CONVERSATIONS WITH AMERICANS, by Mark Lane, 247 pages, Simon and Schuster, $6.95.

WHEN I came home one summer, I wandered by the baby contest that was being held at the Band-shell, my town's coquina-rock version of the Hollywood Bowl by the Atlantic Ocean. There, costumed boys and girls two and three years old were given their first taste of the footlights, the heady liquor of performing for an audience. The three winners in the boys' division that year were dressed as an Indian, a cowboy, and the last wore a minutely detailed copy of a Special Forces uniform. A sweating man in tuxedo lined the three up in front of a battery of Chamber of Commerce and news photographers, whereupon the contestants blinked mutely like pole-axed calves as the flashbulbs burst and the shutters began snapping like a den of rattlers.

Meanwhile, the rides further down the board-walk kept spinning and dipping and whirling-the bumper cars and whirl-a-gig and Octopus. Tucked in quieter corners of this carnival, for the very smallest children, are tamer rides which turn in small circles, go very slowly, and remain perfectly level. They are designed to prevent the children from crying, to avoid upsetting them, rather than for excitement.

The little children, about the same age as those in the baby contest, are strapped in tightly and stare out at the fluorescent fuzz around them; they tend to look very stolid and serious in their little pods, like their grandparents out for a 15 m.p.h. procession to a movie or a drive-in church. After perhaps a dozen revolutions, one set of parents plucks their beloved bundle from a pod proudly emblazoned with a screaming, claws-out eagle, the stars and stripes, and the words "Cong Killer" on the side-and stuffs a thick wad of pink cotton candy in his mouth as a reward for not throwing up in his very first ride at the midway.

Just before Thanksgiving, Simon and Schuster released a book which no one will want to read while eating-Mark Lane's Conversations with Americans consists of 32 tape-recorded interviews with Vietnam veterans that dwell on acts of brutality and the psychology of the armed forces which primes our soldiers for them. Reading this book is like taking a ride in a spin-dry Laundromat filled with blood. Approximately one-fourth of the way into the book, there remains nothing for the most naive reader to discover, and the same events keep repeating themselves in wave after inexorable wave of nausea. After a cycle or two of these atrocities, all the blood has spun right out of the reader's head, the events lose all their reality, and all that's left is a grey blur of the type and the white of the page.

THE NUMBER of incidents of this nature in this book suggests that either witnessing or participating in these atrocities is part of every American combat soldier's experience in Vietnam. The interviews reveal that Americans soldiers have:

Tortured, for revenge as well as for information, Vietnamese prisoners with the following methods:

Dragging men from a rope from a helicopter along tree tops.

Attaching high voltage electrodes to the testicles of men and to the vaginas and breasts of women.

Pulling fingernails off with pliers.

Inserting bamboo splinters into eardrums.

Taking fellow prisoners to airfields, to watch suspect pulled apart in the air by helicopters, or pushed out of helicopters from a sufficient height to kill them.

Shot Vietnamese civilians, old men as well as children, for target practice, for kicks.

Poisoned children by giving them water-like cookies made of plastic explosives.

Gang raped available women, often followed by a modern version of ritual sacrifice which is accomplished by inserting a lighted flare inside the victim's vagina and watching her explode.

Lane also records testimony that charges four American soldiers with killing 19 in one village; many of those questioned refer to a shadowy acquaintance with numerous versions of My Lai.

There is some perverted justice in the spiritual vacuum in which our troops live: American soldiers since 1968, as indicated in this book, have been contributing to bounties on the heads of commanding officers who continue to make vigorous attempts to seek out enemy forces.

THE interviews appear authentic-although many of those who agreed to talk were deserters, more than half have received multiple decorations and have returned to the United States. For some of these men, their testimony takes the form of a confessional, and a few risk prosecution by the Army because they are still in the reserves. Horrified by the manuscript submitted to them, the editors at Simon and Schuster required Lane to provide documentary evidence for the statements before they would handle Conversations with Americans.

Apparently they got it, and Lane asserts that the material is available to government agencies who might wish to prosecute for the charges stemming from the statements.

This book makes no attempt to deal with the unanswerable question of whether Americans are more or less brutal than others, or whether this war is any different from others wars. But Lane does assert, on the back of the book jacket, that

If Americans know less than all there is to know about the terrible cost the war is imposing upon the civilian population of South Vietnam, they know next to nothing of the real cost America is paying for its adventure. The real price is the sacrifice of an entire generation.

Not the entire generation. My mind spins from the book back to the beach back home. Marvin (not his real name) is sitting on the back of a car with a girl with a deep tan and flashing black eyes hanging on his arm. Marvin had been a shy, fumbling, big-boned freckled boy who wasn't coordinated enough to play football or put the shot. But he lifted weights and always tried so very hard. Everyone wished him well. He enlisted. . . the Marines. He had just returned from the DMZ. The transformation was electric. With his black mustache, he looked like Clark Gable, broad chest, flat waist, deep penetrating calm blue eyes that seemed bottomless. Sideburns, deep unhesitating voice. Marvin was a presence of energy, a star.

"Everybody should go over there. You should go over there, Tim. It's the best thing that ever happened to me."

Someone mentioned a small town in Ohio that petitioned the government to remove the rest of their sons from fighting units, because 60 per cent of their young men had been killed in action. "Haw! haw!" laughed Marvin. "They must have been awful damn dumb."