Boys Will Be Boys : ROGUE WARRIOR <i> By Richard Marcinko and John Weisman</i> , <i> (Pocket Books: $22; 352 pp.) </i>

War can be fun for the rogue warrior, once he has a sea daddy behind him and a swim buddy alongside, an unlimited budget for top-of-the-line killer toys and a foreign play-pond stocked with little brown sex machines and bad guys to wax.

This is not meant to be sarcastic. There is a manic energy in “Rogue Warrior” which carried me along on an adrenaline rush. It felt like that “mad minute” we practiced in basic training 30 years ago, an orgasm of firepower in which we shot like crazy and hurled grenades until we were spent. But that was only practice. I never got to kill anybody, and some tiny corner of me wonders what it feels like to go all the way. This book says it feels great, especially if followed by cold beer with good friends.

It would be a mistake to dismiss this book because you think you’ve heard it all before: A driven, talented, maverick officer who could have cleaned up the world is brought down by uptight pencil-pushers. But that’s only part of the story. The most interesting part is how Richard Marcinko, a high-school dropout, an enlisted sailor from the working class, clawed his way up using the same bullying, brown-nosing, devious techniques known to every other ‘80s corporate manager who, like our hero, got very close to the top before his rivals found his paper trail and sent him to prison.

Caution: I don’t know how much of this book is true. Marcinko, who operated clandestinely as a counterterrorist, would at least have altered many names, dates and locales. His legal problems would have caused even more fudging. But he seems to have come clean about the most important stuff, the pure boy-joy of kicking ass and taking names, of assuming muscular male entitlement, tuning out the wife and kids, toadying to father figures, and finding satisfaction in no-strings heterosex and long drinking bouts in which men bond through drunken revelations, bar-room brawling and dirty talk, the most publishable being “Doom on you,” the phonetic pronunciation of an obscene and impossible Vietnamese suggestion.

Women exist mostly as appropriate vessels in this world. Marcinko comes home occasionally to “sperm” his wife and urge her to pour tea, a “ticket-punching” Navy function. He guffaws over a woman officer he calls Female Ugly Commander (or its clever acronym).

Doom on you, girls.

Marcinko’s biological father was a tough Pennsylvania miner of Czech descent, but he found his real fathers, his “sea daddies,” after he enlisted in the Navy at 17. He always had moves--as a teen-ager he aped the Rutgers frat boys he worked for. But it was as Demo Dick, a star of the Underwater Demolition Teams, and later as Mr. Rick, a squad leader in Vietnam (he says the country smelled like “pig dung” and he loved it) that he discovered that you can be a bad boy so long as you suck up to the right older men.

This is the stink of truth, and that’s the reason “Rogue Warrior” rises above the crash course in techno-jock hardware. I have never handled a Heckel & Koch submachine gun or taken an info dump over a SATCOM vest transceiver, but it’s not hard to imagine Marcinko making old Admiral and Mrs. Desk-Driver feel young again with tales of what the SEALS could do if given a budget line to swing from.

It was ultimately the SEALS, the Navy’s elite SeaAirLand commando force, that gave Marcinko his identity, his promotions and his biggest thrills. In Vietnam, he learned “what SEALs did best: hunt men and kill them” and to “never . . . give Charlie an even break.” Superior firepower from ambush is the better part of valor. Never apologize for that.

“So the fact that seven of us had just made bloody hamburger out of five undernourished, unsuspecting, unarmed Vietnamese didn’t strike me as ruthless, immoral or unfair. All my SEALS were still alive, and there were five fewer of the enemy.”

Doom on you, Charlie.

After years of “hopping and popping, shooting and looting,” Marcinko became chief naval attache in Cambodia. He wowed the locals by sharing their cobra feasts and monkey brains, and enjoying an unending supply of indigenous women brought in by his houseboy. His spy stories are flabby; he learned to drink and lie with his Soviet counterpart and to make notes with a pencil stub on paper deep in his pocket. He longed to be back “killing Japs” with his “dirtbag” buddies.

The wars of southeast Asia were lost, says Marcinko, because the unconventional warrior was controlled by conventional bureaucrats. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, as commander of Seal Team Six, a counter-terrorist force, and Red Cell, a unit acting as terrorists to test Navy security, Marcinko spent millions of taxpayer dollars playing war games and antagonizing the fellow officers who would eventually find falsified travel vouchers that could be used to convict him of conspiracy. He was fined and sentenced to 21 months in prison. But he had already suffered his greatest defeat: In 1983, after creating “the best group of warriors in the nation’s history,” he was relieved of the Seal Team Six command without ever having led them in battle. He felt “decapitated.” Of both heads, one assumes.

Now I’d like to read a bureaucrat’s book answering some of the questions Marcinko justifiably raises. Why did the Navy create such groups? For public relations, as a deterrent, as real tools of diplomatic/economic policy? Why do they never seem to be turned loose? Do they actually work? Why a Marcinko in command? And, yo, why are Americans too weenie to use car bombs?

I’d like to hear more from Marcinko and his writer, John Weisman, too--in fiction. For sheer readability, they leave Tom Clancy waxed and booby-trapped. Also, I prefer this man behind a word-processor, rather than slipping through airport metal detectors with a small revolver in a crotch holster. Marcinko, a civilian now, sees himself going “commercial” as a counter-terrorist, a privateer with no governmental restraints at all.

Doom on you, Demo Dick.