The Hill

This taut tale of two stepbrothers stretches from the ``baking dust'' of rural Oklahoma to the steamy heat of Vietnamese jungles. After a sadistic coach costs him his football scholarship, tall, blond Jason Johnson winds up a lieutenant in a Ranger paratroop division in Vietnam. Meanwhile, stepbrother Ty Nance's half-Kiowa Indian ancestry brings its own problems, and Ty, too, becomes a paratrooperlike his father and uncle, both of whom died in combat. Scott ( Charlie Mike ) elicits sympathy for the two heroes while shocking with grim, realistic battle scenes, and introduces two characters who are North Vietnamese, a general and a private. The paths of the four men concenter on Hill 875, in ``the single most costly battle'' of the Vietnam War. The portrayal of the North Vietnamese offers unsettling insights into the nature of an all-too-human enemy, and underscores the pointlessness of the war as ``an aberration of logic.'' The anti-war message here is no less forceful for emanating from an action-adventure novel at that genre's best. (Mar.)