A worm's-eye view

As we continue our worried wait for another dispatch from Raed in Baghdad, today we turn our attention away, for a moment, from this instant-access, always-on war, and tune in to a signal from a distant time and place, long before anybody ever came up with the idea of "embedding" war correspondents, before anyone heard the term "weapons of mass destruction", back to another war and a 110-pound middle-aged man who carried not a rifle but a typewriter into battle: Ernest T. Pyle, the reporter who made the ordinary soldier his beat.

One of my most valued possessions is a tattered old paperback whose front cover had long since fallen off when I found it in a stack of romance novels at the Athens flea market in Greece. Except for that, it's intact, and the back cover identifies it as a "pocket book edition" and urges, "Share this book with someone in uniform." Here is Your War is one of two (Brave Men is the other) compilations of Ernie Pyle's dispatches from the World War II battlefront. Both books are out of print now, though Amazon.com claims you can pick up a used copy for as little as $4. But Here is Your War is also available free online here. And you can find an old radio dramatization, complete with hokey music and overdone sound effects, available for online listening here.

You can also read what many consider Pyle's best dispatch,  The Death of Captain Waskow, online, and find a picture of Ernie at work, as well as tribute after tribute. His coverage of the D-Day invasion was also especially moving; here's an excerpt.

Each and every one of the correspondents, embedded or not, covering the invasion of Iraq pays tribute to Pyle with every report they send, whether live or taped, print, radio, or Internet. But the U.S. Defense Department, which in Pyle's day was known as the War Department, obviously felt that the rules Pyle and his colleagues operated under weren't appropriate for this war. What were those rules? Pyle explains:

"In the beginning no restrictions were put on us; we could go anywhere we pleased at any time. But things gradually changed, as the established machinery of war caught up with us. Then there was a rule that correspondents couldn’t go into the front lines unless accompanied by an officer. Maybe that was a good rule. I don’t know. But there were about two dozen of us who felt ourselves in an odd position, as if we were being conducted through our own house. The rule died in a few weeks and we were again free to wander alone at random."

Pyle irritate some of the higher-ups when he wrote about shell shock. They didn't want the folks back home to know about that unpleasantness. But Pyle insisted his readers needed to know.

He never took notes, they say, except to write down the names and addresses of the soldiers he wrote about. It was such a different world then, even in wartime, that people were happy to see their home addresses in the newspaper.

Pyle covered the war in Africa and Europe for 29 months, then took some time off before joining U.S. forces in the Pacific. He was killed by an enemy sniper while traveling with the U.S. Army's 77th Infantry Division on an island off the coast of Okinawa in April, 1944. 

Probably Pyle's most-quoted passage is this, from the very end of Here is Your War:

<<On the day of final peace, the last stroke of what we call the “Big Picture” will be drawn. I haven’t written anything about the “Big Picture,” because I don’t know anything about it. I only know what we see from our worm’s-eye view, and our segment of the picture consists only of tired and dirty soldiers who are alive and don’t want to die; of long darkened convoys in the middle of the night; of shocked silent men wandering back down the hill from battle; of chow lines and atabrine tablets and foxholes and burning tanks and Arabs holding up eggs and the rustle of high-flown shells; of jeeps and petrol dumps and smelly bedding rolls and C rations and cactus patches and blown bridges and dead mules and hospital tents and shirt collars greasy-black from months of wearing; and of laughter too, and anger and wine and lovely flowers and constant cussing. All these it is composed of; and of graves and graves and graves.

That is our war, and we will carry it with us as we go on from one battleground to another until it is all over, leaving some of us behind on every beach, in every field. We are just beginning with the ones who lie back of us here in Tunisia. I don’t know whether it was their good fortune or their misfortune to get out of it so early in the game. I guess it doesn’t make any difference, once a man has gone. Medals and speeches and victories are nothing to them any more. They died and others lived and nobody knows why it is so. They died and thereby the rest of us can go on and on. When we leave here for the next shore, there is nothing we can do for the ones beneath the wooden crosses, except perhaps to pause and murmur, “Thanks, pal.”>>

Thanks, Pyle.

Wild Art Week continues...