BOOK REVIEW : Peacetime Army Goes to War With Itself : BUFFALO SOLDIERS by Robert O’Connor ; Knopf; $22; 324 pages

This ferocious little novel about the American military couldn’t have come out at a more interesting time.

Gays and lesbians are squabbling for the right to “defend their country,” and straights are getting all huffy about how it’s only they , the straights, who can really “defend the country.”

Crusty officers and shy enlisted men and women and grotesque senators are voicing opinions on whether “the service” will be sullied by this new infusion of hypothetical troops, and the whole implication is that being in the military is a swell way to spend your life, that it’s worth people’s time and trouble to actually worry about getting in.

Robert O’Connor has a different idea about all of this. “Buffalo Soldiers” (so named for the poor black cannon fodder that was recruited to finish off American Indian tribes after the Civil War, a job so grim, so sad and so pointless that nobody could get enough white men to do it) is a novel of our peacetime army in Mannheim, Germany. The time is now; the Cold War is irrelevant. The epigraph here is from Nietzsche: “When there is peace, the warlike man attacks himself.”

Without an “enemy,” the rich, extensive, massive, bored-to-death American contingent on German soil is busily engaged in destroying itself. “Buffalo Soldiers” derives from James Clavell’s “King Rat” and Calder Willingham’s “End as a Man,” but its real literary ancestor is James Jones’ “From Here to Eternity.”

Anyone who doubts the direction America has taken in the last 50 years need only compare these two excellent novels about our peacetime Army.

In Jones’ vision, officers were morally unsound, but their wives were apt to be beautiful. To be an enlisted man was to carry a certain built-in integrity. Even though loneliness was the order of the day (Prewitt, for instance, reduced to falling for a whore, the beauteous Lurene), enlisted men had ambitions. Prewitt wanted to play taps at Arlington. Prewitt drew the line at selling out: He would not box at Capt. Holmes’ boxing smokers.

All that material still seems as engaging as the square necklines on the female characters’ sun dresses; as hopelessly lost to us as our own blue skies before smog.

Here, in O’Connor’s fetid little universe, the creepy Col. Berman still angles for promotion, as did Jones’ creepy Capt. Holmes. And the enlisted man who draws our interest (the devil’s own version of Jones’ heroic Sgt. Warden) is Specialist Ray Elwood, assistant to the colonel, a King of Paperwork especially proud of his “memoranda chops,” but his real occupation is operating a drug ring that makes him a small fortune. Heroin is his drug of choice (though he only snorts, to keep control).

This American base has become a mirror of America itself; it is dangerous to walk anywhere alone at night, since there is a vigorous race war going on.

The death rate in this “peaceful” place is wildly high, and Elwood--when he’s not driving in his ill-gotten Mercedes or helping his hapless clients to shoot up or figuring out mammoth drug shipments with various Turks and Chinese who drift through on this modern Silk Road of drugs--is kept busy writing condolence letters to the folks back home, one of his major duties.

There is a top sergeant after Elwood. The sergeant has a beautiful daughter who has lost most of one arm because of routinely incompetent military health care. Robin--one-armed and dead-game, courageous and hate-filled--takes up with Elwood.

They live in a world of unspeakable and dangerous cruelty (dunking screaming men into toilets, seeing how long their victims can hold their breath, pitching other victims off the three-story barracks they live in, knifing, shooting and bashing each other with unleashed and unthinking malice).

Meanwhile, the moron-colonel, bucking for the promotion he will never get, throws a party at which the enlisted men, working as domestic servants, totally stoned and nodding out, have been dressed up for the occasion in Revolutionary War uniforms.

Paradoxically, this is a desperately funny novel and difficult to put down.

There are marvelous set-pieces here: Besides the Revolutionary War party, a “box-off” (a salute to James Jones and the obsession of his wretched Holmes), in which Elwood’s Black Strong Man gets beaten to a pulp in the ring while, in the bleachers, enlisted men watch Linda Evans and Jackie Collins bash each other in one of “Dynasty’s” “girl fights” on a portable TV and a famous womanizer of their ranks sadly recounts that he has approached a respectable German woman for sex and has been conked on the head with a tire iron.

The American military is destroying itself with meanness, drugs, racism and random violence, the author suggests. (Guess what. So is America.) Anyone out there planning to enlist ought to read “Buffalo Soldiers” and maybe think about looking into a different line of work.