Mount TBR #34

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

WWII: A Chronicle of Soldiering – James Jones

When I was teenager in the early Seventies, I read and enjoyed Jones’ From Here to Eternity, a novel about the peacetime army in Hawaii just prior to WWII. It was compelling in its gritty realism even though its faraway exotic locale and love/adultery stories made it hard for an untraveled and inexperienced teenage boy like me to connect with. In 1975 Jones was hired to the write the text for a coffee-table book of WWII war art.

Jones interweaves autobiographical material with a chronological narrative of the major battles of the war. Jones is best, as we would expect, on the materials with which that he has had direct experience as an enlisted man at war: the boredom of walking and waiting punctuated with the terror of battle and the disgust at sights and smells that would make a demon puke. His description of the “Evolution of a Soldier” gives insight into the process of moving  from civilian to raw recruit, raw recruit to garrison soldier, garrison soldier into combat, and his transformation into a veteran (given the knowledge, experience and luck). The acceptance of death is key.

Every combat soldier, if he follows far enough along the path that began with his induction, must, I think, be led inexorably to that awareness. He must make a compact with himself or with Fate that he is lost. Only then can he function as he ought to function, under fire. He knows and accepts beforehand that he’s dead, although he may still be walking around for a while. That soldier you have walking around there with this awareness in him is the final end product of the Evolution of a Soldier.

So Army puts people into a situation where acceptance and resignation are needed. But Jones underscores the fact that “the government had never set up any De-Evolution of a Soldier center, to match its induction centers. When you went in, they had the techniques and would ride you all the way to becoming a soldier. They had no comparable system when you came out. That you had to do on your own.”

The coffee-table book was such a best-seller that the publisher Ballantine got the cockamamie idea of issuing the book in pocket-paperback size, thus reducing the impact of the art. That’s the version I read, depending on the web to view the art (here and here) lest I tear the 40-year-old spine to pieces.