This book is nothing like that and depicts an army subject to the same ailments as any army in history, with its bravery and cowardice, desertions and suicides, rape and pillage and above all, the stench of blood.

It is no wonder that when it was first published it was a runaway best-seller in Vietnam.

The author, Bao Ninh served with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade, 500 young men and women who marched off to war. Only 10 of them survived.

Something similar happens to his main character in this novel, an infantry cadre named Kien, whose battalion, engaged in one of the bloodiest battles of the war, is destroyed, apart from four survivors of whom Kien is one.

The author begins his story years after the battle, when Kien is sent with a Missing In Action body-collecting team back to the site of the slaughter in what had become known as the Jungle of Screaming Souls.

They had to wait months before the monsoon abated and the flooding of the jungle floor had drained away enough to find what remains remained. Most bodies were merely scraps. Some had ceased to exist altogether, vaporised by napalm or high explosive or washed away. The MIA team burned joss sticks at night to placate the unburied.

Kien, of course, recalled the battle - and its prelude, when almost his entire battalion discovered the narcotic joys of the jungle plant rosa canina and slumped into a card-playing lethargy.

''Desertion was rife throughout the regiment at that time, as though soldiers were being vomited out, emptying the insides of whole platoons.'' The battalion was jolted out of canina rosa by the battle itself: ''That was the dry season when the sun burned harshly, the wind blew fiercely and the enemy sent napalm spraying through the jungle and a sea of fire enveloped them. . . Troops in the fragmented companies tried to regroup, only to be blown out of their shelters again as they went mad, became disorientated and threw themselves into nets of bullets. . .'' This is a very carefully constructed novel, with flashbacks within flashbacks, and on the whole it works, with all the disparate elements being knitted together in the final chapters.

Before that, we have a war and a peace to get through. There are the memories Kien treasures of the girl he left behind in Hanoi, the innocent teenage love affair and its sequel when the fighting's done.

This book, like so many of its American media counterparts, is almost as much to do with readjustment to a civilian life most of the ex-soldiers scarcely remembered. Kien is bitter when people start rejoicing around him at the prospect of fighting the Chinese in that brief border war. ''Just like the old times,'' people said. But Kien rebels against the idea that young men loved war.

''No. The ones who loved war were not the young men but the others like the politicians, middle-aged men with fat bellies and short legs. Not the ordinary people. The recent years of war had brought enough suffering and pain to last them a thousand years.'' The flashbacks at times show that the Vietnamese army was just like any other army (except that they won).

''In 1973 his regiment had mistakenly been sent a batch of uniforms and assorted articles meant for a women's platoon. Side-buttoned trousers, waist length jackets and army-issue bras. They were rock-hard, coarsely woven, ugly things which resembled a pair of green beetles. Such was the tension that any little army supply bungle like that set the boys laughing.'' Many could not adjust. A former tank driver got a job as a driver in Hanoi but could not adjust to smooth roads. In drunken fits he would reminisce. ''Ever seen a tank running over bodies? You'd think we would flatten them so much we'd never feel them. .. No matter how soft they were they'd lift the tank up a bit . . . After a while I could tell the difference between mud and bodies, logs and bodies. They were like sacks of water. They'd pop open when I ran over them.'' This book is a mixture of that kind of gross reality and Southeast Asian sensitivity. The problem for the non-Vietnamese reader is to decide whether this is, in fact, the book as written by Bao Ninh.

It is carefully not described as a translation.

The title page is a little complex. After the title and the author's name we have the inscription ''English version by Frank Palmos based on the translation from the Vietnamese by Vo Bang Thanh and Phan Thanh Hao, with Katerina Pierce.'' With so many fingers in the pie one can't help wondering whether anything but the crust remains.

Then there are infelicities that jar. Which one of that quartet that contributed to this opus decided that the fictional Minh should address his colleagues in the front line as ''mates''? Comrades, with a small ''c'' might have slid by but ''mates'' sounds like somebody trying to be cartoon cockney.

That said, this is a fascinating book - I only wish I had the knowledge to read it in the original Vietnamese.