Like muscle cars and bomber jackets, they don't make them like Philip Caputo anymore. "I actually learned to fly over Saudi Arabia many, many years ago," says the 63-year-old novelist, beginning yet another tantalizing tale from his den in Norwalk, Conn. Caputo is...

INDIAN COUNTRY By Philip Caputo Bantam. 419 pp. $18.95 IN THE prologue to A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo's much-acclaimed memoir of serving in Vietnam as a Marine lieutenant, he wrote, "So, when we marched into the rice paddies on that damp March afternoon,...

In Horn of Africa Philip Caputo endeavors to present a "personal vision of the nature of violence and to show what happens when a certain kind of man is placed in a condition in which he is free to exceed the bounds of acceptable human conduct." Jeremy Nordstrand is this "certain kind of man." An imperious figure with bear-like strength, Nordstrand and two other US intelligence agents undertake a secret mission to Ethiopia. Its purpose is to smuggle arms to a warlike Islamic trib...

Tales of adventure set in Africa, with their prefabricated plots and pasteboard heroes, have become so much the special preserve of hack novelists that the genre has been all but spoiled for serious writers. Philip Caputo's [Horn of Africa, a] story of African gun running and clandestine warfare, begins in such a conventional way that it took me a few more pages than it should have to realize that it is the genuine article: a real novel stuffed with excitement and filled with sharply drawn characters...

Philip Caputo has written a celebrated memoir ("A Rumor of War") and a novel about the meaningless horror of modern war ("Horn of Africa"). He works the same territory again in his new novel, "DelCorso's Gallery." Nicholas DelCorso, a Vietnam veteran turned combat photographer, wants to show the public the true face of war. It has become an obsession with him, an attempted expiation of a momentary sin of callousness, a crusade that seems inexplicable and tast...