The first good book I ever read, when I was about nine, was
Ernie Pyle’s Here Is Your War, dispatches from the North
Africa campaign in World War II. During the war, Pyle held a place
of regard and honor in American culture and letters comparable to
that of Will Rogers. His Scripps-Howard columns ran in hundreds of
newspapers. He was “one of us,” the G.I.s said. When a Japanese
sniper killed Pyle in 1945, the nation wept.
Nowadays, people know Ernie Pyle mainly as a name attached to
various institutions. Our own Wlady Pleszczynski didn’t know who he
was till he (Wlady) arrived at Indiana University and found the
J-school building named after Pyle. (Pyle was a Hoosier, born in
1900, and he left Indiana’s journalism school a semester short of
graduation.) There is the generically perceived “Ernie Pyle Award”
for journalism. Actually, there are three. Scripps-Howard awards
one to an outstanding journalism school student and another to
working journalists for human interest writing. Anheuser-Busch
awards another for “lifetime achievement” to various established
notables like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.
The student award doesn’t seem to be much of a predictor of
journalistic success, or even of a career in journalism. I Googled
the names of the 11 winners from 1990 through 2000. Nineteen
ninety-three winner Janel Shoun seems to be the most widely
published; she works, unsurprisingly, for Scripps-Howard. E. Knight
Stivender, 1999 winner, minus the first initial these days, is a
staff writer for the Nashville Tennessean. Nellan Young,
winner in 2000, writes for the Knoxville News-Sentinel,
with some of her articles syndicated by Scripps-Howard.
Nineteen ninety-six winner Catheryne Pully went to work right
out of school as an aide to a Congressman, while 1998 honoree Carly
Irion apparently competes in rodeos. Of the rest, nothing.
THAT’S ALL KIND OF A SHAME, because Ernie Pyle could really write.
There in my grandmother’s living room, reading in the dusty shafts
of South Dakota light, I was mainlining the good stuff. One is
tempted to quote whole sheets of Pyle, and I’m going to quote a
lot, because he wrote in long strophes, not just one-liners, and
all are worth reading today. The following come from Brave
Men, Pyle’s book about the Sicily invasion, the Italian
campaign, the runup to Normandy, and the D-Day invasion itself.
Pyle could convey the awful grandeur of war:
“Suddenly we were aware of a scene that will shake me every time
I think of it for the rest of my life. It was our invasion fleet,
formed there far out at sea, waiting for us…On the horizon it
resembled a distant city. It covered half the skyline, and the
dull-colored camouflaged ships stood indistinctly against the curve
of the dark water like a solid formation of uncountable structures
blending together. Even to be a part of it was frightening.”
He would describe things other writers did not think to
describe, here, the firing of tracer shells from ships into the
Sicily shoreline:
“A golden flash would appear way off in the darkness. Out of the
flash would come a tiny red dot. That was the big shell. Almost
instantly, it covered the first quarter of the total distance. Then
uncannily it would drop to a much slower speed, as though it had
put on a brake…It amazingly kept on in an almost flat
trajectory as though it were on wheels being propelled on a level
road. Finally after a flight so long it seemed unbelievable that
the thing could still be in the air, it would disappear in a little
flash as it hit something on the shore. Long afterward the sound of
the heavy explosion came rolling across the water.”
Pyle’s readers loved his personal sketches of individual
soldiers and sailors, which always included their addresses:
“Joe Raymer, electrician’s mate first class, of 51 South Burgess
Avenue, Columbus, Ohio, was a married man with a daughter four
years old…Of medium height, he was a pleasant fellow with a
little silver in his hair and a cigar in his mouth. Before the war,
Joe was a traveling salesman, and that’s what he intended to go
back to. He worked for the Pillsbury flour people — had the
central-southern Ohio territory. He was a hot shot and no fooling.
The year before he went back in the Navy he sold more pancake flour
than anybody else in America, and won himself a $500 bonus.”
Pyle could be funny, as in this description of his stay in a
field hospital, where he found himself felled by a fever. His
doctor had just gotten news of the birth of his second child:
“He was so overjoyed he gave me an extra shot of morphine, and I
was asleep before I could say, ‘Congratulations!’”
He could break your heart, as his own was broken:
“The dying man was left utterly alone, just lying there in his
litter on the ground, lying in an aisle, because the tent was full.
Of course it couldn’t be otherwise, but the aloneness of that man
as he went through the last minutes of his life was what tormented
me. I felt like going over and at least holding his hand while he
died, but it would have been out of order and I didn’t do it. I
wish now I had.”
And in his description of awful weariness that overcame fighting
men and correspondents alike, Pyle eerily prefigured his own
death:
“We were grimy, mentally as well as physically. We’d drained our
emotions until they cringed from being called out from hiding. We
looked at bravery and death and battlefield waste and new countries
almost as blind men, seeing only faintly and not really wanting to
see at all.”
ONE MORE INSTITUTION, now forgotten. Apparently April 18, the day
Pyle died (sometimes reported as April 17, 1945, because of
confusion over the International Date Line), is now Columnist’s
Day. Jed, Shawn, Bill, Wlady, who knew? A day for us.
I was lucky. There in my grandmother’s living room when I was
nine, reading Ernie Pyle, I found out what I wanted to be.
