February 9, 2025

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

We Americans owe Ernie Pyle, the famed World War II columnist, deep respect for getting it right about military in a democracy. He described in raw, eloquent emotion the real deal, not the rah-rah, not the parades of flags, not the patriotism of the moment. He reported from the front lines, eating and sleeping with soldiers, sailors and Marines in fox holes, on the seas until he was killed in 1945 by a sniper in the Pacific. His was not a chest-full of decorations at a White House confab but the sweat, dirt, the grunge over two-week-old clothing of the ordinary dogface, the “citizen soldier” whose mind would forever carry the images of war, especially on sleepless nights. We do well to know this man in a time of jingoism, in this moment when the new higher-ups call for “warrior ethos.”

What made Pyle so readable for the moms and dads and girlfriends and wives back home was that he was a brother though he carried no weapon beyond the rapid fire of his typewriter. From 1935 to 1941, he was a nationally syndicated columnist for Scripps-Howard, writing human interest about ordinary people, even in a folksy way, the sort that makes you feel he was sitting at your kitchen table. He had the gift of describing people, places and events most of us know about, perhaps experience but never ponder in depth. Pyle described the ordinary, but, of course, the average Joe and Marge are anything but that. He told us who we were.

In 1941, Ernie Pyle continued his look behind the scenes by joining the World War II correspondent corps and quickly cajoling his way to the front rather than being embedded way back and fed press releases by military public information. He won the 1944 Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper accounts of infantry soldiers – the dogfaces – from his unique first-person perspective.

What America today owes Pyle is to remember G.I. Joe’s irreverence, the questioning and skepticism that is America. Before the war, he penned columns about these men and their families as he traveled about the country. They were the farmers, the tradespeople, the doctors, people caught in the Depression. Pyle caught the mojo of the citizenry.

So when he went to war, joining the same folk on the lines, he continued to note their work, their beliefs, their disdain for autocratic authority. Yes, the men had to fall in line with military discipline, but that did not mean they had to accept big brass as gods who knew best. This also saved their lives as the ordinary American dogface thought out of the box in their fighting. Just the way Sgt. Alvin York did in the First World War, helping capture 130 prisoners in a unique “turkey shoot” firing tactic that he learned in Fentress County, Tenn. Let the generals way back devise their order of battle, but from the foxhole, from the corner of a shelled-out building, real tactics rule. The survival innovation of the pioneers is there in that moment.

Pyle said over and over that the men he served with were ordinary Americans from many walks of life – citizen soldiers, volunteering or drafted to do their duty but relentlessly eager to live beyond survival and return as plain citizens to the democracy they fought to protect. Battle done, they became Joe the plumber, Tom the trash collector, Craig the doc. They shed the uniform to wear ordinary cloth, the only way a republic endures and thrives if it is to be a democracy.

We must remember Pyle’s take on dogfaces in this time when newly appointed American defense officials are calling for “restoring the warrior ethos.” We can just picture old G.I. Joe, cigar in mouth, six-days’ growth on face, in the Bulge, December 1944, freezing in his boots. “Nah, me and my buddies gonna take out that machine gun nest and be home by spring, back in the hardware store.”

“Warrior ethos” is for military dictatorships. Count on citizen soldiers who do what is necessary when and only when that is necessary and then go home to peaceful living. That is America, the land of the free, if we keep it that way.

The writer is a retired newspaperman.

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