Ernie Pyle and war reportage today

...It never occurs to Waskow's men or to Pyle that these are empty gestures...

...Like Pyle, who made a point of telling his readers that he always went into battle with a roll of toilet paper and a can opener, the men he describes are attuned to reality...

...Pyle's war was the infantry's war...

...His dispatches are not filled with tales of American troops heroically wiping out German machinegun nests...

...The troops he saw 76 DISSENT / Fall 2005 NOTEBOOK were able to find purpose and dignity in what they were doing, despite the horrors they faced...

...All we can do is fumble and try once more—try out of the memory of our anguish—and be as tolerant with each other as we can...

...Business as usual, politics as usual, luxury as usual— these are the influences which can undermine the morale of the brave men ready to die at the front for us here," FDR told the country as he insisted on laws that "will tax all unreasonable profit, both individual and corporate...

...It was this loyalty, born out of living so close to death, that Pyle saw as the deepest wartime bond...

...By the final year of World War II, Pyle and most of the soldiers he wrote about thought that the America they would be returning to had a good chance of being better than the America they had known during the Great Depression...

...In their eyes as they passed was no hatred, no excitement, no despair, no tonic of their victory— there was just the simple expression of being there as if they had been there doing that forever, and nothing else...

...Pyle's syndicated column allowed Americans to read what D-Day felt like...

...Robert Capa's pictures in Life magazine allowed Americans to see what the D-Day invasion looked like...

...78 DISSENT / Fall 2005...

...In contrast to fiction writers of his generation, such as Joseph Heller in Catch22 or Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five, who remain popular today, Pyle does not lead us to the antiwar novels and reportage that since Vietnam have become a staple of American literature...

...The contrast between the quiet World War II patriotism of men as politically different as President John F. Kennedy and Senator Bob Dole and the wary patriotism of Vietnam-veteran senators Bob Kerrey and John Kerry illustrates this point...

...When the war is over, antiwar protests will certainly come to a halt, but on the home front we do not expect to be safe from the kind of terrorism that struck us on September 11, and neither do the troops doing the fighting...

...I never heard anybody say anything patriotic, the way the storybooks have people talking...

...Eisenhower's reading of Pyle, whom he knew well, was on target...

...I haven't written anything about the Big Picture because I don't know anything about it...

...THE CONTRAST with Ernest Hemingway, who in the years before World War II set the gold standard for American war writing, could not be more pronounced...

...In combat, today's soldiers are as brave as the men Pyle described, but in the new Iraq War books, such as the Los Angeles Times's David Zucchino's Thunder Run and Rolling Stone's Evan Wright's Generation Kill, dominating the thinking of the soldiers we have sent to Iraq are doubts that finally make them radically different from Pyle's World War II soldiers...

...While the war was going on, all too often the best the military could do was make the kind of claim Frances Fitzgerald ironically cites in Fire in the Lake, when she quotes an Army officer observing the shattered village of Ben Tre, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it...

...As far as his troops are concerned, Waskow is not to be treated as a corpse...

...They weren't heroic figures as they moved forward one at a time, a few seconds apart," Pyle wrote of a rifle platoon in action in France...

...We have lost a sense of what it means for a frontline correspondent to write thoughtfully, yet with undisguised partisanship, about a war he and the nation believe that we are all in together...

...There was a confused excitement and a grim anxiety to their faces...

...To the soldiers who were with Pyle at the time of his death, such hope, forged in the anguish of combat, did not seem naïve...

...Today, American combat operations in Iraq, which have proven unable to stop the guerrilla insurgency, hold out similarly grim hopes for success...

...Finally, he put the hand down...

...DISSENT / Fall 2005 77 NOTEBOOK During the war Franklin Roosevelt did not hesitate to ask the country to sacrifice...

...They were really the hunters, but they looked like the hunted...

...But most important, since Vietnam it has been hard for ground troops and correspondents to be bound by a shared belief in the future or in American political leadership...

...The men didn't talk among themselves...

...In the kind of assessment of a reporter that never would have been made by General William Westmoreland in Vietnam or General Tommy Franks in Iraq, General Omar Bradley observed of Ernie Pyle, "My men always fought better when Ernie was around...

...And so, too, did those on the home front...

...He was sure that when peace came he would not be able to celebrate it with a display of joy...

...What Pyle's soldiers do best is take care of each other...

...The passage ends with the men leaving when they realize they can do no more...

...These possessions, very different from the dope and Valium, that in The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien describes as standard in Vietnam, belonged to soldiers who, as Pyle wrote, "should have been comfortably asleep in their warm beds at home...

...No complaint too minor to mention, no message too mundane to relay...

...For a nation still reeling from President Roosevelt's death, the loss of Pyle six days later came as a terrible shock...

...Marshall in Men Against Fire that in World War II combat only 25 percent of American soldiers ever fired their weapons, was based on his observation that war changed the thinking of anyone who experienced it...

...Like Bill Mauldin, whose "Willie and Joe" cartoons he so admired, Pyle wrote about World War II from the bottom up...

...No detail about life for the 74 DISSENT / Fall 2005 NOTEBOOK G.I...

...Hollywood did a movie, The Story of G.I...

...For the amateur soldiers whom Pyle wrote about, killing was unnatural, and over and over in his dispatches, Pyle focused on how the troops he lived with finally managed to overcome their reluctance to shoot someone they could see...

...NICOLAUS MILLS is a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and the author of Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial...

...For Pyle, who was often ironic, but never cynical, about World War II, such debunking was unnecessary...

...Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the captain's hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes holding the dead hand in his own and looking intensely into that dead face," Pyle wrote...

...Time put Pyle on its front cover...

...Without offering a blueprint of the future, Pyle held out hope for the coming postwar era so long as America approached it with humility rather than a victor's arrogance...

...As Wright notes of the combat unit he covered, "These Marines would be virtually unrecognizable to their forbears in the 'Greatest Generation...

...In The First Casualty, his history of war correspondents from Crimea to Vietnam, Phillip Knightley does what nobody from Pyle's generation would have: he dismisses Pyle's concern for the individual soldier as sentimentality...

...In this year of tributes to the aging vets of the Second World War and disputes over the war in Iraq, it is important to remember Pyle, not only for what he meant to the nation in dark times but for the perspective he sheds on today's war reportage, with its embedded correspondents and its muckraking coverage of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal...

...The climax of the dispatch comes when Waskow's men say good-by to him after his body has been brought back on a stretcher...

...They are kids, he goes on to point out, raised on hip-hop and Internet porn, who learned of the significance of the presidency not through an inspiring speech at the Berlin Wall but a White House blow job...

...In Dispatches, Esquire reporter Michael Herr is cynical about America's Vietnam War strategy but enormously sympathetic to American soldiers under fire during the Tet offensive of 1968, and in her coverage of this May's Operation Matador in Iraq, the Washington Post's Ellen Knickmeyer presents a haunting account of a Marine platoon that was wiped out as a fighting force when every one of its men was killed or wounded...

...The current war in Iraq, in which the Bush administration has lowered taxes on the wealthy and made no call for shared sacrifice, has led to the same conclusion...

...They had made the psychological transition from their normal belief that taking human life was sinful, over to a new professional outlook where killing was a craft," Pyle wrote of the troops he was with...

...Submersion in war does not necessarily qualify a man to be master of the peace...

...What F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels were for the 1920s and John Steinbeck's for the 1930s, Ernie Pyle's reportage was for the 1940s: a generational mirror...

...For them, the invasion of Iraq is simply another campaign in a war without end...

...Our segment of the picture consists only of tired and dirty soldiers who are alive and don't want to die...

...Dead men in winter and dead men in summer...

...His column became the inarticulate G.I.'s letter to his folks back home...

...in Europe was too insignificant to report," Knightley writes patronizingly of Pyle...

...In the reportage that we have gotten from Vietnam and Iraq, there has been no lack of compassion for the troops on the part of America's best frontline writers...

...Pyle knew there was truth in Bradley's compliment...

...I only know what we see from our worm's-eye view," Pyle insisted...

...They "have less regard for property than you have raised them to have," and the scope of their travels has made it impossible for them to be "isolationist again," he told his readers...

...Two collections of his columns, Here Is Your War and Brave Men, were best-sellers...

...The key differences start with the fact that, despite their bravery, since Vietnam most of our combat correspondents have been short-termers...

...Not publicity in a manufactured sense, but a public report to the folks back home on what an outfit endures and what it accomplishes...

...They were young men, but grime, whiskers, and exhaustion made them look middle-aged," Pyle wrote of the First Infantry Division in North Africa...

...Their reportorial stints are, with few exceptions, a matter of months, especially in Iraq, where being embedded with a unit limits a reporter's range...

...But what is conveyed is their enduring tie to the captain...

...Joe, based on his European reportage, and in 1944 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize...

...Soldiers at the front can't stomach flag waving from back home," Pyle noted...

...It reflected the mix of feelings they had about their sacrifices...

...Knightley's disdain for Pyle and for a style of war reportage that parallels the thirties writing of Steinbeck, an outspoken Pyle admirer, reflects the degree to which Pyle does not fit our current image of a war correspondent as a reporter who gets close to the action and then exposes the government's lies about the war it is waging...

...He reached over and gently strengthened the points of the captain's shirt collar, and then he rearranged the tattered edges of the uniform around the wound, and then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone...

...What worried Pyle was not the kind of disillusionment Hemingway described but how men who experienced the death of someone like Captain Waskow returned to civilian life after the war...

...Lack of recognition definitely affects morale," Pyle observed during the Cherbourg campaign...

...Pyle's view, which contradicts the highly controversial claim of military historian S.L.A...

...Pyle seems too trusting of the military, too cozy with his readers for our contemporary tastes...

...In Pyle's judgment these possessions reflected the heritage of the new American army, "guys from Broadway and Main Street," who were as different as they could be from the seasoned professionals of Germany and Japan...

...Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous...

...For Pyle, what drove the men were feelings that were very American but far less abstract than patriotism— loyalty to a buddy...

...It will be a confusing period for us," he concluded...

...A soldier holds his hand as if comforting a brother and looks into, not away, from Waskow's face...

...The war had made America's soldiers more open to change, more sympathetic to the suffering of others than they realized...

...Even death could not break this bond, Pyle believed, and in his most famous dispatch, his account of the death of Captain Henry T. Waskow during the mountain fighting in Italy, Pyle showed this belief in action...

...Pyle, who went ashore on the second day of the invasion, made a point of describing the troops, living and dead, in terms of the possessions that they carried with them that had no military purpose—family snapshots, Bibles, a banjo, a tennis racket...

...Pyle paid dearly for the right to be called a buddy, but it would be a mistake to conclude that all we need for Pyle's kind of reporting to return is another correspondent as warmhearted and courageous as he was...

...We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don't conduct business or people don't shop," Bush observed less than a month after September 11, 2001, in language designed to make civilian sacrifice seem unpatriotic...

...Then the same soldier straightens the captain's collar and smooths the tatters in his shirt...

...THE REASONS we do not have Pyle's kind of war reportage any longer go far beyond individual personalities...

...Yet for Pyle the horror of World War II never negated its meaning...

...Every commanding general is aware that publicity for his unit is a factor in morale...

...What made America's soldiers willing to take such risks...

...Although the men he described invariably believed in the justness of the war they were fighting, they never spoke of the war in patriotic terms as they went into battle...

...Such thinking on the relationship between the home front and the war front characterized all of Pyle's writing...

...They just went...

...When he put a soldier in his column, he gave the soldier's name, address, and city, so that friends and family could easily identify him...

...But Pyle also believed that the legacy of the war was a positive one...

...At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945...

...At its peak Pyle's column appeared in more than two hundred daily newspapers and four hundred weeklies...

...Hemingway's classic statement on war occurs in A Farewell to Arms when his narrator, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, rails against the notion of World War I as a glorious adventure, telling the reader, "I had seen nothing sacred and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it...

...But the killing never became a pleasure for America's citizen soldiers and alDISSENT / Fall 2005 75 NOTEBOOK ways exacted a toll, Pyle believed...

...He did not worry, as a professional historian would, about failing to provide a strategic overview of the war, nor was he embarrassed to write about an everyday detail, like the brushless shaving cream the G.I.s prized because it could be used to soothe sunburn and fleabites...

...They keep going largely because the other fellow does," was the way Pyle put it...

...But in the years since his death, Pyle's reputation has plummeted...

...In writing off Ernie Pyle, we have, however, lost a historic perspective as valuable as the antiwar vision we now honor...

...American withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975 meant only that we were putting behind us antiwar demonstrations at home and the belief that pro-communist regimes in Southeast Asia threatened our global prestige...

...Pyle is much more concerned with the unheroic struggle that meant "in the infantry a soldier had to become half beast in order to survive...

...By contrast, the war in Vietnam, in which the Johnson and Nixon administrations did as much as possible to keep life on the home front normal, did not lend itself to the idea that postwar America would be a significant improvement over prewar America...

...In the draft for a column that was found on his body after he died, Pyle gave full vent to his sense of the war's toll, describing the killing he saw in a series of sentences in which his words and syntax take on the quality of a chant: "Dead men by mass production— in one country after another—month after month and year after year...

...As a result, unlike Pyle, today's reporters do not strike the soldiers they are writing about as being in the war for the long haul, nor is their work widely read, as Pyle's column was...

...In a letter that he sent to Pyle thanking him for his copy of Brave Men, General Dwight Eisenhower summed up the "real heroism" that he believed Pyle depicted by defining it as "the uncomplaining acceptance of unendurable conditions...

...Their faces were black and unshaved...

...It was a hard question for Pyle to answer, and he never tried to glamorize his conclusions...

...They marked Pyle's grave with the kind of tribute that today it is hard to imagine battle-hardened troops offering any reporter covering them...

...There is no direct commentary on the meaning of the scene by Pyle, whose short declarative sentences simply follow the actions of Waskow's men...

...Somehow it would seem sacrilegious to sing and dance when the great day comes—there are so many who can never sing and dance again," he confessed at the end of Brave Men...