NONFICTION - April 21, 1991

FLIGHT OF THE AVENGER: George Bush at War by Joe Hyams (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $16.95; 178 pp.). If you thought Avenger in the title referred to a person, and war to Desert Storm, well, it’s understandable; in the postwar, post-wimp era of George Bush, one expects to see him portrayed as a superhero, even when the war alluded to, as here, lies a half-century in the past. What’s unexpected about “Flight of the Avenger”--the Avenger is the type of plane that Bush flew, at the time “the largest single-engine carrier-based plane in the world”--is that Bush does comes off somewhat heroically, mainly due to his modesty. Although in 1944, Bush himself was shot down (and rescued) near a Japanese-occupied island where captured pilots were sometimes executed, he told Los Angeles writer Joe Hyams that “the real heroes to me were the Marines going ashore at Iwo Jima. I wore clean laundry every night and ate well.” Hyams, a former Army correspondent, is a sympathetic biographer of the youthful Bush in wartime--too sympathetic, in fact, for the future President comes off as too good to be true.