Combat and reconciliation

Certainly, ''Black Virgin Mountain" is no classic of travel literature. By his own admission, the author is an indifferent traveler, not much at ease beyond the streets of his native Chicago. And while Heinemann positions himself squarely in the antiwar camp since his return from war, his rants -- and the book offers many -- are not burdened by the consistency of a political line. The true subjects of ''Black Virgin Mountain" are neither period nor place, but class bias and soul baring. Heinemann's narrative scores a bitter dirge for working stiffs everywhere who feel they were bred for cannon fodder, and maps a soldier's heart for the wounds he carries long after his war has ended.

When draft notices arrived for Heinemann and his brother on the same spring day in 1966, there was no drama about the outcome. ''No one told us we could hightail it to Canada. . . . declare ourselves conscientious objectors." A healthy blue-collar prole with a ''straight-arrow upbringing" like theirs, he writes, either served or went to jail. Three Heinemann brothers would eventually go into the military, two to Vietnam. Among them only Larry remains. One brother was a postwar suicide; the other left his family never to be heard from again. Heinemann mines his text with enough dyspeptic comments to underscore just how upset he remains that working-class families like his were sacrificed in a draft suspiciously skewed toward social privilege (an iniquity that some believe remains unattended in today's all-volunteer force).