I could not attend this year’s Memorial Day observance, so I did not stand with others for a moment of silence, did not sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and did not hear a bugle sounding taps.
Nevertheless, I stand with those who sang and heard the mournful trumpet call and, like others, remembered someone who never returned home. In silence, I recalled two people who were victims of war.
My cousin was one. He was a messenger on a motorcycle during the invasion of Okinawa. He died on June 14, 1945. Sniper fire. I was too young to grieve. He was one of 14,009 American soldiers who died on Okinawa and one of nearly 235,000 Americans killed in action during World War II.
In a way, my cousin’s epitaph was written by war-haunted journalist Ernie Pyle who told of the wanton and monstrous toll that war extracts from those who see it on a daily basis, and of how those at home cannot understand.
Pyle is the second person I remembered on this Memorial Day. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his columns about World War II in Europe. He was killed by enemy fire on Ie Shima, a tiny speck of an island off the coast of Okinawa on April 18, 1945.
In an unpublished column found after his death, Pyle wrote that war scars the memory of soldiers in a way that cannot be grasped at home by someone who reads columns of figures or hears a mention that “he is a near one who went away and never came back.” Soldiers, however, see dead men in mass production month after month and year after year in ditches and hillsides.
He ended the column: “We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference.”
His writings brought to those at home the toll and terror of war; a terror that becomes a constant companion for a soldier. He wrote of life in the foxholes, of the burning tanks, of the high whines of mortar shells, and of the blown bridges and the dead animals. He described the hospital tents, the laughter and cursing of soldiers in harm’s way “and of the graves and graves and graves.”
His column about the death of Capt. Henry Waskow in Italy was so emotionally powerful that it made the front pages of American newspapers and is considered by those wise in such things as the finest single piece of writing to come out of the war. The piece was turned into a movie, “The Story of G.I. Joe,” that those who fought in the war say is a true depiction of what battlefield life was like.
He was the soldier’s friend. A distinguished high school superintendent once told me his greatest honor was that “I was in one of Ernie’s columns.” It concerned accidental bombing of American troops in Normandy by U.S. planes. He once got into a near fist fight when he found out the prominent head of the school’s booster club was a pilot on one of those planes.
Pyle was one of the few civilians ever awarded the Purple Heart and is buried with honors in the National Memorial Cemetery in Honolulu. Since he was born in Indiana, the Indiana University Pyle School of Journalism is named in his honor, and you can learn about war through 40 or so of his best writings by going to the school’s website.
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Today, I think he is all but forgotten.
Yes, dear reader, you’ve read many of these same words each year around this time. And it never seems to end. From 1775 to this day, the number of American military dead is more than 1.1 million. It never seems to be enough.
Some decades ago, American poet Archibald MacLeish wrote about young dead soldiers who still speak to us with silenced voices. The poem ends:
“We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.
“We were young, they say. We have died; remember us.”
On Monday, I remembered two.
Jerry Shnay is a freelance journalist and can be reached at [email protected].