Unwritten words and untold stories
Nobody ever told me that Ernie Pyle was a poet.
I picked up the book “Reporting World War II” in the discount bin at my favorite used bookstore in Missoula for some light reading. I’ve always been fascinating by books about war. I can’t really explain why, only that almost every time I pass a book rack with a journalist’s account of what it was like shivering under the sniper shells in Sarajevo, I have to stop and because my hands have already reached out and started thumbing through it. Maybe it’s because my own life has been so blessed and so sheltered. I read to remember that my own problems are very small indeed.
I’m still working through my book on reporting WWII. In the fashion of politically-correct revisionism, the editors included minority voices drowned out by the fever of the time. Beside legends in war journalism like Ernie Pyle and Edward R. Murrow lay the works of Susan B. Anthony, writing about the exploitation of women who walked in the shadows of Rosie the riveter; Fortune Magazine’s reporting from inside a Japanese Internment Camp; I.F. Stone, demanding that the Americans do more to help the Jews. It fascinates me to see the different viewpoints — a little war within a war. Most people agreed that the cause of the war was right — the question was, what immoralities can a just war justify?
Historians can and will argue whether the internment, the working conditions of women in factories and the U.S.’s decision not to bomb camps like Auschwitz were necessary or inevitable, but me? I’m going to curl up with Ernie Pyle.
My English teachers in the public school system pretty much drove away any love I might have ever had of the so-called “classics,” so it always surprises me to read something from authors who don’t write like broken-down bagpipes. Sometimes I think English majors got together one night and picked the most long-winded, boring books they could find in each era.
“Heh! Let’s see what happens if we all start pretending to convince everyone that Herman Melville is the best writer ever!”
For example, in one writing class, I was given the story “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway. Our teacher told us to write something similar, a dialogue that alludes to something without mentioning precisely what it was. I decided that, heck, if I couldn’t tell the reader what I was talking about, why should I even bother knowing myself?
The story came back with an A+ and a note scrawled in the margin: “Good job! I had absolutely no idea what you were talking about!”
Aren’t you glad to know how your tax dollars are being spent?
Though Ernie Pyle has a hall named after him at Indiana University, Pyle was short of finishing college by a semester.
His education didn’t convolute his voice, however. Pyle digests the stories of the soldiers without sounding preachy, political or evoking too much pathos. I think it’s because he chops the war up into moments that had more significance that other journalists’ stories about the overall war.
A page opened at random:
(March 28, 1944)
“Sometimes you hear them coming, and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you hear the shell whine after you’ve head it explode. Sometimes you hear it whine and it never explodes. Sometimes the house trembles and shakes and you hear no explosion at all.
“But I’ve one thing here that’s just the same as anywhere else — and that’s that old weakness in the joints when they get to landing close. I’ve been weak all over Tunisia and Sicily, and in parts of Italy, and I get weaker than ever up here.
“When the German raiders come over at night, and the sky lights up bright as day with the with flares, and ack-ack guns set up a turmoil and pretty soon you hear and feel the terrible power of exploding bombs — well, your elbows get flabby and you breathe in little short jerks, and your chest feels empty, and you’re too excited to do anything but hope.”
Ernie Pyle’s birthday was last Sunday. Born 108 years ago this week, his legacy continues. In 1944, congress passed the Ernie Pyle bill, which gave soldiers extra pay for combat duty. His visions of the common soldier brought him a Pulitzer Prize the year before he was gunned down on an island near Okinawa. He was three-and-a-half weeks short of his 45th birthday when he was buried in a common grave with other soldiers.
I won’t say he would have wanted it that way, lying cheek-by-cheek with his brothers in arms. Despite the intimacy I feel with all my favorite authors, I didn’t really know him. But I will say that his life and works were a symbol of the sacrifices all men and women have made for the sake of their country. It’s up to the country to make sure sacrifices, like Pyle’s, aren’t in vain.