Leon Uris has done the nearly impossible. He has written a wonderfully different kind of war novel…. His "Battle Cry" is nearly as long as the other successful treatments of the Second World War; it has many of the same characters and now traditional Anglo-Saxon words, but Mr. Uris is not angry or bitter or brooding. He obviously loves the Marine Corps, even its officers. Thus, he may have started a whole new and healthy trend in American war literature.

Leon (Marcus) Uris 1924– Book jacket photograph from The Haj by Leon Uris. Copyright © 1984 by Jill Uris. By permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Sam Huxley, Mr. Uris's officer as well as one of his heroes, is the fictional commander of the very real Sixth Regiment of the Second Marine Division, and he would have been an easy man to hate. He is hard, and he is harsh, and he...