He regarded US military intervention as a mistake. But at the same time, he never abstracted any situation he observed from his own personal experience into convenient categories of binary oppositions. Jones avoided certain pat generalizations that marred otherwise fine observations by contemporaries such as Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and Frances Fitzgerald. Although criticized heavily at the time of publication, Viet Journal now appears surprisingly contemporary. It has not been dated.
War is hell for both sides and all soldiers suffer the danger of bestial reduction.
His Viet Journal is fascinating reading, a work mixing personal factual experience with fictional constructions akin to recent perceptive theoretical observations on the subjective nature of documentary film. As several other Viet Nam scholars have emphasized, it is a mistake to isolate Viet Nam from other conflicts and representations. The James Jones Reader provides key selections from his war-time fiction. In addition to the famous trilogy From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, and Whistle it contains extracts from his symbolic novella, The Pistol, as well as WWII, and war stories from T he Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories, and Some Came Running. It is thus a very good introduction to Jones' work and should stimulate the reader to then begin reading his entire opus.