HERO OR COWARD? : RYAN'S CAPTAIN A CONUNDRUM IN `COURAGE'.

Byline: Terry Lawson Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

So here we have Meg Ryan, America's sweetheart, she of the giggle in the voice and the sparkle in the eye, piloting a helicopter in a Desert Storm firefight, barking orders to the men in her command, brandishing an M-16 with a naturalness that would shame Bruce Willis.

The movie in which Ryan does all this is ``Courage Under Fire,'' which opened Friday. Its story focuses on whether her character deserves the Medal of Honor. Ryan herself, however, seems to qualify for at least some minor decoration. Not for the success of the image makeover (which she dismisses as ``hardly as radical as some people would build it up to be'') or the ordeal of making a movie in distressing, often dangerous conditions (the desert in winter, dodging low-flying choppers and mortar rounds), but for displaying courage under crisis of conscience.

``I actually love talking about this movie,'' says Ryan, fussing around her luxury hotel suite, tearing herself away from a television showing ``East of Eden,'' and setting up a battery of jelly beans, iced cappuccino and goldfish crackers before settling in. ``That's not always the case, because with a lot of movies I've done, good and bad, they speak for themselves. They are what they are, you know?''

``But doing this movie had really made me work through how I felt about a lot of issues that most of us just have gut reactions to ... you know, little things, like war.''

Not to worry: Ryan's still against it. And she maintains she never would have agreed to do ``Courage Under Fire,'' which was directed by Ed Zwick (``Glory'') from a script credited to Michigan's Patrick Sheane Duncan (``Mr. Holland's Opus''), if it glorified or romanticized war in any way. Still, she acknowledges that just having herself and co-star Denzel Washington blown up 30 feet high on a movie screen conveys a ``cultural message.''

``I've long ago come to terms with the fact that movies now substitute for myth in our culture,'' says Ryan, ``and I make decisions on what movies to do and what not to do with that in mind, sure. But I'm also aware that there is a long and hallowed tradition of using war as a metaphor in movies, as a clean, direct way to tell a story. `Courage' fit right in that tradition.''

Though you'd never know it from the posters, ads and trailers, Ryan is a secondary character in ``Courage.'' She is, in essence, the metaphor. Washington plays a fast-track colonel who has been benched after ordering an attack on what he thought was an Iraqi tank in the Gulf War. Tortured by the knowledge he killed American soldiers and angry at what appears to be a cover-up, he is in no mood to put the political gloss on the president's desire to award a Medal of Honor to the first woman to be killed in combat.

So when his review of the case turns up real inconsistencies, he's more determined to get at the truth: Was Capt. Karen Walden a real hero or cardboard? Or worse, was she a coward?

``It was the ambiguity that was most fascinating to me,'' says Ryan, ``the idea that she was perhaps a little bit of what everyone saw. Everybody's perceptions of other people are filtered by what they bring to the table, and just the fact of what she was - a woman in combat - colored how these people thought about her.''

Karen's story is told in flashback, as Lt. Col. Nathaniel Serling interviews the men under her command. In one soldier's eyes, she's a macho warrior who sacrificed herself for her men; in another's, she's an indecisive officer who breaks into tears under stress. Yet another version of the events is compiled with less prejudice, but more confusion.

``I never saw it as playing three different characters,'' says Ryan. ``It had to be the same person in every sequence, just seen from a different angle. I always had to know who she was, or at least as much as she knew.''

Ryan tried to find that out the old-fashioned way, by spending time with women who had chosen the military as a career or as a way of furthering their ambitions.

``I found some common motivators,'' says Ryan of the female soldiers she met. ``Every one was an adrenalin junkie. Most of them liked camping. And more than a few of them liked to go fast, in one way or another. A few of them had joined the Army because they wanted to learn to fly and didn't have any other opportunity to do that open to them. One of them said, `I just like controlling a big old piece of metal, you know?' ''

``But to tell the truth, I learned the most from the ones who talked about it the least. It's like, to them, the obstacles of being a woman in what was a man's world are somehow liberating. Being put in a box brings out the real courage in them.''

Ryan and her co-stars spent three weeks in Texas in what was designed to simulate Army training but ended up, Ryan admits with a giggle, ``being more like Camp Four Seasons. I mean, I never wanted for cappuccino, or anything. They'd say `Go left,' we'd go right.'' But if she didn't emerge from the experience a lean, mean fighting machine, she did come out with ``a better sense of how dependent everyone has to be on each other, how survival depends on comradeship.''

This came in handy when shooting began outside El Paso, on a desert set that was as technically accurate as Zwick and his crew could make it: real tanks, real Huey helicopters and a quarter of a million dollars' worth of explosives.

``If there are two things Meg hates, it's guns and helicopters,'' says Lou Diamond Phillips, who plays a soldier with no respect for her leadership. ``But to get the character, she had to learn to love them and respect them, and she did.''

``I was just determined not to get killed,'' says Ryan. She also notes that Phillips, a friend of Brandon Lee, who was killed in an on-set gun accident filming ``The Crow,'' took extra care in all their scenes involving firearms, checking for live rounds after every take and pledging ``to never point a loaded gun anywhere in my direction.''

``Someone asked me what the difference was in doing a movie like this one and a comedy, and I told them it was knowing exactly where to stand. In a comedy, you don't have to worry that much about a helicopter blade taking your arm off or getting blown up by mortar fire if you don't hit your mark.''

Ryan admits the experience helped her understand the allure of weaponry, but that if anything, carrying a gun for three weeks only confirmed her anti-gun position.

``The M-16 has no kick or anything, you hold it one hand; it's just entirely too easy to use,'' says Ryan. ``I don't want to think about them on the streets. I don't want to think about any guns on the street.''

Ryan says she looks forward to returning to less violent fare; she's currently making a ``truly sick'' comedy with Matthew Broderick called ``Addicted to Love.'' And she has at least three other movies in various states of preparation: a remake of the Audrey Hepburn-Albert Finney movie ``Two for the Road''; a thriller about a woman who thinks she's being stalked by the devil called ``Lost Souls''; and the long-ago-announced remake of ``The Women,'' in which she will co-star with Julia Roberts.

Though she says she was relieved to shed both the uniform and the armor of authority she had to wear for ``Courage Under Fire,'' she says the experience has had one lasting benefit.

``Now when I tell Jack (her 4-year-old son with husband Dennis Quaid) to do something, I use my military voice, and he jumps to,'' says Ryan. ``Go to bed, young man! That's an order.''

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) Calling the ``Courage Under Fire'' cast's pre film training a less-than grueling ``Camp Four Seasons,'' Meg Ryan nevertheless went for gritty realism in her role as an Army captain during Operation Desert Storm.

(2) Meg Ryan on the real-life female soldiers she met: ``It's like, to them, the obstacles of being a woman in what was a man's world are somehow liberating. Being put in a box brings out the real courage in them.''