Through Nam-Colored Glasses : Why don’t we know anything about the guys who run our military? : THE NIGHTINGALE’S SONG, <i> By Robert Timberg (Simon & Schuster: $27.50; 543 pp.)</i>

Back around the time of “Desert Storm” I paid a visit to friends at Esquire Magazine, then gearing up to cover the war. Editor Terry McDonnell was standing over a fax machine in the corner of his office, anxiously awaiting a dispatch from one of his reporters at the front. The fax beeped a couple times and spit out an error message.

McDonnell collapsed heavily in his chair. “You know what my problem is? We’ve got 15 people up and down the hall here who could tell you what Mike Ovitz had for breakfast this morning, and if he flossed, what brand he used. But we don’t know a damn thing about the officers who are running the United States military. You think we’ve got our priorities backward?”

Well, yes, and now, in answer to McDonnell’s quandary and close on the heels of thick volumes such as “The Commanders” by Bob Woodward and “Crusade” by Rick Atkinson, comes Robert Timberg with an even heftier tome, “The Nightingale’s Song,” an important and ambitious stab at understanding how Vietnam has become the lens through which the American military sees the world.

The author intends the book as a kind of “The Best and the Brightest” for the 1990s. Writing in muscular prose that is two parts David Halberstam to one part Hunter Thompson, Timberg (a Baltimore Sun reporter and himself Annapolis ‘64) concentrates on members of two Naval Academy classes that belong to the Vietnam generation: Robert “Bud” McFarlane, John Poindexter and John McCain from the class of ‘58, and Oliver North and James Webb from the class of ’68. He ends up, inadvertently I’d bet, giving us “The Worst and the Dumbest.”

Halberstam’s classic study of the goofs and idiots who game-planned and systems-analyzed us into a misbegotten war in Southeast Asia rang with irony and disdain and found guilty parties everywhere. Timberg, on the other hand, set himself quite a different task. Into a culture where the word Vietnam has consistently rung with images of either flower-power protesters or walking-wounded vets with vacant eyes and panhandler’s paws, Timberg brings the stories of five of the kind of successful military men who are today running the nation’s defense establishment. It’s a gang-bio of five Annapolis grads, three of whom (North, Poindexter and McFarlane) conspired, fumbled and lied their way through Iran-Contra. Webb is a successful novelist and former Secretary of the Navy, and McCain is the former Vietnam POW who returned from the war to snag a Senate seat and achieve a certain prominence on the right-wing of the Republican Party.

Timberg’s ultra-researched text--in literally hundreds of interviews, we hear apparently from everyone who ever knew his subjects, from quite a few who clearly did not and from each of the subjects themselves--lumbers and heaves with an earnestness of purpose that finally smothers a perfect opportunity to answer a key question about the Vietnam generation: Why do these guys behave like crybabies and spoiled brats? Instead, the author reports at great length on the hostility and bitterness in the hearts of these men, but he fails to explain why they feel that way, beyond a standard-issue M1-A1 recitation of that now familiar chestnut: They sent us to fight a war they wouldn’t let us win and didn’t thank us when we came home.

The book has the same woe-is-me whiny tone I’ve found in entirely too many memoirs, histories and novels about Vietnam. There’s an us-versus-them quality to each of the stories Timberg tells, a not so tacit assumption that even a war that was lost conferred upon its warriors a nobility to which those who opposed the war (or simply did not serve) are not entitled.

The Service Academies are like elite military fraternities, cloistered behind high walls with distinctions between classes, and between graduates within a single class that are impossible to discern from outside. Timberg knows the secrets of Annapolis and delights in the Middie mythomania guys like North and Webb have traded on for years. But instead of letting us in on these secrets, Timberg drives front-loaders full of facts into the text, stacking them chapter after chapter like ammunition boxes. And just when you expect him to load up and fire, his guns fall silent.

He reacts with prickly heat when North (whom he simply does not like) goes through a rocky stretch in his marriage, yet when McCain (who is, after all, an American Hero) jettisons his crippled and aging first wife to marry a healthy, wealthy and well-connected much younger woman from Phoenix who will grease the tracks of his political career in Arizona, Timberg trots out the trusty catch-all explanation, the war: “McCain was no different than most veterans of that war. As he went through life, Vietnam kept stumbling on stage and chewing up the scenery no matter how often he thought he had written it out of the script.”

And I guess it’s just too bad that among those chewed were the wives left in the lurch.

In North, Webb, McFarlane, Poindexter and McCain, the author has a group with step-on-necks-if-necessary, high-temperature ambitions, most of which, one way or another, are realized. Three of them end up running their very own free-for-all foreign policy in the Reagan White House. Webb gets appointed Navy Secretary and resigns in a policy-snit that Timberg sees as honorable and heroic. McCain networks, marries and back-slaps his way into the Senate. A couple of them have become millionaires in the process, Oliver North proving that even a Marine can write a bestseller.

All of them shamelessly exploit their academy contacts and the old-boy system. When Congress admits women to the service academies, Webb jumps as though a snake bit him, obviously less than eager to share his frat-house with the girls.

The singular between-the-lines strength of Timberg’s book lies in its whispering of the dirty little secret of this generation: These guys don’t just think they’re special, they demand we agree with them that no one is as special as they are. They want attention. They want praise. And yet the rank, status and monetary rewards that come their way are never enough. Like kids with their hands at the bottom of an empty cookie jar, they want more. And more. And more.

You’ve never heard so much chest beating and whimpering and complaining in your life. Early on, Timberg reports as if it were a shocking revelation that while 27 million young men came of draft age during the decade-long war years, “ sixteen million , or 60 per cent . . . escaped military service by a variety of legal and illegal means.”

The italics, stunning naivete and attitude of aggrieved victimhood are Timberg’s, but they belong also to his five subjects and to, in my view anyway, entirely too many others in the military of today, and they utterly and completely infect this book. Here, explaining Oliver North’s breaking of the Annapolis Honor Code--not to mention Federal law--when he lied to the U.S. Congress, McFarlane sympathetically whines that “Ollie came away from Vietnam saying you must never stop trying to support people that you’ve given your word to.” There, James Webb in his first year at Georgetown Law School discovers that despite the fact that his classmates are wearing khaki and fatigues, he is the only veteran at the school, and--surprise, surprise!--nobody understands him or honors his service. Told by a classmate that she had never met anyone who was in Vietnam before, Webb is shocked, shocked that she didn’t know anybody who had even been drafted.

On the rare occasions North isn’t inflating his resume and exaggerating his combat record and lying to the Congress, he’s bleating about the “betrayal” he and his fellow Marines felt after Vietnam. When Webb isn’t handing out medals the insensitive brass was too busy to award his old Marine comrades, he’s giving an address to Midshipmen notifying them that they belong to a tiny minority of brave, honorable men, as if the rest of us long ago fell to lives of dishonor when we opposed the war, or took a political stand not to the liking of Webb and his buddies. When McFarlane isn’t snappishly explaining the noble motives behind the illegal, unconstitutional and probably impeachable arms-for-hostages deals, he’s weeping shamelessly about his feeling of loneliness when country-clubbers like Schultz and Weinberger leave him out of their cigar-smoking Bohemian Club get-togethers. When Poindexter isn’t applying his McNamara-like laser intelligence to solving literally dozens of problems at once, he’s griping about the “elitist” press and the “corrupt” Congress. And when McCain isn’t patriotically rousing the troops on the lawn of the house his beer-heiress wife bought for him, celebrating yet another landslide electoral victory, he’s mewling about the nasty treatment he got from the mean old anti-military press that called him one of the “Keating Five.”

Huh? Did I miss something here? Or did the author? I’m afraid in his case the answer is yes. Timberg is so busy piling fact upon fact that his book lacks the dramatic structure that came naturally to his subject’s stories. The whole book leads up to Iran Contra, and we wait and wait for a door to be opened and a blinding light to illuminate the mystery of why North, McFarlane and Poindexter became embroiled in a Constitutional crisis many believe was dark and more dangerous than Watergate. Instead, we get a we-were-betrayed-in-Vietnam-and-we’ll-never-forget-it explanation for their fealty to the Contras, and a perplexing excuse-making comparison of North’s crimes to those prosecuted at Nuremberg: “He [North] did not gas Jews. Not even close.”

For Timberg, as well as his subjects, Vietnam explains all. These five men received the best education their country could provide, and they achieved rank and status, including service at the highest reaches of the White House, the Pentagon and the Congress. And yet you’d think from reading this book that the war in Vietnam dealt them such a dirty deal, we should be like Oprah and Jenny Jones and excuse their transgressions and feel their pain.

Sorry, boys.