Of the four main protagonists of Whistle, two are suicides, one is murdered in a bar fight, and the last goes mad. All are medal winners for heroism during the U.S. South Pacific campaign of World War II. That was Jones's final verdict on the war he himself had tried to fight honorably and found there was no honor; there was only self-survival, which became contaminated by meaningless death on every side and led to the most profound despair on the part of every man with a shred of conscience.

It might be appropriate to give a newer generation a quick sketch of what made Jones unique. Unlike radical intellectuals and practicing Christians who also condemn war—as a matter of fact, who doesn't today?—Jones began as a romantic, hard-nosed war lover…. There was something so basically up-yours American male in his appetites that he spoke for hundreds of thousands in his first, most widely read novel, From Here to Eternity, which ended with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

A decade later came The Thin Red Line, which examines with a kind of brooding contempt the murder and monstrosity on Guadalcanal during the campaign against the Japanese in '42 and '43. Any male romanticism that Jones might have had about testing himself in the ultimate contest had long since fled. What makes the book extraordinary is the tremendous calm and self-discipline with which he opens a door on hell; no shrieking, no hysteria, but instead a very level and unrelenting examination of what modern warfare is like….

Whistle brings this big, sad story of the American fighting man and the so-called last great war to its final ghoulish resting-place. The four characters who dominate the book have all been wounded in some fashion during the fighting on the Pacific Island of South Georgia, following Guadalcanal. They are all sent to an army hospital in "Luxor," Tennessee, to mend…. The hospital and the town become the final stage for the deterioration of the four men.

Three of the four we have met before under different names. Mart Winch was the sardonic and masterful 1st/Sgt. Warden in Eternity and 1st/Sgt. Welsh in Red Line: Bobby Prell was the defiant bugler Pvt. Prewitt (really the young Jones) in Eternity and Pvt. Witt in Red Line, and John Strange was the amiable Mess/Sgt. Stark in Eternity and Mess/Sgt. Storm in Red Line. (p. 70)

All have deep mental wounds as well as physical ones, revolving around the men they have deserted on South Georgia. One must recall that the war is still going on, getting ever more fierce. Loyalty to the company and the division is their only patriotism. Even at the hospital this bond makes the surgeon think twice before amputating Prell's festering leg, almost as if these vets would lynch him if he added to their humiliation. But as Mark Winch sneeringly predicts—and they look to him as their father figure, a role he can't abide—the bond is going to fray. They have all seen too much and been through too much to take unquestioning comfort in each other. (pp. 70-1)

The odor of death permeates this last book in a sharp, unflinching way that distinguishes it from its predecessors. Jones had the first of several heart attacks in 1970, when he was beginning the final rewrite on Whistle, and one can't help but be aware that this knowledge of foreshortening mortality colors the book. To Mart Winch, the oldest, wisest, and most disillusioned of the four, Jones gives his own weakening physical symptoms and much of his mature outlook. If Prewitt was the persona of Jones's roaring young manhood, Winch is the used-up lion of his middle age….

This is a sadder book than the others because there is no relief from the starkness. Whether it is the most profound of the three is an arguable point. Jones fought to keep his humanity to the end—and a novelist without humanity becomes a propagandist—even though one feels at moments that the author wants to sit the reader down on his knee, like a naive child, and lecture him about the insanity of the human race. But Jones keeps this impulse under tight control for the most part and goes about his business as a conscientious, if sometimes nose-thumbingly raw, craftsman. Yet there is little contrast in the emotional coloration of the novel.

It is very realistically written, with all that gorgeous, snickering love of army detail that Jones knew down to his fingertips. But the four leading figures have in one sense already died when they are shipped back to the States. They are almost ghost figures compared to their earlier personifications in Eternity and Red Line. We know they are doomed, and that we can do nothing about it. It is painful and frustrating, and sometimes we feel that Jones is sadistically prolonging the agony when he could have ended it with a blunt literary pistol shot—made it half as long, half as painful.

And yet one still roots for him all the way to wring every drop of spleen out of his heart about the one subject he knew better than any other writer in the country. The art may have suffered, the suspense is that of a mystery in which we know whodunnit in the first chapter—but the bulldog snarl of the man is heightened by his refusal to let us off easy. This is what American war has done to American man, he is saying, and it is all a revolting crock of shit. Look at it. Feel it. Goddam—eat it, you foolish civilians who cloak the dead meat of a generation in judicious abstractions. You are the pitiable ones!…

Jones didn't want to let us off the hook of his grim final vision one little inch, especially at the mutual windup of his life and art. It will take time for the just rank and worth of this soldier-scribe to emerge from the journalistic gunfire of our time, but if you squint through the haze you can see Stephen Crane and Hemingway waiting at the barracks door to welcome a tough soul brother home. He was an equal. (p. 71)