The Embassy House

Less often portrayed than the horrors of the soldiers' war in Vietnam are those of the covert war conducted by the CIA. Proffitt, who worked in Vietnam as a journalist and wrote the highly praised Gardens of Stone, recreates them here in a story that's hard-hitting, tense, often horrifying and utterly convincing. Captain Gulliver, nicknamed Sandman for his legendary skills as a killer, is a Green Beret who, in 1970, is ""shanghaied'' by the CIA to oversee the weeding out of Viet Cong from the villages of a Mekong Delta province. Gulliver hates both his job and his cold-blooded CIA superior, an arranger of ``terminations'' that he gets others to carry out. He finds friendship with his Vietnamese counterpart, the mysterious Captain Dang, and solace for his torn conscience in the arms of a Vietnamese actress. The entry on the scene of a naive and pretty CIA case worker and the torture-murder of an innocent man force Gulliver to make his grimmest choice yet between conscience and duty. This is not a story of communism versus democracy, but of civilized values sacrificed to political cause. 500,000 first printing; major ad/promo. (June 10)