The book about B.T. Collins is a very good Vietnam book. It does away with some too easy assumptions about how people came home. Collins came home cruelly diminished in body. He lost an arm and a leg during his second tour. But he came home proud and stayed that way.

“I had been planning this book for a long time,” says Maureen Collins Baker, B.T.’s sister. “It was to be a gift from me to him.”

But her brother, who lived life so completely with a prosthetic leg and a hook for a hand, would not get to see the book. Baker began writing it the day after his funeral. He died at 52 on March 19, 1993. He died after a wonderfully improbable life filled with mad excess and steely loyalty and pride in an ideal that has not been well tended.

“I talked to his Army buddies,” says Baker. “They talked about how war could be a rush, how intense it could be. They talked of that bond between men — how that person standing next to you will die for you.”

Baker is a retired college professor who has done a lot of work in children’s television. She lives in Providence. Tomorrow night, she will be at the Rochambeau Library at 7 to talk of her brother and her book.

In writing the book, she talked to people who would refer her to other people. The process went on and on. B.T. Collins was a great talker and the mention of his name inspired others to do some talking as well. There were stories — oh, were there stories. Collins, it seems, was one of those people who might go too far sometimes. But he never pulled back.

“In a business where ‘on deep background’ and ‘not for attribution’ are the only conditions under which so many public figures will even comment on the NCAA basketball tournament, Collins was blunt, candid, quotable and honest,” said columnist Mark Shields. “He never trimmed, and he never truckled.”

So Outrageous Hero: The B.T. Collins Story is far more than just a Vietnam book, although Baker believes her brother was defined by that experience. It is the story too of the country Collins came home to and tried to whip back into shape by the force of will and spirit and personality.

The Collinses grew up outside of New York City where, says Baker, they were part of a family shaped by Margaret and James, parents who were passionate about each other and the things they believed in.

“Dad was all about duty to country — stand up, speak out,” says Baker.

Her brother, Brien Thomas, was all about raising hell. Baker remembers a time when he came home after many cocktails to find the doors locked. His father had had enough. B.T. appeared on a ladder at the window of his sister’s second-floor bedroom. But the window was too small. His sister talked him off the ladder and he spent the night in the garage.

Later, B.T. partied his way out of the University of Pennsylvania.

Then he went to Vietnam. He went once, came home, and decided he had to go back, the second time as a Green Beret. He told his family about the kids he had seen there and how he felt he could save lives.

On June 20, 1967, he almost died in the Mekong Delta. A grenade blast lifted him off the ground. A leg and a hand were gone.

That is where Baker begins her book:

“My brother, B.T. Collins, did not die that day in Vietnam. On the contrary, he was reborn. June 20, 1967 became his ‘life day’; one he would celebrate for the next 26 years. All that he subsequently became, he believed, dated from that moment in the Mekong.”

There were hard months in the hospital at Valley Forge, Pa., where veterans who were making the sometimes impossible adjustment to diminished bodies filled their days with dark humor and flashbacks and the kind of give and take with doctors and nurses that could happen only at a time like that and in a place like that.

After 18 months, Collins got in a specially equipped car and headed for California. He was on a mission. Life had been given back to him and he wasn’t about to waste it.

“It was a chance to strut his stuff,” says Baker.

He went to Santa Clara University and its law school. He went at a time when antiwar feeling ran high. He challenged it. He sure made no apologies. And other students quickly learned that if he ever fell or had difficulty because of his arm and leg, they were not to help him.

After law school, he made himself impossible to ignore on the left coast. He was a Republican who served three governors, creating the oddest of political odd couples when he served as chief of staff to Gov. Jerry Brown, the space cadet of the Democrats.

He was uncompromising. And he pushed himself hard. He revived the California Conservation Corps with boot camp discipline. He got sued by the ACLU for requiring inmates at the California Youth Authority to learn to write. And he made it a personal matter that there be a Vietnam Memorial in Sacramento.

At the request of Gov. Pete Wilson, he ran for the California Assembly and was elected. His sister says that was the least favorite thing in his life in California. Other Assembly members disappointed him in the way they did the people’s business.

He had a massive heart attack on the way to a luncheon at which the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was speaking. His funeral was a celebration of a life lived full.

“B.T.’s definition of living well,” said former Governor Wilson, “consisted of bringing to any debate or any question a kind of unsparing honesty, decency, compassion, generosity of spirit and uniquely irreverent sense of humor that you knew was pure B.T.”

This book is really a reminder of possibilities and promise. Baker makes wonderful use of letters — letters written home from Vietnam and letters written about B.T. Collins by those he touched. We get to look into a life that is made richer by sacrifice. It is a life, Baker fears, that is becoming more and more the exception.

“A lot of us have forgotten who we are,” she says.

bkerr@projo.com