Randall Jarrell is famous to many (okay, I'll say it, so you won't have to) ex-English literature majors, and other fans of poetry, including war poetry. His poem, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," is one of the more famous war poems around. What I didn't realize until I read more about Ernie Pyle was that Randall Jarrell made one of the more profound quotes about why Ernie Pyle's contribution as a journalist in wartime was so important. He wrote:
"We felt most the moral qualities of [Ernie Pyle's] work and life; but we could not help realizing that his work was, in our time, an unprecedented aesthetic triumph: because of it most of the people of a country felt, in the fullest moral and emotional sense, something that had never happened to them, that they could never have imagined without it -- a war."
Never read Jarrell's famous poem? Here's your chance, then: It's pretty short and to the point in its ability to communicate, elliptically, the experience of war on the individual:
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
The two men -- one a poet, who had served briefly in the military, the other a journalist who had embedded at length with the troops, and considered himself one of them -- both served to "amplify" the experience of serving in combat for those to those who stayed at home. Interestingly, for our purposes on this blog, no one is clear whether Jarrell's "accidental" death at 51 (he was hit by a car while walking) was actually accidental, or in fact a successful suicide attempt. He had struggled with mental illness (depression) before his untimely death.
As for Pyle, he died in combat, with the troops he loved and whose individual experience he communicated so successfully to the folks at home. According to Pyle's obituary in the New York Times, Eleanor Roosevelt herself wrote of Pyle, "I have read everything he has sent from overseas," and, the obituary states, "recommended his writings to all Americans."
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Just because I can't get enough lately of this journalist with the compassion for those he encountered in combat, I have to add one more quote from his (excellent) obituary. How I wish we had someone like this today. See how very much his point of view is needed among veterans today:
Said General Mark W. Clark, from Fifteenth Army General HQ in Europe:
"A great soldier correspondent is dead, perhaps the greatest of this war. I refer to Ernie Pyle, who marched with my troops through Italy, took their part and championed their cause both here and at home.
"His reporting was always constructive. He was "Ernie" to privates and generals alike. He spoke the GI's language and made it a part of the everlasting lore of our country. He was a humble man and in his humility lay his greatness.
"He will be missed by all of us fighting with the Fifteenth Army Group. There could have been only one Ernie Pyle. May God bless his memory. He helped our soldiers to victory."