Books: A War Without End My Father, My Son

During the late '60s, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Jr. commanded the "brown-water navy," the fleet of small craft that patrolled the rivers and canals of South Viet Nam. He did such a good job that in 1970 he was appointed chief of operations for the entire U.S. Navy. Zumwalt was the right man in the wrong place at a bad time. An unpopular war was turning odious. The air was full of politics and protest; belowdecks there were racial tensions and poor morale. The admiral swept in with a mandate to give the most traditional of military services a new look. His reforms attracted national attention and the < resentment of a square-rigged bureaucracy. Policy differences with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Secretary of the Navy John Warner eventually led Zumwalt to retire in 1974, consider a career in politics, and set to work on his candid memoir, On Watch (1976).

Lieut. Elmo Zumwalt III, 40, is the admiral's son. His childhood does not seem to have been unduly affected by the aura of authority. Elmo had other problems: a heart defect that had to be surgically corrected; a mild but frightening case of polio, from which he fully recovered; and a hard time getting good grades at school. Yet he persevered, graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1968 and going into the family business as a swift-boat commander in Viet Nam.

As suggested in this intimate book about national and family tragedy, Admiral and Mrs. Zumwalt would have preferred a safer line of work for their son. Swifts, part of Dad's brown-water navy, were fast and well armed for their size, but in South Viet Nam's network of narrow waterways, these craft were extremely vulnerable to ambushes. Hidden in the dense vegetation that grew along the banks, the Viet Cong killed and wounded sailors with unnerving regularity. To serve a year on a river patrol boat meant a 70%-to-75% chance of becoming a casualty.

The answer to these alarming odds was to deprive the enemy of his natural camouflage with a massive application of herbicides. They had innocuous names like Agent White, Agent Purple and, the most widely used, Agent Orange, which could transform lush landscapes into vast mangy hides. Many U.S. service members probably owe their lives to the use of Agent Orange. For others it may have been only a temporary reprieve. Lieut. Zumwalt survived his tour without visible harm. He returned home in 1970 to marry Kathy Counselman of Falls Church, Va., go to law school and set up practice in Fayetteville, N.C.

Viet Nam settled uneasily into memory. The first sign that the war was not over came in 1977 with the birth of Elmo Russell Zumwalt IV. The boy's slow development was eventually attributed to "sensory integration dysfunction," an inability to discriminate sounds and sights. Then, in 1982, Elmo III learned he had cancer of the lymphatic system. Two years later he had developed Hodgkin's disease, a more aggressive form of lymphoma.