My Hero

Anyone who remembers anything about World War Two from a personal view should be considered long-of-tooth. People can still write of The Big One with some authority but soon it will fall to archivists of sorts who will depend on different prejudices to entice them to write of the war that was over before they and their fathers before them were born. This doesn't diminish their ability to write well. Witnesses who write of epochs are tempted to color their narratives and when they do they cheat the whole world.

Readers are left without guarantees when they open history books and biographies. For many the choice of author is based on the readers' own prejudices and books are sold to audiences... or they are not sold very much at all. What is history-or life-that is "flat, unprofitable and stale"?

David Lawrence was born too late to get a ration book. His father and I were little boys when guys older than us and younger than our fathers were sent away with guns and bullets so that cartographers could rearrange things and so writers like Ernie Pyle would become heroes.

Somewhere in our conversation on a hot July afternoon (1991) David mentioned Ernie Pyle. He asked if I knew of him. I did and I said that Pyle was my hero in a time when heroes existed. It was before Bart Simpson and Alf and Ninja Turtles and Andrew Dice Clay and Eddie Murphy occupied the hearts of little boys. It's not to say that when I was a kid we didn't have our share of make-believe gods. I'll name mine: Buck Jones, The Shadow, The Green Hornet, Superman, Andy Hardy, Huck Finn. But heroes and idols were more than that lot and their kind. And <@145>though we consciously make the distinction between the fiction of our dreams and the forces that invaded our dreams the luxury of the latter was enriching because real people carried great influence far beyond their own physical time.

Ernie Pyle was a war correspondent, a journalist, who immortalized the soldier. He wrote of brave men and followed the romantic tradition of others before him: Tennyson, Hemingway and a host of others lesser or better known depending on whose eyes fell on their narratives. Writers on the same side write differently. Ernie Hemingway saw one condition. Ben Mussolini was a little closer to the dynamics of class struggle first and Hemingway would immortalize it in another war twenty years later and Mussolini would be the antagonist.

Ernie Pyle approached the battlefield in more simplistic ways. He saw the individual, the G.I., and he raised the soldiers' struggle a little beyond its collective worth. His tome was "Brave Men" and he followed them across the world and on an island between the Americans and Japan (Okinawa), he companioned with his subjects until the Japanese finished his career by killing him.

I read Pyle. I read Mussolini, too. But I never read a word of Hemingway. A longtime friend of mine, George Haas, read...digested with immeasurable pleasure...all of Hemingway, who he regarded far beyond the heroic state. He was an idol.

George had an advantage. I knew Pyle before he knew Hemingway. But Pyle died and I had to look around and I never found a writer to attach to until Will Shakespeare appeared to extend great influence beyond his own physical time. George still had the advantage. He taught English so he lived with Shakespeare.