A Proud Day.(Heart of a Soldier: A Story of Love, Heroism, and September 11th)

Heart of a Soldier: A Story of Love, Heroism, and September 11th, by James B. Stewart (Simon & Schuster, 321 pp., $24)

Consider the last 18 months. It looks like The Great American Crack-up: A decade-long orgy of moneyed excess and Clintonian evasion comes to a climax in roiling capital markets and collapsing portfolios, domestic terrorism and foreign war, disgraced clerics and discovered corporate thievery. Even baseball threatened to let America down.

But -- as if to restore our faith -- along comes this excellent book. Heart of a Soldier is the story of a life of heroic virtue and self- sacrifice, but it is also a simple love story, the love of a big- hearted man for his adopted country, for his friends and family, and for the woman who completed him. And it is a story of this man's triumph over the soul-destroying hatred of 9/11.

James B. Stewart is both a best-selling author and a Pulitzer prize- winner; in a matter of pages one sees why. He has chosen a subject that is riveting in itself, and rendered it with glass-clear prose that leaves the reader with an intimate understanding of the story and its people.

Rick Rescorla was born in a working-class village in Cornwall, England -- to a family of modest means, modest education, and modest ambition - --- just before World War II. Stewart deftly guides our imagination to see a small boy captivated by great dreams of "foreign places and adventure, fantasies fueled by weekly trips to the Palace Cinema." And it is as if this small boy sitting in the dark of the Palace Cinema wills his life to conform to the heroic, romantic images that so captivated and thrilled him. Restless with the uneventful domesticity of Cornwall, Rescorla joins the British army at 17 and starts a life adventure worthy of Hollywood.

Stewart describes Rescorla's military service in Northern Rhodesia, a near-otherworldly place of "free-flowing Watney's Red Barrel ale, the gin-and-tonics before supper [and] white-jacketed servants." In the warm receding light of the British Empire our hero meets an American, Dan Hill, who becomes his lifelong friend and comrade-in-arms. The two hunt and camp on the African plain, and Stewart's lens focuses in on Rescorla's autodidactic enthusiasm for poetry and fiction, especially for Kipling.

With the colonial order coming to an end, Hill and Rescorla decide to leave Rhodesia and agree on their life's ambition: fighting Communism. "We both want to fight Communists, and keep them from world domination," Hill implores. "There's only one place to do that. . . . It's the U.S. . . . We can go to the States, enlist in the army. . . . When you get to New York, call me."