"Whistle" is a 1978 novel by James Jones, most famous for his novel "From Here to Eternity". The novel describes the lives of four service members who are patients at a military hospital in the middle of World War II. As James Jones remarks in an opening note, the novel serves as the third part of a "trilogy", consisting of "From Here to Eternity", "The Thin Red Line", and this book. The three books all center around four characters who have roughly similar names, and roughly similar biographies, but differing fates in the books themselves. The book was written by James Jones in the last years of his life, and the last three chapters of the book are just his drafts of what he wanted to write, before he passed away from congestive heart failure.
The book follows four characters, Winch, Prell, Strange and Landers, who were all medically invalidated during the South Pacific Campaign of World War II. Winch is (much like the author) suffering congestive heart failure unrelated to the war, while Prell was seriously wounded by machine gun fire and earns the Congressional Medal of Honor, but is in risk of losing his leg. Strange and Landers are both suffering minor but incapacitating combat wounds. The book starts on a hospital ship back to The United States, and follows the four characters to their destination in a military hospital in a fictionalized version of Memphis, Tennessee. Through a series of sometimes disjointed subplots and stories, the book explores several issues: the physical and psychological scars of war being one of them, and the rapid social change and wild culture of World War II America being the other.
Whatever the literary merits of this book are, it more raised my interest as a historical document. As a historical document, it provides challenges for me, because while it was written about World War II, Jones wrote it during and after the Vietnam War, and it is easy to see an influence of that conflict on the attitude of the book. I don't know what specific political or social views Jones had about war, but it is easy to read this book as a very critical, although not polemical, work on war in general. But much of that is influenced by my own background: having lived through the much different, but much longer series of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is interesting to read a book about PTSD before PTSD had a name. The attitudes towards sexuality are similarly old for a modern reader: the book goes into some detail for quite some time about how the characters relate to the idea of oral sex, something that to a modern reader seems much less serious than the life and death issues in the book. But that is mostly the interest of the book for me: some things that would seem very important to me are glossed over, while other things that are now commonplace are treated as new developments. And, if nothing else, I can't think of many other books like this: World War II novels that are focused on life in the United States, rather than in the campaign areas.