Kindle. Eventually inevitable due to the gravitation of Malick's movie (1998).
This is Jones's take on the Guadacanal campaign of 1942/1943 that was "the first major Allied land offensive against Japan" of World War II. (Guadalancal, for those of us born long after, is one of the Solomon Islands.) It's relentless, well written, never boring, sometimes hilarious and yet somehow not as iconic as Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961); Witt is a bit like Yossarian in being doctrinaire but is not as overtly philosophical about it. (Perhaps the relative lack of enduring recognition is because, like Milton Friedman and the money supply, everything reminds Jones of sex.) The cast of characters initially seems daunting but are sufficiently distinct that they're not hard to follow. His deft treatment of PTSD ("combat numbess") was perhaps novel at the time.
Goodreads. Maxwell Geismar at the New York Times at the time.
