Sergeant Shows His Stripes

THE SERGEANT (254 pp.) -- Dennis Murphy--Viking ($3.50).

In this spare, direct first novel by a 25-year-old Californian, the members of the triangle are less interesting than the author's skill at triangulation. The draftee hero is clean-cut enough to be a sidekick of Frank Merriwell. The girl is sweet enough to grace a soap ad. And the bedeviled antagonist is the victim of an unconscious drive that makes him pathetic rather than villainous. Yet this is the kind of book that demands to be read at one sitting: the people may not be important, but their story is.

At 20, young Tom Swanson is doing his postwar Army turn at a quartermaster depot near Bordeaux, France. Militarily, the place is a joke. The company captain is a whisky-tippling, well-intentioned weakling who has never successfully crossed the no man's land that separates officers from enlisted men. When Master Sergeant Albert Callan, a World War II hero and an Army regular, is assigned to the company, the captain quickly melts into the background. The men get on the ball, and the sergeant, half hated, half respected, is insistently felt as a ruthless, unbending presence who is long on Army regulations, short on common humanity. Sadly enough for Tom Swanson. the middle-aged sergeant takes a shine to him. He installs him as company clerk, breaks up his lyrical love affair with a charming French girl, and begins an unconscious homosexual pursuit. Each night he takes the boy off to village bars until their lives become a dreadful bender from which Tom cannot escape, only half sensing the truth about the sergeant that must sooner or later burst to the surface.

The girl waits loyally while the boy tries desperately but unsuccessfully to shake his crude, nearly crazed pursuer. In the book's final burst of violence, the sergeant moves rapidly to an inevitable end. Author Murphy's scenes of Army life abroad are nearly faultless (he served in France in 1953-54), and he sticks to his story with a relentlessness rare in a first novelist. He maintains enormous suspense, never lets his characters get out of character, and makes a genuine tragedy of an unsavory situation.

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