BOOK REVIEW - War adventure -- a casualty of timing? - The Far Reaches A Novel Homer Hickam Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press: 314 pp., $24.95

This is, perhaps, an inopportune time to publish "The Far Reaches." The bloody battle against the Japanese in which Homer Hickam sets his novel, the U.S. military's struggle for the Pacific atoll Tarawa, took place 54 years ago, in November 1943.

For some who were there and survived the slaughter, time has softened or worn away the memories. It's an episode to be recalled upon request. For others, though, memories of the fight for Tarawa, one of the most brutal in U.S. history, remain too vivid to be shelved or tucked away, a quivering ball of horror.

In the three-day amphibious assault, about 1,000 Marines were killed and nearly 2,300 U.S. fighters were grievously wounded, Hickam writes in an author's note with references to the battle. The Japanese, "who fought nearly to the last man," he says, lost 4,713 men.

Oddly, for a writer whose key to the reader is building sympathy for his characters, these appallingly high figures seem to make Hickam sore.

"Another way of looking at it," he writes, is that "nearly 30 percent of the 12,000 Americans who participated in the landing were either killed or incapacitated by wounds." Ninety of 125 U.S. landing craft were sunk or wrecked.

"The battle was three days of bloody mayhem. One wonders what the reaction of the United States public would be today after such a horrendous 'victory.' " (At the time, thanks to the news media brought along to record what was expected to be certain victory, photos of dead Marines washing onto Tarawa's beaches were splashed across U.S. newspapers, shocking the nation. A congressional investigation into the heavy losses was halted only after the Marine Corps commandant made a personal plea.)

Hickam, a former infantryman in Vietnam and author of such books as "Rocket Boys," "October Skies" and "We Are Not Afraid," is as scornful of contemporary Japanese as he is of today's antiwar Americans. "In 2004," he writes in the author's note, "the Japanese sent 600 troops to Iraq, principally to support a variety of humanitarian projects, including water purification. Japanese citizens instantly began to fret over the safety of their soldiers, demanding that everything possible be done to keep them out of actual combat and to bring them home as soon as possible.

"Obviously," he adds, "there have been a few changes in the mindset of both Americans and Japanese since the 1940s."

Just as obviously Hickam doesn't like the change.