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Corporal Fife in The Thin Red Line is James Jones. This is Jones when he was 21 years old, and a corporal in the Army. He was stationed in Hawaii and saw Pearl Harbor in flames in 1941. Just a year later he arrived in Guadalcanal as the company clerk of Fox Company. Corporal Fife, his counterpart in the novel, is the company clerk of C-for-Charlie Company, the novel's version of Fox Company. As company clerk, Fife has an overview of the company's enlisted men. After he returned to civilian life, Jones transitioned from company clerk to company novelist. In The Thin Red Line he tells the stories of sixty or seventy men, in the Battle of Guadalcanal. “No book has ever really been written about combat in wartime with real honesty,” Jones told his editor, “so I use only those things I have experienced myself, and those told me by men in my old company.”