The Siren Song of Danger : MEANS OF ESCAPE, <i> By Philip Caputo (HarperCollins: $25; 400 pp.)</i>

If they gave a war, Philip Caputo went. If a remote corner of the world had never seen a white man, Caputo would go there. At times, the price was a blister from a camel’s saddle in an unfortunate spot; at others, wounds more serious, physically and mentally.

Caputo’s memoir, “Means of Escape,” is far more than one man’s journeys into the dark regions of our times; it is, through him, an American journey from abundance and promise, through defeat and disillusionment, to a kind of peace.

Caputo begins with his childhood in an Old World Italian extended family in the suburbs of Chicago. World War II was over and anything was possible; restless and adventurous, the young Caputo wanted it all. The Phil Caputo who brings this book to a close sits by a window with a view on the flowing tide, content, at least for the moment, with stillness. In between is enough adventure, despair, tragedy, courage, nobility, evil and otherwise exotic human behavior--much of it by Caputo himself--to swell the heart of a classic explorer like Henry Morton Stanley or T. E. Lawrence.

Caputo finds in his divided heart the dilemma of man since Odysseus left the comfort of Ithaca and went to war. Why, when family, and all we care about, is Here, do we perpetually want to be There? “There is the place I will find adventure, excitement, true love, knowledge, fame, glory, riches, escape from the humdrum. All that is never Here; it’s always There, over the hill and around the bend.”

His parents pushed him to be the first in the family to graduate from college, counseled him to avoid risk, to stick to the straight and narrow. He rebelled against this caution: “If I did not overcome it, it would drag me into a life I dreaded leading, a narrow life of unrestricted horizons. I would marry, settle down, do what was expected of me, but would never discover the undiscovered country.” However, he writes, “that fear of risk never left me.”

To vanquish that fear he must “throw myself periodically into harm’s way.” Sky diving or stunts wouldn’t quench the fear; those were merely children of “the great mother fear of the great mother death” whose true kingdom was war.

And so to war he went, over and over, pushing himself, pushing his luck, pushing out to the front lines of experience and beyond. The October War between the Arabs and Israel, the fall of South Vietnam, the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, and Beirut, always Beirut. As a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, he could purge his guilt of having gone to war as a “soldier of darkness” in Vietnam (an experience chronicled in his superb and elegant “A Rumor of War”). Reincarnated as a “soldier of light,” he opened his soul to the siren song of adventure, stoked on adrenaline, marinating himself in the next war, the next wilderness of the spirit, the next new experience. Testing, testing.

To beat that fear of risk once, twice, a dozen times, wasn’t enough. It returned the next morning, staring back at his face in the mirror. And so off he went again, not the jaded foreign correspondent who has seen it all, but the driven and troubled idealist looking finally only for a reason to stop.

One can’t help but compare this book to Graham Greene’s second volume of autobiography, “Ways of Escape,” with which it--almost--shares a title. But while Greene disappeared into his work like a double agent, Caputo is a front-line soldier. Greene’s autobiography gives more insight into his fiction than into the man; the man is safely hidden. Caputo’s book lays the man out for dissection. Not that Caputo’s own fiction isn’t of value. But in his memoirs the truth seems a seamless part of his prose, which is sturdy, clear, and, quite often, poetic.

At times, this book truly surprises. For example, one of the most troubling moments is Caputo’s recollection of some Muslim women caught in a shelling during a Beirut cease-fire. The wounded had been taken away. “All he saw were bodies, a lot of shattered glass, and round loaves of bread scattered here and there. Some loaves had been blown to fragments and the crumbs lay in puddles of blood like croutons in a dark red bisque.”

That vividness is Caputo at his best. But he is far more than a camera recording what he sees, or even an artist painting it in shocking colors. For this tragic scene brings out of him . . . nothing. In harsh, bitter language he reflects on the complicity of women in the slaughter that was Beirut; on their stupidity in going outside. It’s impossible for him to file a story about it since the only words that come into his mind are “an even baker’s dozen,” and that makes him laugh; hardly an appropriate response. So he gives up and studies his own thinning hair. “Thirty-four and growing bald already. Looking in the mirror, he knew the baker’s dozen had not been the only casualties he had seen today.”

This is strong stuff, comparing your own disillusionment and hair loss to 13 women being blown to bits.

But this story appears at the beginning. By the end, when he returns to this scene after witnessing war upon war, after seeing terrorists massacre schoolchildren for no other reason than to kill them, he finds in Beirut what he calls a “post-modern” war, war removed from all purpose and reduced only to its essence: killing; random, brutal killing. Caputo struggles to explain it as the moral equivalent of a black hole, where the forces of darkness are so powerful in men’s souls that no light can enter.

His own soul, the soul of the boy eager to journey beyond the horizon, to catch a train and see where it went, to enrich himself with experience, has become closed and miserly. Overload. His only response is that of the grunt in Vietnam confronted with the worst atrocity: “Don’t mean nothin’. Don’t mean a thing.”

The problem for Caputo, however, is that to him these are only words. It does mean something. It means everything. He can’t be dishonest about his feelings for the massacred Muslim women. But he can’t live with those feelings either. That young man’s journey from Chicago has ended with him stranded, caught in a moral no-man’s land blasted clean of feeling.

And so, in a truly terrifying passage, he falls into the hands of men who had become even more numb to the suffering of others than he had, “Children of the Beast” so beyond understanding that they talk to him, let him go, then, for no discernible reason, run after him and shoot him. The bullets that shatter his foot also shatter his shield of invulnerability, and return him to the world of suffering and feeling. The inhuman wounds him enough to restore his humanity. It is subtle, powerful, writing that burns into the mind like a flare in the night.

One of the few distracting things about this excellent book is Caputo’s wholly unnecessary efforts to impress. On the one hand he recognizes in himself the urge for validation, for prizes and recognition, a failing that he recounts with appealing irony as if he were now above it. Yet not 50 pages pass before he is cataloguing the prizes he wins. When he is held hostage and one of his captors quotes Shakespeare, Caputo finishes the sentence. He figures out the Israeli strategy in the October War with a pencil and a note pad and impresses an Israeli colonel by comparing it to Von Runsted’s envelopment of the Maginot Line.

A little of this pedantic self-importance goes a long way, but then, a man obsessed with pushing himself to the limits is not likely to be self-effacing. And to Caputo’s credit, this self-inventory is unblinking and uncompromising. He has lifted off the cover and let us see the moving parts.

And what makes this more than just the account of one foreign correspondent whose life has been shaped by war is the striking parallel to our own national experience. A child of World War II, Caputo grows up amid limitless possibilities, which intoxicate him from his first consciousness. He goes to Vietnam as a patriot, returns disillusioned and in disgrace. An exile in his own land, he wanders the world looking for redemption, seeks in vain to find his place in the Old Country of his ancestors, is held helpless hostage, peers into other hearts darker than his own, confronts his own mortality and limits, then finally finds a kind of peace.

It’s a remarkable journey that strikes deep, familiar, and, at times, uncomfortable chords in anyone who has passed along similar territory. It is an important book that disquiets the complacent soul, absorbs the imagination, and burrows into the heart. It is a report from the true front lines, the front lines of the spirit. And from that assignment, Caputo comes home with the goods.