WW II - James Jones

I had this book in paperback when I was a kid and quickly decided that I didn't like it.  It didn't talk about planes and tanks and ships and cool stuff like that.  It just went on and on about soldiers and I remember noting that it was pretty profane, and obsessed with some things that a sixth grader in 1976 wasn't very familiar with.  I saw a format large hardback copy of it a few months ago at a HP Books and got it, as it seemed to have a visual component that maybe I'd missed.  Sure enough, it's now one of the best books on the war I've ever read.  (Of course if you didn't already know, the author also wrote From Here to Eternity, one of the best pieces of fiction about the war).
Why Jones didn't call it "Evolution of a Soldier" I don't know, because that's his theme.  Well, one of them because the book is really two books in one.  It is, first, a large format art book, intended to gather together the best of the war art available (subsequently documented in a PBS series as the link reflects), and Jones was originally just narrating that. 
But at some point - likely Jones just couldn't talk about the war without it turning into a memoir - he turns the book into a narrative of the war from the soldier's point of view, telling stories from his time in combat in the South Pacific, but focusing on the EVOLUTION OF A SOLDIER as he insists on repeatedly capitalizing it.  And this is the best part of the book, because Jones explains in a way that few can, or have, exactly what a soldier has to go through to become a soldier - essentially the deadening of the ordinary instincts of survival and freedom.  It has nothing to do with the artwork, except to explain where the artwork actually catches the experience.  A good example is The Price, a painting by Tom Lea of a Marine at Peleliu.  Jones explains that the painting is not medically possible, but he - as someone who was there - says that it's an extremely accurate representation of what being there was like, reinforcing the horror that a combat soldier endures.
It's a powerful book, and I understand far better now what it is trying to convey.