Into the Rough

G. I. Prewitt, a Kentucky mountain boy and Top Sergeant Milt Warden are the main characters. Prew the high I.Q. individualist, enlisted in 1936. by 1941 has no illusions about romantic army life. He is skilfully drawn as a quiet philosophical soldier with great resources of will-power and determination. Through a miscarriage of army Justice he ends up in "The Stockade." a military prison "the toughest Jail in the US. Army." Jones serves up some of the most brutally sickening passages of prison horror one wants to rend. Unfortunately it has obvious truth. Almost accidentally Prew becomes a deserter, upon release from the Stockade to prostitute girl-friends home in the upper crust area of Honolulu. After Pearl Harbour he remembers that he is a soldier. Trying to get back to his unit, now at alert on one of the beaches he runs into a nervous patrol and several machine-gun bullets on a golf links. He is probably the first martyr to die at the bottom of a bunker.

Prewiett seems to have been misunderstood by everyone except Jones.

Warden is a variation on the theme but a more robust more directly materialistic arrangement. He strides into a tearing hating sadistic kind of love with Karen, who happens to be his C.O.'s wife. (The C.O. hardly enters the story at all—mostly through the embittered lips of Karen—but he is obviously not the "home at five garden in the weekend type".)