Desert Islands, Desert Storms

Old memories are coming back now. Feelings of uncertainty. Of peril. Caught between hatreds you cannot fathom and events you cannot escape. Of times when time itself seems elastic -- stretching out interminably and then, snap.

War consumes us now, again: Afghanistan, Colombia, the Philippines, Iraq, New York City. How far have we traveled? From Agent Orange to orange alert, from fireballs of white phosphorous to dirty bombs. Experience draws me back to my library. Experience and dread. On this shelf are “the books of war.”

I wish I could recall exactly when “The Quiet American” wrapped itself around me. Sometimes, back then, there were more readers than books, so we ripped out the pages and passed them from person to person. One book served a half-dozen of us. Some pages got lost, some reached you out of order. Who cared? This was Vietnam. I wasn’t even 21. I had a cigarette lighter engraved with a boast that I feared no evil in the valley of the shadow of death. My hand would shake when I reached for it.

“They steadied me,” Gloria Emerson, the celebrated writer and correspondent, told me recently when I asked her about the books she carried in her combat satchel.

Precisely. These books aren’t talismans but teddy bears. You hold them close.

It used to be that this was insider stuff: Troops and correspondents on the battlefield shared a powerful sense of camaraderie. No one who wasn’t there could understand the conversation. But that’s not the case anymore. We’re all part of it now.

How do you gear up for this kind of war?

Duct tape, maybe. The right books, for certain.

I don’t mean research material when I say the “books of war,” although brushing up on our studies is hardly a bad idea. And I’m not referring to escapist reading either. I’m speaking of something more deeply personal: books you read, and then reread, because they help you keep your balance in the crosswinds of ominous events.

More than three decades after we passed around those loose pages in the damp canvas hooches at Chu Lai, I now sit in a comfortable chair and watch the new film version of “The Quiet American.” Michael Caine has received an Academy Award nomination for his role as the war-wise old Saigon hand Thomas Fowler.

In the way these things work, I assume his richly introspective portrayal will lead new readers back to the source, and that’s a start: Graham Greene’s calm 1955 novel depicting a murky but palpably alive Vietnam in the not-so-calm days when the U.S. was digging a toehold against communism and the French were doing the fighting.

For Emerson, David Halberstam and other correspondents in Vietnam, it was a seminal guide, a piece of traveling equipment -- because Greene had not only evoked the mystery and exotic charms of Vietnam but foreshadowed the bloody quagmire to come.

In those days, I was not yet a correspondent. But as a Marine Corps corporal, I was steadied by the book in an entirely different way. Phuong was the woman in the novel’s love triangle involving Fowler and the naive, doomed CIA agent Alden Pyle. As someone unprepared and baffled by Vietnam, nothing surprised me, or reassured me, as much as learning that Phuong yearned for precisely the same things I did: survival, escape and romance.

It sounds sentimental now, but this simple realization was my coming of age. There was more here than killing and trying to stay alive.

I asked Emerson about the books of war and she recommended three: Joseph Heller’s caustic World War II satire, “Catch-22”; Michael Shaara’s meticulous novel of the Civil War battle at Gettysburg, “The Killer Angels”; and Michael Herr’s dazzling, in-the-dirt account of the Marines’ deadly and ultimately meaningless stand at Khe Sanh in Vietnam, “Dispatches.”

If we count the Gulf War and assorted brush wars, I’ve written about conflict in a dozen countries. My own kitbag of books for the occasion begins with Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski’s haunting and atmospheric account of surviving Angola’s civil war in 1975, “Another Day of Life.” In this first-person narrative, the writer clings to his humanity as he is swallowed in chaos.

I include “Midaq Alley” by Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. This classic of Arabic literature tells of everyday life, of innocence and innocence lost on a back street in a poor quarter of Cairo in 1947. It has nothing to do with war except as an antidote against wartime’s impulse to demonize people whom we regard as different.

Lastly, I keep at the ready Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “Night Flight,” a short but poetically vivid novella of courage, duty and the unknown -- a story of the early days of aviation and of the pilots who flew over the Andes in darkness and storms.

Naturally, I’ve been rereading Greene too. In his published diary, “In Search of a Character,” he sets sail on a freighter bound for Africa during World War II. At the time, German submarines made such travel treacherous, and Greene thought it important to keep a list of the books that he and others carried. He called them “books for a desert island.”