CHAPTER SEVEN
While covering the war as a newspaper correspondent in Europe, Ernie Pyle had met most of the big generals, including Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, and even the British general Montgomery — or “Monty,” as the Brits called him.
Of course, Pyle was something of a celebrity in his own right, in that the generals had all wanted to meet him. Pyle never got bigheaded about it — he was a man who was much happier observing than being the center of attention. This trait was one of the reasons that the soldiers and sailors and airmen all seemed to love him. He didn’t feel that he deserved any attention, but that they did.
As for the generals, Pyle had found them all impressive and competent, determined to win the war. But there was also something else that each general he’d met seemed to have in common. They all seemed to realize that they strode upon the world stage, and they behaved accordingly. Generals like Patton and Montgomery had their own personas, and they certainly lived up to them, from what Pyle had seen.
There was not a lot of drama surrounding a general like Eisenhower, although his legendary efficiency was a kind of persona in itself. There were rumors that Ike had a mistress, a pretty young driver from the motor pool, but Pyle wasn’t one to dabble in such idle gossip. Besides, he wanted to write about the ordinary soldiers, not the generals or troop movements or military strategy.
Now that he had come to cover the war in the Pacific, Pyle had also met General MacArthur — or rather, MacArthur had wanted to meet him, which was again a change in the usual direction of how things flowed. More often, it was the humble war correspondent begging for an audience with the busy general so that he could write a profile of some sort that pleased his editor back home.
But with MacArthur, he had been invited to meet the general. Pyle suspected that this had less to do with the fact that MacArthur enjoyed reading his articles and more to do with the fact that MacArthur was well aware of the importance of how he was portrayed in the newspapers back home. It was no secret that the man had political ambitions.
General MacArthur was clearly a man who worked all the angles. Despite the well-honed cynical nature of a typical reporter toward anyone official, Pyle had been impressed by MacArthur. He certainly looked the part of a general, in that he was handsome, tall, and imposing. His age gave him gravitas. He could have been an actor portraying a general in a movie. But MacArthur was no stuffed shirt. He gave succinct orders and seemed to quickly absorb all the information that his staff brought him.
MacArthur didn’t seem compelled to mingle with the men, or to be loved by them. His entire focus was on strategy, and rightly or wrongly, he seemed to view his troops as a means to an end. The end in this case was the defeat of Japan, which everyone could agree upon.
Whether or not he had actually read any of Pyle’s war reporting was an open question. But the general had certainly been briefed to know all about Pyle. By the time that he left his audience with MacArthur — Pyle couldn’t think of a better word for it, but it was like meeting some head of state — Pyle’s head was spinning, which usually didn’t happen with a seasoned reporter like himself. Knowing Pyle’s style, MacArthur had tried to be casual, but it hadn’t quite worked. General MacArthur projected a commanding presence without even trying.
Sitting here on the beach at Guam, waiting to ship out with the enlisted troops, he felt far more at home and at ease than he did when meeting generals. He much preferred the company of GIs, noncommissioned officers, and even the field officers over the company of any general. These men were the real deal, and there was nothing phony or contrived in Pyle’s reporting about them.
He loved the ordinary troops. They were his fellow Americans, after all. This morning, he was at the headquarters of a captain who was single-handedly trying to rig some kind of HQ using weathered driftwood, a sheet of tin with bullet holes in it, and a handful of rusty nails. The captain appeared confident that these unlikely materials were somehow going to combine to keep out the sun and rain, but Pyle wasn’t so sure about that.
Pyle didn’t know where the captain had come across the tin or the nails here on this beach. But then again, infantry captains were a resourceful bunch.
“Let me give you a hand, Captain,” Pyle said, hurrying to help him by holding the tin in place while the captain attempted to drive one of the rusty nails through the metal using the butt of his combat knife. Pyle had grown up on an eighty-acre grain farm in Indiana before heading off to college and a newspaper career, so he was familiar with cobbling things together from a boyhood on the farm.
And yet even the effort of holding the sheet metal in place left Pyle almost breathless. At age forty-four he was too thin, smoked too much, and had been known at times to drink his meals.
The rusty nail wouldn’t take. The knife slipped, nearly taking off the captain’s finger in the process.
“Son of a bitch,” he said mildly, shaking a few drops of blood off his hand, then simply moving the nail farther along the post to one of the bullet holes, where he was able to get it secured. The nail head was smaller than the hole, so the captain ended up smacking the nail until it bent over and pinned the sheet metal in place.
“There,” the captain said with satisfaction, standing back to admire his work, as if he had just finished constructing the Empire State Building, or maybe the Taj Mahal.
“Not bad,” Pyle admitted. He’d been skeptical, but he had to agree that the rough shelter would at least keep the midday son from beating down on what passed for company HQ. “Captain, do you mind if I talk to some of your men?”
“Go right ahead,” the captain said. He stuck his cut finger in his mouth, sucked on it, spat into the sand. “I’m sure they would love to talk with you. They’re all good men, a long way from home.”
“What about you, Captain?” Pyle asked.
The captain gave a short laugh. “Doesn’t matter who I am or where I’m from,” he said. “You go talk to the men.”
Pyle nodded and moved on, leaving the infantry officer to put the finishing touches on his beach shack. If he needed to, he could get the captain’s name later from one of his men.
He moved off down the beach and found a group of soldiers who didn’t have the benefit of a tin shelter and were consequently baking under the hot tropical sun. The soldiers had recognized him on the beach right away, because Pyle was about as famous as any war correspondent could get. Winning the Pulitzer Prize would do that.
Plus, his appearance made him instantly recognizable: middle-aged, a bald head framed by tufts of graying hair, shorter than average, and thin to the point of looking almost emaciated or haggard.
Thanks to covering the war in the field with the soldiers in Europe and now in the Pacific, he ate the same C rations, smoked the same cigarettes, and heard the same shells screaming overhead. Of course, all this made him into a hero to the troops. Even if they couldn’t read the newspapers themselves because delivery wasn’t very good on the beach itself, the folks at home certainly read those papers and mentioned the stories in their letters to the boys at the front. It was a roundabout system, but word got out all the same about this bedraggled Hoosier.
“Where you from?” Pyle asked, sidling up to the nearest soldier and squatting beside him in the sand.
“Hey, you’re Ernie Pyle, ain’t ya?” the young soldier asked.
“That’s me,” Pyle said quietly. “But I’d rather know about you.”
“Are you going to put me in the newspaper? Make me famous?”
“That’s the plan,” Pyle said. “That is, if it’s all right with you. Let’s tell the folks back home how you’re doing. I can’t make any promises about the famous part, though.”