Four for War

Four for War is a novel that focuses on the response of four young men (boys, really, one year out of high school) to modern war: Mike Kelly, a college football player by trade, a bird watcher by choice; Jim Lyons, a lumberjack and a poet in hiding, recently married; Marv Adler, already a successful political cartoonist who draws a world motivated by power and greed; and Art Draper, a failed officer candidate who is getting a crash course in military chickenshit. Each of them enlists in the Marine Corps, and in June 1943 the four form a special communications team for imminent Pacific operations. The novel follows them through their indoctrination into an immoral, profane, and inept military system whose goal is to weed out the individual, the intellectual, the creative, and the racially different. They are assigned to a Canadian brigade for the invasion of Kiska Island in the Aleutians and get their next lesson in military science. The admirals and the generals who plan and manage the invasion see it as another weekend maneuver with a pep rally added: colonels write fight and hate songs to the tune of "Old Notre Dame"; the Canadians put a band playing "Dixie" in one of their landing craft. But farce turns to tragedy as the four watch the Americans and Canadians shoot one another until they realize there is no enemy; the Japanese troops were withdrawn a week before. The invaders suffer more than three hundred casualties; the commanding admiral calls it "a fine invasion." Their final examination in matters military comes at Betio Island in the Tarawan Atoll. Newspapers back home would call this battle a modern version of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" for clearly someone had blundered when the marines had to wade through eight hundred yards of open water and a withering fire to reach the beaches called, appropriately, Red Beach 1,2, and 3. The story of the four climaxes on each of these beaches as six thousand Japanese and Americans die in a seventy-six hour slaughter for less than one square mile of coral rock and sand. Afterwards one of the commanding generals says the battle was 'unnecessary, ' Betio should have been bypassed