`The Flamboya Tree' by Clara Olink Kelly; Random House.(The Orlando Sentinel)

America's war in Afghanistan seems such a remote-controlled, high-tech event _ except, obviously, to those Americans who actually have family or friends fighting in that distant land.

But for the rest of us, the war is barely more than the occasional newspaper headline or TV news brief. There is none of the muck, the terror, the uncertainty of a war that hits home, that overwhelms entire communities, every man, woman and child.

That may be why Clara Olink Kelly's memoir of World War II in a remote corner of the Pacific is so shocking and so moving. For her, war is a brutal event that explodes on her very doorstep. It mutilates her family, both physically and …