Combat experiences are like Tolstoy’s unhappy families: no two are alike, which may be why they often make for great novels, as Tolstoy also knew. The cause need not even be noble, since a hopeless situation and senseless violence can actually fortify a work of fiction. Certainly that is the case with António Lobo Antunes’s “Land at the End of the World,” set in Angola in the early 1970s, as Portugal’s ludicrous effort to preserve its African empire was meandering to an inglorious end.

The unnamed narrator is a young doctor wrenched from a comfortable life in Lisbon and forced to spend 27 months on the front lines treating his hapless fellow soldiers. He resents that they have been made “agents of a provincial form of fascism that was corroding and eating away at itself with the slow acid of its own sad, parochial stupidity.” But mostly he is sickened by the mutilated bodies delivered to his care, and fearful the same may happen to him. Though there are flashes of humor, almost always mordant, this is not “M*A*S*H” but something far darker and more absurd.

“The Land at the End of the World,” newly translated by Margaret Jull Costa, was originally published in 1979, four years after Portugal’s withdrawal from Africa and the final collapse of America’s intervention in Vietnam. At that time it was interpreted as a comment on the inherent futility of those recent Western adventures in the third world. But read at more than 30 years’ remove from those events much of this account of what Mr. Lobo Antunes’s narrator calls a “painful apprenticeship in dying” would no doubt make sense to survivors of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

“What have they done to us,” the narrator asks in one of his typically long and torrential sentences, “sitting here waiting in this landlocked place, imprisoned by three rows of barbed wire in a land that doesn’t belong to us, dying of malaria and bullets, whose whistling trajectory sounds like a nylon thread vibrating, fed by unreliable supply lines whose arrival or not is dependent on frequent accidents en route, on ambushes and land mines, fighting an invisible enemy, fighting the endless days that never pass, fighting homesickness, indignation, and remorse, fighting the dark nights as thick and opaque as a mourning veil.”