspective about America’s Vietnam involvement, Danziger, a veteran of First Air Cavalry Division, allows his characters the full range of their ignorance. Appropriately, the novel’s title is derived from a massive misunderstanding of myth, an infinite lack of learning that confuses Arizona development with ancient bestiaries. In a letter exhorting his officer son to sew up Saigon’s best mall acreage, the developer writes: “With American help, the whole damn country is going to rise like a Tucson from the ashes.” The best part is that no other character--officer or enlisted man--notices this double error in mythology and geography. True Americans, they are too mesmerized by the promise of big, quick bucks to comment on the goof. If they knew in the first place.

The center of the novel, set in 1970, is Phuoc Vinh army base, where a dwindling number of U.S. officers and enlisted men are charged with actually making Vietnamization work, or appear to work. In fact, the Americans are engaged in a race to give the base to the South Vietnamese before the North Vietnamese army storms the rotten fortress.

It is touch and go all the way.

In the opening chapter, an outlying American firebase is overrun by the North Vietnamese army. The three survivors, including the officer in charge, save their lives by playing dead, something that must not have occurred to Custer.

The assault is a foretaste of coming chaos. Back at the main base, incompetent or hapless officers struggle to maintain their defenses. But the enlisted men are listless, more interested in playing cards and smoking grass than repairing bunkers, resetting tripwires, installing flares, placing claymore mines and cleaning personal weapons. Anyway, troops are rapidly being withdrawn; there aren’t enough bodies available to do much of anything.

One operation does get off the ground--a psychological-warfare mission to terrorize the enemy by broadcasting recordings of the “ghost” of a North Vietnamese soldier from a helicopter. The mission does prompt a mass desertion, but from the South Vietnamese army.

As the debacle of Phuoc Vinh unfolds, the mundane concerns of U.S. Army careerists never cease. Visiting a church, Maj. Hank Bedford meditates on his stalled career: “ What I want, he said to God solemnly, is to hear someone call me Colonel Bedford . . . . What I want is for more lieutenant colonels to get killed so the army has to promote majors. “

The importance of death to his job also preoccupies another American officer, a lieutenant who has killed several of his own men. One night he dreams that he has to write a letter of condolence to the mother of one of his victims: “I am sure that if the circumstances under which I had to shoot him had not occurred, he would have been killed or wounded in a completely honorable way, a way we could all be proud of.”

However, it is left to a South Vietnamese to deliver the darkly humorous verdict on America and its leaders. In a conversation with an American officer, Sgt. Xuan of the National Police remarks that then Defense Secretary Melvin Laird is “with all respect, a windbag.”

Then the colloquy continues:

“ ‘Yes,’ ” Maj. Dow agreed.

“Kissinger is, with all respect, a criminal,” he said.

“ ‘Well, yes, possibly,’ ” Maj. Dow agreed.

“But Nixon,” Sgt. Xuan concluded, “Nixon is a mystery.”