I just finished a short book about the unpublished works of James Jones.

"To the End of the War'' which covers a few things that were unpublished and/or edited out of one of his other works.

I can see why they were edited out because they entered a dark place that the American Public was afraid to go at the time. Most of the writing took place almost immediately after the war when the American public and GI Joe were just coming home and getting on with their lives. The public wanted the war behind them and certainly didn't want to venture into the dark side.

GI Joe didn't want to talk about it and the public was not ready to hear it. 

In 1943 Jones was sent stateside with a head wound and an earlier injury that had compounded itself on Guadalcanal that took him out of combat duty and had him sent stateside.

He wrote a lot about the anger and bitterness among the guys that were there getting patched up to be thrown back into the lines and how they were treated unfairly.  Many openly rebelled and when they were denied leave they simply went AWOL.

He mentioned one Old Army First Sergeant that was disgusted and got busted to private where he stayed, refusing to accept promotion because he was sick and tired of the responsibility and stupidity he was forced to deal with.

The pre-war Army was a caste system. The officers were treated a LOT better than the enlisted people. This is one of the few things that the American mothers did right. They wrote their congress critters about how their sons were being $hit on and things got a lot fairer.

Timing was everything otherwise Robert Leckie's "Helmet for my pillow" would have been heavily edited. Leckie includes his problems, anger and disciplinary indiscretions and how he basically stopped caring about a lot of things.

However, Leckie's book came out in 1957, over a decade after the war when things were a little different. Leckie had just seen 'South Pacific' and was pissed off and said "That's not how it was" and wrote his book, one of several.

I like reading the dark side of the war because it brings a lot of things into a clearer context. Many years ago I had an older woman tell me her son was a lot different after he returned from Vietnam. 

I looked at her and asked her, "What did you expect?"

If you decide to read 'From Here to Eternity' get the Penguin Classics version. In 2013 it was published by Penguin Classics the way it was originally written before it was edited to omit some of the darker things Jones wrote about.

Edited to add: Much of the treatment of enlisted men changed in 1950 when the UCMJ came into effect. It eliminated a lot of the petty tyranny military personnel were subject under previous rules and gave them some personal rights and some protections.

To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY