SOLDIER'S JAUNDICED VIEW OF AMERICA IN VIETNAM.

Byline: Richard Bernstein The New York Times

Title: ``SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam''

Author: John L. Plaster

Data: Illustrated. 367 pages, Simon & Schuster; $25

Our rating: Three Stars

In July 1973, the Defense Department disclosed that in the previous eight years, 81 U.S. servicemen had been killed in Laos and Cambodia while on secret missions carried out as part of the Vietnam War.

By the time that information had been released, it was already widely known that the United States had undertaken special operations in those two countries, which were theoretically off-limits to U.S. ground personnel.

In fact, as retired Maj. John L. Plaster reports in ``SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam,'' more than 300 men from what was deceptively code-named the Studies and Observations Group were killed during missions to gather information, capture enemy prisoners and rescue Americans or their allies held captive in areas of Laos and Cambodia used as sanctuaries by North Vietnamese forces.

Plaster served three tours in Vietnam as a team leader for the Studies and Observations Group, known by its acronym, SOG. He has written a detailed history of this little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

No great stylist, certainly not a moralist, and unconcerned about the deep psychology of battle, Plaster comes across as a straight-talking soldier, brave but unreflective, the kind of guy you could count on if you were in a jam but wouldn't ask about the meaning of life.

His book is a cross between an official military history and a speech one might hear at an annual gathering of some brotherhood of veterans, scrupulously attentive to operational details, blunt and euphemistic at the same time (``I dealt him a solid torso burst and he went down.'')

Whatever its spiritual and literary limitations may be, ``SOG'' seems to be a reliable account of an important part of the overall Vietnam tragedy, one that draws on Plaster's own experience, on many interviews with other veterans and on newly declassified Pentagon records.

It is a reminder as well that the young men who fought the war faced circumstances of almost unimaginable brutality, and that they and their Montagnard and South Vietnamese allies committed innumerable acts of equally unimaginable courage and daring. Plaster does not conceal his frustration that in Vietnam, heroism produced not the admiration of a grateful population back home but a collective embarrassment.

This author and veteran, in other words, is no Oliver Stone portraying the Vietnam War as an arena of moral degeneration, drugs and the murder of officers by their men.

Plaster and his buddies were good guys who gave their all fighting the brutal, implacable enemies of their country. ``Old recon men still gather to toast departed comrades and sing `Hey, Blue,' reciting name after name,'' he writes at the end of his book. ``The war may be forgotten, but those names are not.''

SOG grew out of efforts in the early 1960s to collect intelligence about North Vietnamese infiltration routes to the South. By early 1964, under Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam had organized a covert unit, eventually called the Studies and Observations Group, to take over some of the CIA's clandestine operations.

Until the end of the war, hundreds of SOG teams infiltrated North Vietnamese-controlled territory, most in Laos but many in supposedly neutral Cambodia as well.

Plaster describes many of these operations in hair-raising and gory detail, recounting individual exploits and acts of selflessness of the sort that only men who have gone into battle together are likely to know.

Like the secret B-52 strikes in Cambodia, SOG's activities were intended to counter North Vietnam's use of Laos and Cambodia as vast staging areas and supply routes that were supposedly immune from attack. As Plaster describes them, the SOG missions were invaluable to the overall war effort, producing vast amounts of information about infiltration routes and troop locations, bomb damage reports and interrogations of enemy soldiers.

Every U.S. soldier roaming enemy sanctuaries, Plaster proudly states, tied down 500 North Vietnamese soldiers - ``and the NVA couldn't catch even half the teams.''

Plaster's yearning for triumph and vindication seems to blind him to some obvious issues. The North Vietnamese did catch close to half the SOG teams, for example, which, in a war where the U.S. interest was unclear, might have raised some questions about cost vs. benefit, or even the possibility that the addiction to danger of the Green Berets and other special commandos surpassed both good judgment and military usefulness.

From the beginning, SOGs casualty rate was extremely high. Plaster describes attempts to rescue small teams of men trapped in the jungle in which the number of rescuers killed far exceeded the number of men rescued.

Plaster also makes it clear that SOG operations were terribly hampered by porous South Vietnamese security and by the presence of enemy agents. As a result, the other side got accurate advance information about missions more secret to the American public than to Hanoi. Between 1961 and 1968, 54 long-term Vietnamese agents working for the CIA and SOG got behind enemy lines.

Plaster concludes that every one of them was caught, and some were used for years by the other side to send back false information.

This fact alone would seem to provide sufficient reason for some meditation on the worth of the overall program, but Plaster is not the meditative type. As he tells his story, he often barely controls his impulse to fight the war over again, and this imparts a needlessly vengeful and callous tone to his account.

When North Vietnamese soldiers killed Americans, Plaster tends to see it as ``slaughter.'' When Americans killed the enemy, in Plaster's account, they ``snuffed'' them, or ``dropped'' them, or ``dispatched'' them. The underlying attitude is common to war: We are the ones who suffer; the other guy, when he is blown away by a satchel charge placed on a booby-trapped truck, gets what he deserves.

It is time, after 30 years, for a bit more compassion, a deeper sense of tragedy. Still, Plaster's book is comprehensive, informative and often exciting. His effort to recount the acts of bravery under fire committed by U.S. soldiers in Indochina is a worthy act of historical rescue from an unjustified, willed oblivion.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) Retired Maj. John L. Plaster, author of a new book on special operations in Southeast Asia, served three tours of duty in Vietnam.

(2) no caption (Book cover - SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam)