Whistle (67 page)

The time shift from Winch’s incarceration in the mental ward to the concluding chapter is roughly a month and a half, late June after the D-Day invasion. Strange was now happily set in with the infantry Division to which he had persuaded Winch to transfer him. With the destruction of the old company, he had given all his loyalties, affections, and emotions to his new company and Division. But curiously enough, having left the communications outfit in exactly the way he wanted, he now found he was so attached to the new men in the infantry unit that it was almost impossible for him, with his foreknowledge of what they were about to go through (they did not have this foreknowledge, and would be going into combat innocently), to relive the whole experience. This was to be the climax of Strange’s story and the book.

In this last chapter, Strange and his new outfit were en route to England and Europe in a large troop convoy. It was generally known among the men that they would be thrown into the fighting in western France as cannon fodder as soon as possible.

The troop convoy was several days out from New York in the Atlantic. It was late on a foggy night and Strange was wandering around the ship alone. A series of flashback scenes took place in Strange’s mind as he moved about. He pondered the fate of the old company.

He thought first of Winch. He remembered the early morning at Camp O’Bruyerre when someone at headquarters told him about Winch’s mad raid on the PX. There was very little he could do to help Winch that morning, although he got a pass and loitered around outside the hospital prison ward for a long time.

Then Strange remembered going to the hospital ward the next day to visit Winch. As he walked down the corridor, Strange heard Winch crying out from his room that same old phrase from the day on Hill 27 on Guadalcanal:
“Get them out! Get them out of there! Can’t you see the mortars got them bracketed!”
Strange acknowledged then to his sorrow that there was no point in visiting Winch, and he went back to his new outfit, which was getting ready to ship out to dry dock in New York. Just before he left Camp O’Bruyerre, another soldier told him he had seen Winch looking out the barred window of the mental ward shouting the same words.

Now, as he was roaming about the troop ship in the North Atlantic, Strange’s thoughts turned to his wife, Linda, whom he realized he still loved, although he knew she could not care less. Then he thought of Marion Landers, and finally of his terrible grief when he had learned of the death of Bobby Prell in the bar fight in California.

As Strange looked out on the ocean and on the other darkened ships in the convoy moving eastward to Europe, there was an echo in his memory of their hospital ship from the Pacific as it finally approached the American landfall, “the great blue continent,” almost a year before. Just as with Landers when he was struck by the car at Camp O’Bruyerre, Strange remembered as in a dream the slow white ship with the huge red crosses on its sides, his visits to Prell in the old main lounge where the serious casualties were segregated—“the repository, the collection-place and bank, of all human evil,” his gazing out the window port on the California shore in the calm moonless night.

From these thoughts of the hospital ship those months before, Strange returned to reality, to the troop convoy: At this point comes the final scene, the final climax, the final everything of the book . . .

As Strange gets out of the crowded hold with all the stinks and smells of overcrowded men, he goes up on deck in the drizzly, foggy night—an unpleasant night, quite chilly, although it is June—and leans against the boat davit.

He faces finally the fact that he simply cannot go through the whole process again. He simply can’t go into England and into Europe with this new outfit knowing what he knows from the Pacific, and sit back in his relatively safe position as a mess sergeant and watch the young men be killed and maimed and lost. He can’t stand being a witness again to all the anguish and mayhem and blood and suffering.

And when he reaches this realization he sees what a trap he has placed himself in by insisting that he should go to Europe, and that he should go in an outfit, an infantry Division, that he likes rather than the old Signal Corps unit he had a great deal of power in and didn’t really care that much about.

With all this in his head, somewhat on the spur of the moment, wearing his overcoat, his helmet, his boots, and in the chill night his woolen gloves, he grabs the railing by the boat davit and just slips over the side, quietly without anyone around. No one hears, no one notices.

As he hits the water he himself is shocked by what he has done. It was such a sudden thing that he didn’t know he was going to do it.

He treads water in the sea as the ship moves away and out of sight in the fog and the night. He doesn’t try to attract attention . . . As he watches the ship go away he’s not distressed really. And in his full uniform he treads water alone, the ship slowly moving out of sight in the fog.

He thinks now that he is never going to know the answer to those peculiar dreams of Roman justice or injustice he had both times coming out of the anesthetic during his hand operations. All that Strange thinks with a certain regret is that he will never find out now.

And then as he’s treading water with his woolen GI gloves, he can feel the cold beginning to swell his hands. And from this, in a sort of semihallucination, all of him begins to seem to swell and he gets bigger and bigger, until he can see the ship moving away or thinks he can. And then he goes on getting bigger and bigger and swelling and swelling until he’s bigger than the ocean, bigger than the planet, bigger than the solar system, bigger than the galaxy out in the universe.

And as he swells and grows this picture of a fully clothed soldier with his helmet, his boots, and his GI woolen gloves seems to be taking into himself all of the pain and anguish and sorrow and misery that is the lot of all soldiers, taking it into himself and into the universe as well.

And then still in the hallucination he begins to shrink back to normal, and shrinks down through the other stages—the galaxy, the solar system, the planet, the ocean—back to Strange in the water. And then continues shrinking until he seems to be only the size of a seahorse, and then an amoeba, then finally an atom.

He did not know whether he would drown first or freeze.

James Jones (1921—1977) was one of the preeminent American writers of the twentieth century. With a series of three novels written in the decades following World War II, he established himself as one of the foremost chroniclers of the modern soldier’s life.

Born in Illinois, Jones came of age during the Depression in a family that experienced poverty suddenly and brutally. He learned to box in high school, competing as a welterweight in several Golden Gloves tournaments. After graduation he had planned to go to college, but a lack of funds led him to enlist in the army instead.

Before war began he served in Hawaii, where he found himself in regular conflict with superior officers who rewarded Jones’s natural combativeness with latrine duty and time in the guardhouse. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, which Jones witnessed, he was sent to Guadalcanal, site of some of the deadliest jungle fighting of the Pacific Theater. He distinguished himself in battle, at one point killing an enemy soldier barehanded, and was awarded a bronze star for his bravery. He was shipped home in 1943 because of torn ligaments in his ankle, an old injury that was made much worse in the war. After a period of convalescence in Memphis, Jones requested a limited duty assignment and a short leave. When these were denied, he went AWOL.

His stretch away from the army was brief but crucial, as it was then that he met Lowney Handy, the novelist who would later become Jones’s mentor. Jones spent a few months getting to know Lowney and her husband, Harry, then returned to the army, spending a year as a “buck-ass private” (a term which Jones coined) before winning promotion to sergeant. In the summer of 1944, showing signs of severe post-traumatic stress—then called “combat fatigue—he was honorably discharged.

He enrolled at New York University and, inspired by Lowney Handy, began work on his first novel,
To the End of the
War (originally titled
They Shall Inherit the Laughter
). Drawing on his own past, Jones wove a story of soldiers just returned from war, presenting a vision of soldiering that was neither romantic nor heroic. He submitted the 788-page manuscript to Charles Scribner’s Sons, where it was read by Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. Perkins rejected it, but saw promise in the weighty work, and encouraged Jones to write a new novel.

Jones began writing
From Here to Eternity,
a story of the war’s beginning. After six years of work, Jones showed it to Perkins, who was fully impressed and acquired the novel. After Perkins’s death, the succeeding editor cut large pieces from the manuscript, including scenes with homosexuality, politics, and graphic language that would have been flagged by the censor of that era, and published the novel in 1951. The story of a soldier at Pearl Harbor who becomes an outcast for refusing to box for the company team, it is an unflinching look at the United States pre-WWII peacetime army, a last refuge for the destitute, the homeless, and the desperate. The book was instrumental in changing unjust army practices, which created a public outcry when it was published. It sold 90,000 copies in its first month of publication and captured the National Book Award, beating out
The Catcher in the Rye
. In 1953 the film version, starring Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift, won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and made Jones internationally famous.

He returned to Illinois to help the Handys establish a writers’ colony. While living there he wrote his second novel,
Some Came Running,
which he finished in 1957. An experimental retelling of his Midwestern childhood, it stretched to nearly 1,000 pages and drew little acclaim.

In 1958, newly married to Gloria Mosolino, Jones moved to Paris, where he lived for most of the rest of his life, spending time with his old friend Norman Mailer and contributing regularly to the
Paris Review
. There he wrote
The Thin Red Line
(1962), his second World War II epic, which follows a company of green recruits as they join the fighting in Guadalcanal; and
The Merry Month of May
(1970), an account of the 1968 Paris student riots.
The Thin Red Line
would be brought to the screen by director Terrence Malick in 1998.

Jones and his wife returned to the United States in the mid 1970s, settling in Sagaponack, New York. There Jones began
Whistle
, the final volume in his World War II trilogy, which was left unfinished at the time of his death. However, he had left extensive notes for novelist and longtime editor of
Harper’s Magazine
Willie Morris, who completed the last three chapters after Jones’s death in 1977. The book was published in 1978.

A young Jones, riding his bike in 1925.

Jones and his sister, Mary Ann, nicknamed “Tink.”