The Magnificent Bastards (Dell Book D145)

384 pp. A brutally authentic novel of the U.S. Marines and the women they meet between battles. "A new approach to men at war, in the story of the women of the canteens and the Red Cross on an island base in the Pacific. Chiefly the story of two women,- ""Mom"" who was a tower of strength and serenity in a Topsy turvy world (and who was tortured inside by the knowledge of her grown son in a mental hospital -- by fear that she too was doomed); and Lee, a war widow, whose seven years of sexless marriage had left her frozen, scarred, and hoping to find something positive in sharing the horrors her husband had experienced before his death in the Pacific. It is a grim story of the impact of the war on men and women; it's tough and brutal and unpretty in its realism, but the crudity is softened by a woman's approach, even as the brief violent contacts on relief base softened the crudities of some of the men. Lee was snapped out of her oasis of detachment by the sadistic, selfish Colin Black, Colonel of the toughest company of the Marines. That she took full measure of punishment served to heighten the irony -- and she came through feeling that all emotion was at an end -- that she could take anything. The ending- for Mom- held, too, its measure of punishment, in a strange fulfillment. The author's Poporn on the Ginza (back in 1949) was a personal record of her own Red Cross experiences with the Japanese people. This is another side of the coin."