Rising Sniper

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.”

The men nearby laughed. They knew just what he meant.

“Well, you can put in that article that you’re talking to Billy Smith from Little Creek, Virginia.”

Pyle’s keen ear picked up that the young man had a tidewater drawl.

“Pleasure to meet you, Billy,” Pyle said, extending a hand. The two men shook. It helped that Pyle was one of the oldest men on the beach. It gave him an almost fatherly appearance, or, at least, that was how the soldiers typically reacted to him. “How do you like island life so far, son?”

Billy just laughed. “It’s all right, if you like sand, coconuts, and Japs,” he said. “Other than that, there ain’t much to recommend it.”

The other guys laughed as well, then added their two cents.

“And don’t forget the leeches!”

“Or sunburn.”

“Hey now, what about trench foot!”

Pyle just shook his head and made notes as the men had fun identifying challenges that they had lived with on Guam. Soldiers liked to gripe, which they couldn’t do so much with an officer. Some of their gripes would make it into the article. Some of Pyle’s reporting from Europe had gotten pretty dark, to the point that he’d had to take a leave of absence and return to the United States for a while.

Pyle understood that people loved to read about the long-suffering soldiers still getting the job done. There was an honesty in his reporting about what the boys in the field faced.

“How long have you been in the army, Billy?” Pyle asked.

“I joined up as soon as I was old enough, about a year after Pearl Harbor,” the young soldier said. “I figured they couldn’t win the war without me.”

Billy’s comment made the other soldiers laugh. “Yeah, yeah,” one of them said. “Did ya ever think that maybe your girlfriend was just trying to get rid of you and talked you into enlisting?” That brought more laughter.

It was hard to see it, but these men had gone through a lot, just a few days ago. They had all been fighting for their lives against the Japanese, who were a ruthless enemy. The evidence showed in their gear, which was now battered and scratched, but clean, oiled, and well maintained. The soldiers’ lives depended on that, as they all well knew.

Their boots were scuffed, and their uniforms showed various tears, stains, and even blood spatters. They had washed them out as best as they could in the salt water of the sea, putting them back on stiff from the salt.

The combat that they had seen was also evident in their faces, which had deep lines and creases, far more than someone their age should have. They had grown hard in order to survive.

One or two men in the small group simply sat quietly and stared, their eyes alone telling the story of what they had seen. Pyle knew better than to ask these men any questions, and he left them alone. He had seen the same look on the faces of many young men in Europe. Now, here were these shell-shocked boys in the Pacific.

He knew the feeling, having experienced it himself after the horrors that he had seen. This was the toll that war took, wounds that couldn’t be bandaged or even seen.

Another soldier spoke up, bringing Pyle’s thoughts back to the present. “Listen, Ernie, you tell those folks back home that we are going to lick the Japs and will be back home in time for the Fourth of July.”

“What’s your name, son?” Pyle asked.

It seemed like a simple question, but he had recently battled with the US Navy to allow him to use individual sailors’ names. Navy officials had relented to an extent, allowing Pyle special dispensation to use names. That permission did not extend to other war correspondents, which was a policy that the self-effacing Pyle did not agree with.

The US Army, however, was fine with him using the soldiers’ names, just as he had done while reporting the war in Europe, and he jotted down what the young soldier told him.

“Well, sir, I’m Jimmy Jones from Augusta, Georgia.”

Pyle nodded. “I’ll put that in the article, Jimmy, although I’ve got to warn you — you might get a promotion for that quote.”

The other soldiers laughed, and Pyle moved on down the beach. It was the same everywhere. He could have almost made the quotes up, and who would know the difference? But that wasn’t how he did things. He was here to tell their stories.

Where they were going next wouldn’t be any kind of cakewalk. The scuttlebutt had it that they were headed to the Philippines. Pyle was always in search of a good story, so he traveled to the next destination, just as the troops did, eating the same chow and sleeping in the same cramped, overheated bunks.

That was just fine by him. He wondered sometimes if he would make it out of this war alive. He knew it was the same thought on every man’s mind on this beach. They were united in their goal of victory, but they were also united by their doubts and fears.

Finally, there was some activity on the beach. The process of moving troops off Guam to the next operation was long and slow. A makeshift quay had been constructed for loading the men onto the transport ships. Smaller boats would take them to the vessels offshore, mostly the navy’s cargo attack ships and attack transport ships, known as AKAs and APAs. Pyle knew from experience that these would be jammed with men and gear before making the long voyage to their next destination.

He grabbed his duffel bag and started to move along with them, struggling under the weight. The bag was extra heavy because it contained his prized typewriter. Pyle didn’t carry any weapons, unless you counted a penknife that he used to sharpen pencils. He’d always been a little embarrassed that right after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Pyle had tried to join the navy but had been rejected for being too frail and unfit.

He was surprised when the weight in his hand suddenly lightened. He looked over to see that a couple of soldiers had grabbed hold of his duffel and were carrying it for him.

“No need to do that, fellas,” he said.

“We’ve got it, Ernie,” one of the men said, a burly soldier who threw the duffel over his shoulders as if it weighed nothing. “You just tell our story. Let people know what we did here, and why some of my buddies died.”

Pyle nodded. That was just what he planned to do.