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Winning the PR War in Iraq : /p>

Jeff Emanuel without a trace of irony describes the efforts to win, and possible victory in, the "PR War."

Anybody out there read Ernie's War: The Best of Ernie Pyle's World War II Dispatches, edited by David Nichols, published by Touchstone? If you did, you can't help but ask yourself what died on Ie Shima on April 18, 1945, besides the GIs' best buddy.

As Nichols notes on page 363, "shortly before Pyle left France, General Omar Bradley urged him to go home and stay home; his chances, the general suggested, were about used up. Pyle's wife, Jerry, virtually begged him to abandon war correspondence. But the armed forces in the Pacific badly wanted Pyle to join them. It was apparent to them what a morale booster he had been in Europe, how he had made the war there so vivid to stateside readers, and they exerted considerable pressure on him to cover the Pacific Theater. Although he was emotionally not up to the job, Pyle acquiesced." In fact, Pyle had premonitions of death before leaving his home in New Mexico, and advised at least one friend that he didn't think he was coming back.

p>How could Pyle be such a hero to the GIs, improve morale at home and still "tell the truth"? And what was Pyle's "truth"? Consider this rough draft of a column Pyle had been preparing for release upon the end of the war in Europe, found on his body the day he was killed. br> /p>

...This is written on a little ship lying off the coast of the Island of Okinawa, just south of Japan, on the other side of the world from the Ardennes.

But my heart is still in Europe, and that's why I am writing this column.

It is to the boys who were my friends for so long. My one regret of the war is that I was not with them when it ended.

For the companionship of two-and-a-half years of death and misery is a spouse that tolerates no divorce. Such companionship finally becomes a part of one's soul, and it cannot be obliterated.

True, I am with American boys in the other war not yet ended, but I am old-fashioned and my sentiment runs to old things.

To me the European war is old, and the Pacific war is new.

Last summer I wrote that I hoped the end of the war could be a gigantic relief, but not an elation. In the joyousness of high spirits it is easy for us to forget the dead. Those who are gone would not wish themselves to be a millstone of gloom around our necks.

But there are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along with high rows of hedge throughout the world.

Dead men by mass production -- in one country after another -- month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.

Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.

There are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn't come back. You didn't see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.

We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That's the difference...

br> This was the same Ernie Pyle whose June 12, 1944 column, describing the fighting on Omaha Beach, told his fellow Americans "In this column I want to tell you what the opening of the second front in this one section entailed, so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you."

Any chance any Iraq embed wrote "so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you"? How about zero?

p>There are no more Ernie Pyles. There are few Americans who not only "support the troops," but also appreciate and are forever humbly grateful. The one constant, the one hero, is the American fighting man. He is still with us. I never wore the uniform, so this is not self-congratulatory. I'm just grateful. br> -- Frank Natoli

topics:
Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Mainstream Media, Television, Business, Constitution, Law, Military, Iraq, NATO, Conservatism