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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3300 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Ode to Ernie Pyle Christopher T. George "The G.I. has lost his best friend." Lt. Col. Joseph Coolidge, April 19, 1945, --on the day after Ernie Pyle's death Red-haired Indiana farmboy, you said you didn't wanna look at the south end of a horse going north so after a career as a Scripps-Howard columnist you got sent to Europe with Stars and Stripes. You chronicled the day-to-day life of the G.I.s, comforted the "mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys" who lost their lives in foreign places, expunged in Normandy hedgerows or Iwo Jima foxholes, died at odd angles, paste-faced in obscene mire, soldiers killed, you recorded, by "mass production." Treated them like guys not statistics, understood their blisters and piles, their suppurating wounds. You were the scrawny eager aging country kid who shared their canteens, their K-ration chow, lamented that, transferred to the Pacific theatre, you'd miss out on the victory in the European war. But a Jap marksman had you in his crosshairs on Ie Shima, his bullet struck your graying head, the Indiana farmboy struck down at only age 44, you shared their infinite commonwealth of death. |
