EXILES.<i> By Philip Caputo</i> .<i> Alfred A. Knopf: 384 pp., $25</i>

Philip Caputo is a splendid, muscular storyteller who possesses the crucial power to make endearing ordinary men from diverse fragilities and stubbornness. The men who loom so large in the remarkable and often harrowing three short novels in “Exiles” understand suffering. They are often shrewd and smart but never lucky. All of them move in alien terrain that promises defeat and, in two of the novels, odd and ghastly deaths.

A former Marine in Vietnam who wrote the brilliant memoir “A Rumor of War,” Caputo understands the working-class men who are always America’s surplus and count for very little; such men were used up in the Vietnam War. Two of the novels have nothing to do with that lunatic conflict but still, it hovers: The brutish father of one man was a veteran and another character was shot in the leg and fled to Australia to start over. In the third and last novel, “In the Forest of the Laughing Elephant,” Caputo leads us back to Vietnam and wills us to keep up with an infantry squad tracking a tiger in the jungle after the great beast has carried off their beloved mess sergeant. But their radioman, carrying the maps and compass, has drowned. Their story begins like this: “They had been six, now they were five, and none of them could see the sun.”

In “Exiles,” all the characters are displaced people in need of rescue. This is not immediately apparent in the first novel, “Standing In,” for a gilded enclave in Connecticut is hardly a prison camp. When a young man, Dante Paneta, is on a train going home to his mother’s funeral, he meets an older woman who is shocked and mesmerized by his resemblance to her adopted son, a Navy pilot whose F-16 crashed during the Gulf War. She is charming, imperious, clever and determined not to let him disappear. So striking is Dante’s resemblance to her son that both wonder if his mother might not have had a child out of wedlock. Dante is led into the charmed circle of the privileged. His benefactor, Greer Rhodes, corrects his grammar, provides elocution tapes to change his working-class accent, gives him the right clothes (once worn by her son) and has her husband get him a job as a documents clerk in the operations room of a branch office of a brokerage firm, which he hates. He sticks it out: “Of all the possibilities opening before him, the greatest was the chance to become someone else. He didn’t know who that would be, only that it would be a new and more estimable self. . . .”

In his new world, he notices the exclusion of all things public. Private clubs. Private schools and roads and beaches. He finds a girl, which is what Greer wants in her maneuvering to keep him nearby, but Dante knows that “he was the downtown man, she the uptown girl.”

After Greer helps Dante sell his mother’s shabby little house in another town, he has the money to buy a partnership in a barbershop. She is appalled. She uses a nasty hoax to get him fired from his old job cutting hair in Miami. By now, he has discovered her duplicity and arrogance. Her son did not die as she claimed; he was murdered by a homophobic shipmate. Now he knows, with some horror, that he is “neither guest nor intruder here, but a captive in the camp of an alien tribe.” He threatens to pack up and get out, but Caputo wisely leaves it to us to decide whether Dante Paneta can make the leap.

In “Paradise,” David MacKenzie struggles to impose efficiency on the local fishermen on an island in the Torres Strait near Australia. His mission is to convert subsistence fishermen to the methods and goals of market capitalism, but they resist his prodding and preaching. The local fishermen do not even own their vessels, and he wonders if he has been too long in “this forsaken world of treacherous reefs and deceptively beautiful seas, too long isolated from modern civilization and his own kind, among people only a little more than a century removed from headhunting and cannibalism. . . .” He worries about going troppo, the term used to describe a man who surrenders to local customs and delusions, like his predecessor, who had been sent home, sedated, after drinking a local brew, joining a warrior’s dance and shooting an arrow at a visiting member of the Queensland Parliament. “Think of yourselves as economic missionaries,” says his boss, who heads the Industries Board, but MacKenzie drinks instead. His wife, Dale, who teaches school, dances naked in a hidden grove to work off her tensions.

The horn-shaped island, called Nettles after the first white whaler who arrived and married a local woman, is not quite four miles long and a mile wide; it has gorgeous beaches. It is the ideal place to go mad. The most ambitious and focused man on the island is old Uncle Elias, who wants Nettles Island to once again be the center of the Torres Strait with his people “restored to their preeminence and their pride.” He schemes to that end.

When a shipwrecked white man, Barlow, is nursed back to health, MacKenzie, in need of a mechanic, puts him to work fixing a diesel engine. The man’s ship sailed from a port 600 miles away, a haven for thugs, drug dealers, smugglers, disbarred lawyers and bail jumpers. MacKenzie feels the deepest unease looking at the badly sunburned man, whose skills are urgently needed: “There was something else about the muscular man with the blond mane sun-bleached to platinum, something whose presence MacKenzie sensed from the moment he looked down at his young, partly ruined face: the aura of an evil more complex and menacing than the evil of a simple roughneck.” But his skills are urgently needed, he works well and he provides a false identity.

Caputo’s power as a novelist is in portraying men who know fear and must take risks to try to restore themselves. Dante Paneta fears loneliness and the humiliation of poverty, so he risks being corrupted. Dave MacKenzie fears failure and is even certain of it, so he ignores his intuitive repulsion of the shipwrecked man. And the soldiers are under orders to keep moving in the jungle and, since their wishes count for nothing, that is all that they can do.

In the book’s final story, set in a monstrously depicted jungle, we learn how the soldiers can hardly breathe in the wet green air, as they stalk a tiger that scares them more than the enemy. There are sprouted leaves that scrape like sandpaper. Savage vines coil up the trunks of trees, throttling the life out of them; each shrub and tree seems to be battling the other in a slow struggle for light, water and air. No writer has ever made the jungle more frightening than Caputo.

Lincoln Coombes is leading them, and Coombes will get them out. His guide, a hill tribesman and hunter, is not certain the tiger should be killed. As Coombes becomes fanatical, destroying the men’s watches so they will stop caring about time, the trackers wonder why “they were following a man who had no certain date or place of birth, no verifiable history of any kind, a man who was not a man so much as the sum of the stories that were told about him.” What they are never to know is that Coombes saw the tiger take Velasquez, although 42 men were guarding the perimeter when it crept past them through a minefield and concertina wire. He wants revenge. The squad must return to its base camp by a certain time or face court-martial, but Coombes does not care. One man wants to kill Coombes but is stopped by another.

Then it occurs to the soldiers that they cannot hear the war--the helicopters, artillery, gunships--in this unnatural silence. They have left the war zone and entered an area where there are no bomb craters or defoliated trees, and they want the old war back.

It is not good enough for Coombes when they find one foot of Velasquez or, later, the mess that is his corpse. It is the tiger he must have, no matter the cost or the consequences. What Caputo makes so clear in this stunning novel is that the men are not pursuing the tiger but being dragged by it to their doom.

The great theme in these novels is powerlessness. Desperate men, each facing a different struggle, lack the same power to choose. Caputo reminds us how, although we tend to assume that such men always possess power and control, they do not, except on those occasions when they use a weapon to have their way.