Chained Eagle.

ONE VIETNAM movie we can bet Oliver Stone will never make is the story of our American prisoners of war. It certainly won't be for want of material. Many books have been written by former POWs. All are inspiring, frightful, heart-rending, glorious accounts of man at his best and worst.

Every American ought to read at least one book about our POWs. For those who fear reading such a book would prove too depressing or too intense, the book to read is Chained Eagle by Everett Alvarez Jr. and Anthony S. Pitch.

Alvarez was a 26-year-old Navy attack-jet pilot when he was shot down over North Vietnam on August 5, 1964, the day after President Johnson ordered reprisals against the North for allegedly attacking two American warships in the Gulf of Tonkin. Alvarez himself had provided air support to the warships during the alleged attack, and in Chained Eagle he calls into question the popular notion that the incident was deliberately staged by the U.S. to provide an excuse to attack North Vietnam. From Alvarez's own testimony and the official records he uses to reconstruct the event, it appears the warships were indeed not under attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats but honestly thought they were, having misinterpreted sonar signals in the confusion of a black and violent midnight squall. Hours after the event, Navy officials were already doubting the attack had occurred, but Johnson's overhasty response obligated everyone to say it had.

Alvarez had his own doubts about the incident when he was shot down, but his captors never pressed him on the matter and in the eight and a half years he spent as a POW, it caused him little worry. He was not the first American captured or the longest held. That honor went to Army Captain Jim Thompson, who was captured in South Vietnam five months earlier. But Thompson wasn't known among the many American aviators who followed Alvarez into captivity. To them, Alvarez was the first, the eminent old pro, the legendary grandfather of them all.

When Alvarez finally returned home in January 1973, his parents were separated, his sister was in league with Jane Fonda, and his wife had divorced him and remarried (he had found out two Christmases earlier). The nerves in his arms were permanently damaged by torture, his body harbored parasitic worms, and his heart, he writes, was covered with a hard protective shell that made it difficult even to grieve for lost comrades.

Yet this is a story with a happy ending. Alvarez survived his ordeal with both his faith in God and country and his personal honor intact. He returned home to a hero's welcome and within a year he was again happily married. He retired from the Navy in 1980, served the Reagan Administration as deputy director of the Peace Corps and then deputy administrator of the Veterans' Administration, and now runs his own management consulting firm in Rockville, Maryland, where he lives with his wife and two teenage sons.

Two things set this book apart. One is the absence of any evidence of rancor. In tone, Alvarez seems free of bitterness toward people who gave him every cause to feel bitter. There are no angry tirades against his captors, no damning words for the woman who betrayed him, no condemnation of his sister for her high-profile involvement in the antiwar movement, of which he and most of his fellow POWs strongly disapproved. His strongest words are directed against the handful of POWs who broke ranks and colloborated with the enemy for better treatment or early release, but even those words are restrained.

The second special feature of this book is its matter-of-fact treatment of the experience of imprisonment. Alvarez does not dwell on the brutality of his captors. He spares us detailed descriptions of the tortures he endured, allowing sketches borrowed from another book to explain what he does not. He relates the misery of his condition with a detachment that robs it of its shock value. Perhaps some will think he does not communicate to the reader the full power of his experience. On the other hand, he does tell us that life as a prisoner is first of all monotonous, and that even torture can become routine, losing its effectiveness as it becomes so. If we are not shocked by his experiences, it is because he is not shocked by them either. More so than many other books on the subject, this book gives the reader a sense of what it means to be imprisoned for a long time.

No doubt Chained Eagle benefited from the 16 years between Alvarez's release and the writing of the book. The book does not explain why he waited so long to write, but Alvarez himself provided the answer last December in a talk at the Washington Navy Yard. Not long after his release, Alvarez was approached by a literary agent from New York about writing a book. The agent escorted him from publisher to publisher, all of whom, said Alvarez, were more interested in what his country had done to him than in what he had endured at the hands of the North Vietnamese. The final straw came when he was asked by a publisher what he thought of Jane Fonda. Before he could answer, his agent warned, "Be careful--she's a good girl." He knew then the time was not right.

Now at last his story has been told, and it was well worth the wait.

Mr. Mitchell, author of Weak Link, is a reporter for Navy Times.