BOOK REVIEW: FICTION : Putting a Face on an Enemy Long Gone : NOVEL WITHOUT A NAME <i> by Duong Thu Huong</i> , William Morrow & Co. $23, 320 pages

What did they think of us, those North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers we chased through the jungles for a decade? Why did they fight so hard, and accept such terrible losses, for an ideology that we knew to be both bogus and cruel?

Maybe they were brainwashed, U.S. troops thought. Maybe it was true, what our superiors not so subtly suggested: that Asians--at least poor and benighted Asians--didn’t “put the same value on human life” that we did.

That was ignorance talking, of course. Ignorance and racism. As former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s recent memoir, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” confirms, Vietnam was terra incognita to us. We didn’t really know whom we were fighting there--or, for that matter, whom we were trying to help.

Only now, in “Novel Without a Name” by Hanoi dissident Duong Thu Huong, does our old enemy--Victor Charlie, the NVA, all those bodies we counted and recounted in vain--begin to have a face.

Duong wasn’t a soldier, but she performed with a North Vietnamese theatrical troupe in huts and tunnels at the front lines for several years. This book may not be the epic account of the war from the other side that we’ve waited for. It’s short, lyrical, fragmented. But it has plenty of feeling--more than most American war novelists, bound by tough-guy and absurdist formulas, have allowed themselves to express--and a raw but undeniable power.

The protagonist is Quan, a 28-year-old army captain whose hair is turning white after 10 years of combat. One childhood friend, a careerist who is already a colonel, orders him to check on another friend, who is reported to have gone mad. In the course of his trek across a beautiful and blasted landscape, fragrant with flowers and stinking with corpses, Quan visits his home village. He is assailed by memories, dreams, forebodings, echoes of folk songs and poems.

Quan and his comrades have fought for glory, like young men anywhere. They have fought for the future Marxist paradise. Most of all, though, they have fought in the context of Vietnam’s centuries-long struggle to repel outsiders: Chinese, Japanese, French.

In this context, Saigon’s “puppet” troops are hardly serious adversaries. “Those well-fed boys couldn’t possibly have the drive of those ready to fight until death,” Quan says.

On his journey, however, Quan sees the full price his people have paid for victory. The superb organization that links the fighting units is made up of old men, women and children cowering under bombardment in isolated bunkers. Half-starved villagers eat manioc so that the troops can have rice. The war has killed off gentle and intellectual youths, encouraged psychopaths, left parents bereaved and profited only the Communist Party officials who lord it over the poor like mandarins of old.

Only a paradise could justify so much pain. Yet when Quan returns to his unit for the final, triumphant advance on Saigon in 1975, he realizes that no paradise is near.

Still, we keep asking: What about us ?

Perhaps the biggest blow to American egos in “Novel Without a Name” isn’t that we inflicted such grievous damage but that Quan and his comrades always felt they could outlast us. On the big screen of Vietnamese history, it seems, we were only a blip.

The U.S. presence that we remember so vividly--the half-million soldiers, the mountains of supplies, the air-conditioned office buildings, PXes, brothels, helicopters, napalm and Bob Hope shows, our awesome firepower and our uneasy consciences--dwindles, in this book, to some captured medicine and TV sets, a lone prisoner whose life Quan contemptuously spares, and the bombs raining down like a force of nature--a killing force as impersonal to the enemy as he was faceless to us.