SOURCE: An introduction to Ernie's War: The Best of Ernie Pyle's World War II Dispatches, edited by David Nichols, Random House, 1986, pp. 5-37.

[In the following essay, Nichols provides an overview of Pyle's life, focusing on his relationship with his wife.

Ernie Pyle was born August 3, 1900, on a farm a few miles outside Dana, Indiana, the first and only child of Will and Maria Pyle. He was a senior in high school when a neighbor boy went off to World War I. Pyle wanted to go, too. Bored with the steady rhythms of farm life and enamored of men of action, he found the prospect of marching off to war in storied Europe irresistible. He shared with countless other Americans a love of parades and boisterous song. His parents, however, insisted that he finish high school, a big disappointment for a young romantic. Upon graduation he enrolled in the Naval Reserve, but the Armistice was signed before he made it to advanced training.

He entered Indiana University at Bloomington in the fall of 1919. Shortly after he arrived, he met Paige Cavanaugh, a war veteran several months his senior. Both were Indiana farm boys anxious to make as solid a break with the farm as possible. Soon they became good friends, Cavanaugh telling of his wartime experiences in France and Pyle wishing he had been so blessed. "He thought the war was a great experience for me," Cavanaugh has said, "and he regretted that he'd not been able to be a part of it—the risk, the romance, the adventure of it, perhaps." Cavanaugh, both in his urge to travel and in his contempt for the conventional, was to deeply influence Pyle.

In January 1923, just short of completing his journalism degree, Pyle left the university to take a general-reporting job on the La Porte Herald in La Porte, Indiana. His parents were strongly opposed to it (the graduation issue again), but Pyle had deferred to their wishes once and missed a war for it. He was not about to pass up a real newspaper job.

Pyle left La Porte after a few months to become a reporter for the Scripps-Howard Washington Daily News, a one-cent tabloid of generally twelve pages, competing against three more established publications, including the Washington Post. Pyle, his bosses discovered, had a knack for writing punchy headlines, and soon they made him a copy editor. Only a few months short of twenty-three when he arrived in Washington, Pyle began what would be a long association with Scripps-Howard, the only employer of any duration he would ever have. He met Lee Miller, also an Indiana native, who would steadily promote his career, encourage him when depression overcame him, edit his copy (leniently, for the most part), and, when fame arrived, handle his business matters. Miller would also write a posthumous Pyle biography.

In college, Pyle had written a windy editorial entitled "The Ideal Girl," in which he described the kind of young woman a young man ought to marry. She would be "the type who is willing to share your troubles, sympathize with you in your periods of adverses, and makes your interests her interests." Ernie believed he had found such a woman in Geraldine Siebolds, to whom he was married on July 7, 1925, by a justice of the peace in Alexandria, Virginia. Jerry, twenty days her husband's junior, was a civil-service worker who had moved to Washington from her native Minnesota shortly after graduating from high school. She was an extremely bright, attractive woman, willing to share Ernie's troubles and sympathize with him in his "periods of adverses." For the most part, she was also willing to make his interests her interests. But she had little use for marriage. Jerry was stubbornly nonconformist and agreed to marriage only if the deed were kept hidden from their Washington friends. Ernie, whose only concern in the matter was his parents' feelings, agreed, and "for years," Miller wrote, "they made a fetish of insisting they weren't really married."

They fancied themselves bohemians and were not model housekeepers. When they socialized, it was with the newspaper crowd, including Lee Miller, who described the floor of their downtown apartment as tobacco covered, the window sills stained by party drinks, the furnishings limited to army cots, wicker chairs, and a breakfast grill.

In the summer of 1926, the Pyles quit their jobs and left Washington to drive around the United States. They traveled nine thousand miles in ten weeks. The trip ended in New York, where Ernie got a job on the copy desk of the Evening World and later the Post. In December of 1927, the Washington Daily News invited him to return as its telegraph editor, and Pyle, never fond of New York, readily accepted. Although it was another desk job, he was soon able to compensate for the long, hectic hours of editing wire-service stories and writing headlines by carving out a beat all his own, the first daily aviation column in American journalism.

Pyle undertook the aviation column about a year after Charles Lindbergh's celebrated transatlantic flight. Lindbergh's feat and the attendant hero worship in the press must have profoundly touched him: even as an adult he was fascinated with men of action, much as he had marveled at Indianapolis 500 drivers as a student.

His work on the copy desk completed by early afternoon, Pyle would hunt for material at the several airports in and around Washington. The writing he did on his own time, in the evenings at home. Soon his apartment became a gathering place for flyers and assorted hangerson.

Two things germane to Pyle's later success emerged from his dealings with aviators. He found that total immersion in his subject matter yielded the best results, that he had a gift for becoming a member of a group while retaining his ability to explain it to outsiders. Just as important, Pyle discovered that he could mix with all kinds of people. Inherently shy, he was a democratizer in a group. Meeting him, even reading his column, people felt at ease and were inclined to open up.

Scripps-Howard eventually made Pyle aviation editor for the entire chain. Aviators were the heroes of the hour, and he was their scribe. Yet Pyle was not an altogether happy man. Paige Cavanaugh was routinely indulging his wanderlust by traveling to Europe, and it's likely that Pyle wanted some of that for himself. Cavanaugh, however, was single and perfectly content to drift from job to job, abandoning any pursuit he found even marginally dull. Pyle cared about financial security. It was one thing to live a pared-down existence, mock middle-class aspirations, drink bootleg liquor, and listen to Jerry read poetry aloud, but it was quite another to be unemployed, and Pyle feared being out of work. Even so, what others might have taken for ambition—working on his own time at the aviation writing, for example—was mostly a flight from boredom, a lifelong affliction for Pyle.

Much to the disappointment of aviators and readers alike, Pyle quit the aviation column in 1932 to become managing editor of the Washington Daily News. He didn't want the position, but he didn't think he could turn it down, either. While Pyle did a good job in his three years as managing editor, neither inside work nor politics appealed to him. In one picture taken near the end of his managing editor term, Pyle looks fifty years old. He was only thirty-four, just beginning the hectic period of his life.

In the winter of 1934, Pyle developed a severe and lingering case of influenza. His doctor ordered him to seek a warmer climate, and the News granted him a leave of absence. With Jerry, he traveled by car to Los Angeles, where they boarded a freighter and sailed six thousand miles to Philadelphia in three weeks. It was an arduous convalescence that suggested a new career. Back in Washington, he wrote a series of articles about his vacation. The pieces were well received, and soon Pyle talked his bosses into giving him a try as a roving columnist. Now officially employed by Scripps-Howard Alliance, he was to write six columns a week for distribution to the twenty-four Scripps-Howard papers, including the Washington Daily News.

" … I will go where I please and write what I please," he told a friend, and for the next six years he did just that. Thirty-five times he crossed the American continent, dipping into each state at least three times. He reported from Alaska, Hawaii, and Central and South America, moving by car, truck, plane, boat, horse and muleback.

It was Pyle's habit to travel for a week or so, collecting material as he went, then hole up in a hotel room to write. If the week had gone well, he might have, say, four interviews with which to work. These he would write as reports, almost always including himself. They revealed a man who enjoyed a tall tale and the company of rugged individualists—Alaskan gold miners or a squatter who painted pictures in his shack behind the Memphis city dump. Thus readers met a variety of interesting characters whose personalities were revealed in apposition to Pyle's. The balance of the week's pieces would be personal essays on his own foibles and illnesses (which were legion), or on curious things that happened to him as he puttered across country at speeds rarely exceeding forty-five miles per hour.

The latitude the job offered was far from liberating, however. Ernie and Jerry were free enough to follow their own inclinations, but there was a purpose to it all, and that weighed heavily. Both were often discontent with their traveling life. Paige Cavanaugh had married and settled in Inglewood, California, and though he still regularly changed jobs, Cavanaugh was becoming more rooted. "Many times on this trip, Mr. Cavanaugh," Pyle wrote from Guatemala, "I've envied you—just thinking of you sitting there … with every comfort in the world.…" Pyle had in Cavanaugh a friend whose light-hearted approach to life offered respite from the wearisome routine of travel and from his concern for Jerry, who, early in their travel days, had begun to show signs of the depression that would later twice cause her to attempt suicide.

It's impossible almost forty years after her death to offer anything but conjecture about Jerry's unhappiness. A mystery to Ernie, as well as to his friends and associates, it was likely a mystery to Jerry herself. She was an emotional chameleon, capable of change at a moment's notice. Column readers knew her as "that Girl who rides with me," though she was a vague figure, never well developed. She lived out of suitcases, retyped his copy, offered praise and criticism of his work, her life revolving around Ernie and his restive disposition. Life on the road held very little for Jerry, whose pleasures—reading, playing the piano, working crossword puzzles—were largely sedentary. More than ever before, Pyle's college description of the "ideal girl" applied to her: she shared in his troubles and sympathized with him in his "periods of adverses." Even sex was denied her.

Ernie and Jerry probably never wanted children early in their married lives, but later on—just when is unclear—the question was moot. Ernie had become impotent. He often joked about the problem in letters to Cavanaugh and eventually sought treatment for the condition in San Diego, but he apparently never recovered. Later, in desperation, Jerry would want a child.

Beginning with Ernie's extended trip to Alaska in April of 1937, they began spending more time apart, carrying on their marriage by correspondence. Their letters were full of the superlatives of endearment, but something was amiss. Jerry's depression, slowly building for two years, was now virtually unchecked; she drank heavily and used sedatives and Benzedrine. While Pyle toured Alaska and the Aleutian Islands, Jerry closed their Washington apartment for good. For three years, until they built a house in Albuquerque, she was a woman without a home, living variously with her mother in Minnesota or with friends around the country.

Ernie, meanwhile, was in demand and carried along by the pleasure he took in his new-found popularity, but in these years, he surrendered the only intimate relationship he had ever had—that with Jerry—to the pressures of a largely unseen audience. He was aware of this—aware, too, that the more successful the column became the harder it would be to quit. Still, he pushed ahead toward syndication outside the Scripps-Howard chain, often chafing when the results were meager.

In September 1938, the Pyles began a tour of Central and South America. They parted in French Guiana so that Ernie could visit the penal colony at Devil's Island; Jerry ended up in Miami, alone in a hotel and drinking heavily. Ernie later found her incoherent, emaciated, and unable to eat. Outwardly, she recovered quickly, and they resumed their travels.

When the war that would make him a national hero was breaking out overseas, Pyle was mostly uninterested. Not until September 3, 1939, when Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, did he take serious notice. Eight days after the declaration, he wrote to Cavanaugh: "Personally, I'm just about to bust. I want to get over there as a war correspondent or something so bad. However, there is an unspoken stalemate on between Miss Geraldine and me as regards that subject. The matter has never been discussed openly, but we know how each other stands. I'll probably win in the end, however. Pacifism is fine as long as there ain't no war around. But when they start shooting I want to get close enough just a couple of times to get good and scared."

At the age of thirty-nine, Pyle still had a schoolboy's vision of battle, an untutored conception of war that re-called his disappointment over not accompanying his neighbor friend to World War I twenty-two years before. He was restless. He had avoided doing pieces on serious topics for so long that now, in the face of world crisis, his work seemed trivial. "For the last two weeks I've been so goddam bored writing silly dull columns about Mt. Hood and hop ranches that I think I'm going nuts," he wrote Cavanaugh. But relief was slow in coming.

It was a little over a year later, in mid-November 1940, that Ernie sailed to England to report on the Battle of Britain. He left Jerry in Albuquerque to oversee the construction of their new house, the first and only house they would ever own. Though Jerry eventually came to love the little house, she hardly found it compensation for her husband's decision to go to war. She wrote to friends of her fears for Ernie's safety, which, she said, she was learning to live with. She added: "But to pretend that I give one single solitary good goddamn about a shack or a palace or any other material consideration in this world would be to foist upon everybody at all interested the greatest gold-brick insult a low mind could conceive."

Frightened but animated after waiting twenty-three years for his first taste of war, Pyle arrived in England in mid-December for a three-month stay. Shortly thereafter, London received a particularly brutal pounding by Luftwaffe fire bombs, which Pyle watched from a balcony. He described the city as "stabbed with great fires, shaken by explosions, its dark regions along the Thames sparkling with the pinpoints of white-hot bombs.…"

Pyle soon found that he liked England and the English. His columns, flavored by their persistence and understated humor, the copy chatty and somewhat glib, were well received in the States. He wrote about life in the subway shelters, about the firemen who worked through the night and the spotters who enforced blackout provisions and watched for roof fires. He took a long tour of England's industrial midlands and stood in the ruins of Coventry. Now marginally familiar with one aspect of war, Pyle had yet to shed his dilettante's view of it. He was a tourist, a visitor sharing his hosts' misery in a cursory way. When Pyle next went to war—almost two years later—he would not be on a balcony looking down; he would be in a foxhole, looking up. And what he would see then would dispel forever his adolescent view of the romance of war.

Since he had begun his travel work five years before, it had been cruelly true that for every gain Pyle made professionally, he had suffered a personal setback. As his popularity increased, his marital happiness declined. Privacy was a thing of the past: in the spring of 1941, tourists began driving past his house in Albuquerque at all hours, hoping to get a glimpse of him. Even his stay in England had been marred by word of his mother's death in Indiana.

Much as the new house delighted him, Pyle had little time to enjoy it because he had to travel frantically to keep the column going. Jerry's unhappiness had deepened during his months abroad, partly out of concern for Ernie's well-being, and now her troubles took a new turn: she tried to take her life, apparently by closing herself off in the kitchen and turning on the gas jets. Ernie took her to Denver for a thorough physical, but the doctors found nothing wrong.

He was on a tour of Canadian air bases in late August when friends summoned him back to Albuquerque. A friend had found Jerry near death, hemorrhaging at the mouth. An ulcer had eaten through a blood vessel in her stomach. Her doctors predicted a slow recovery. Jerry had been "drinking colossally for days," Ernie wrote Cavanaugh. "Will stay here until she gets completely back to normal, and may have to completely reshape our lives to prevent her ever doing this again." He offered Scripps-Howard his resignation, but the company flatly refused it. They settled on a three-month leave of absence—with no pay, at Pyle's insistence.

Calling Jerry a "psychopathic case," he explained her condition to his bosses: "Because of her futility complex (I suppose) she is not permanently interested in anything. And without any interest, she frequently gets to wallowing in boredom and melancholy and hopelessness, and that leads her to progress from normal drinking to colossal drinking.…"

Jerry made a remarkable recovery. By mid-fall, Ernie was proposing a three-month trip to the Orient, but when his plans fell through, he had to make do with resuming the column stateside. Jerry, meanwhile, turned again to heavy drinking. That December the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the United States declared war on Japan and the other Axis powers.

The year 1942 was the low point of Pyle's life. In the year's first six months, he began and ended a love relationship, apparently platonic, with a woman in San Francisco. He traveled relentlessly to rebuild circulation lost during his three months of leave, concentrating mainly on the West Coast so that he could undergo a series of painful (and nonproductive) treatments for impotence in San Diego. All the while, Jerry's condition steadily worsened. She was in and out of the hospital, "doping and drinking to excess again," eventually coming to believe that having a baby would help her right her life. " … I can't give you a child, as you know," Ernie told her. "I haven't been lying when I've told you that the power of sex had gone from me."

Finally, with the concurrence of Jerry's doctors and family, Ernie reluctantly divorced her on April 14, 1942, hoping the shock would force her "into a realization that she [has] to face life like other people." He left open the possibility of remarriage, assuming that Jerry would "get to work and cure herself.…" Ernie signed the house over to her, divided their savings equally between them, and provided her with a weekly income.

Scripps-Howard, meanwhile, wanted Pyle to prepare for a foreign trip, something interesting to give the column the impetus it lacked after his frequent absences over the last year. He flew to Washington and quickly concluded that Great Britain was his best bet. The law required that he register for the draft, and he did so, discovering in the process that his classification was 1-A. He requested and was granted a six-month draft extension.

Shortly before he left the United States for Britain, Jerry's mental health slipped sufficiently that Ernie found the courage to do what he said he should have done long before. He committed her to a sanitarium at Pueblo, Colorado, for six months. When she pleaded to be released and remarried to him, Ernie refused, admitting that his comments seemed cold. " … I'm coming back (permanently I mean) when you are so far along the road of cheerfulness and normal outlook and usefulness to your-self and other people, that there can be no doubt about our future, and not until then.…" Emotionally unstable himself, Ernie in his dealings with Jerry had assumed more the outlook of a foster parent than that of an exhusband. That he urged her to make herself useful to others is significant. For years, Ernie and Jerry had dismissed middle-class American life as unworthy of their aspirations. They had lived a rootless existence, clung to the bohemian pretensions of their Washington days, and traveled at Scripps-Howard's expense, liberally dispensing tips at a time when most Americans their age were struggling to raise families in the Depression.

"Stability cloaks you with a thousand little personal responsibilities, and we have been able to flee from them," Ernie had written of their traveling life. Blind as he was to the fact Jerry desperately needed his steady company to overcome her problems, Ernie was quicker than she to apprehend that service to others in a time of national need was a potential antidote to their troubles. With the country mobilized for war and the government enjoining everyone to do his part, Pyle felt the tug of usefulness. He was not certain how to act upon those sentiments, but he closed the travel-writing phase of his career on a note of chagrin, sure only that what lay ahead would be preferable to the strain of the preceding twelve months.

Before Pyle flew from New York to Ireland during mid-June 1942, he wrote his ex-wife, "I am all alone. Be my old Jerry when I come back. I love you."

Americans were already at war in the Pacific as Pyle began writing about the training of American troops in Ireland and England. By studying the men he wrote about, he picked up on their longings and away-from-home habits and sent back the kind of detail no other reporter bothered with. His circulation figures steadily improved, and slowly his frame of mind did, too, though mail from Jerry was infrequent, and this bothered him. In late summer, he received word from her that she had left the Colorado sanitarium and was living in Albuquerque, in a house on the grounds of a Catholic hospital. (She had prevailed upon her sister to authorize her release.) Perplexed, Ernie urged her to find a job, something congenial to get her mind off her problems.

Living close to his subjects worked an insidious change in Pyle, the one-time bohemian outsider. He found himself in the unlikely position of chronicling the daily lives of the conscripted soldiers of what was becoming a very middle-class nation. Pyle's subjects were men whose backgrounds were often strikingly "normal," even boring, and whose postwar dreams called for more of the same. Many a Pyle subject wanted nothing so much as a little white house with a yard bordered by a white picket fence—precisely the sort of house Pyle and Jerry had built in Albuquerque, which he had sardonically described to Cavanaugh as a "regular little boxed-up mass production shack in a cheap new suburb."

Though some days he believed induction into the Army would be a relief, by late September Pyle had guardedly decided to stay with column writing. Homefront reaction to his pieces was favorable, so he asked Lee Miller to file with the draft board for another six-month extension. The board promptly granted it, but soon thereafter the government stopped drafting men thirty-eight and older. By month's end he had come to equate writing with service. He told Jerry, "As much as I would like to come home, I don't see any point in getting home for a few days and then spending the rest of the war as a private when I can do more good—if any at all—by sticking to what I'm doing."

Visiting Air Corps bases consumed most of his time in October. There were rumors that a second front would be opened soon, and Pyle concluded that he would go along, not with the forces actually making the landings, but a little later. From London, in late October, he wrote Jerry a long, introspective letter. "My future without you is unthinkable," he said, "and I hope you feel the same way. We have both suffered so much that surely there is peace waiting for us ahead.… I too look at things much differently than I did; I have sobered a great deal, and I see now that I was bad in so many ways. I've finally realized that I unconsciously had the German attitude—that everything I did was right just because I did it.… I don't waste any time reproaching myself for the past, but somehow I feel that my character and my mind have deteriorated so terribly; I don't have any spiritual stability within myself at all… all purpose seems to have gone out of life for me (except the one of hope) and I've no interest in anything."

His spirits continued to sag. The column had become "something I don't love anymore," he wrote Jerry on November 3, 1942. "I would do almost anything to abandon it forever. I have no interest in it, and I'm weary almost unto illness of thinking for a living."

Shortly after that, he boarded the Rangiticki, a British transport ship carrying troops to replace those wounded or killed in the Allied invasion of North Africa. He had shared several months of agreeable companionship in Ireland and England with the American men quartered in the ship's hold. By traveling with them through hostile waters to a foreign place, he was beginning to share their future in a serious way. Yet he had no intention of becoming their spokesman in this war; he planned, rather, to take a quick look at Africa, then travel to India or China. Had he been in a better frame of mind, he might have seen that he had already found a new outlet for his ability to capture the human side of events great and small, a talent previously diluted for want of focus.

Pyle went ashore in Algeria on November 22, 1942, and spent the balance of the year in and around Oran. From his column, readers got a sense of how massive an effort the war was, of how diverse were the duties of its participants.

A few days after he landed in North Africa, Ernie, depressed and lonely, wrote Jerry a letter asking her to be remarried to him by proxy. He got an Army judge to draw up the papers, which he forwarded to Albuquerque. Bedridden with influenza over the Christmas holidays, he was horrified by a dream in which Jerry had married someone else. It was their third straight Christmas apart.

Shortly after the holidays, Pyle was ready for a look at the front. In January 1943, he flew from Oran to a desert airfield called the Garden of Allah. He planned to write a series of columns on the bomber crews and fighter pilots stationed there, take a look at how the infantry was faring, then resume the travel column. Thus far, his portrait of the American soldiers in North Africa was instructive but incomplete. In this next phase of his introduction to war, Pyle would come face to face with what most people understand intellectually but that only the combatant or his astute observer comes to know emotionally—that battle demands of its participants a suspension of the peacetime moral sense that killing is wrong. Pyle would see nothing of the sublime in this moral transformation, necessary as it was.

He spent a week with a group of P-38 Lightning pilots who generally flew escort for the bombers but who delighted in an occasional strafing mission. After one such mission, during which they had blown a German truck convoy to pieces, the pilots laughed as they told their story of Germans flying out of the trucks "like firecrackers." It bothered Pyle to see men so young kill so readily—and with such relish. He "couldn't help having a funny feeling about them… they were so casual about everything… they talked about their flights and killing and being killed exactly as they would discuss girls or their school lessons."

The column on the fighter pilots and their strafing marked the emergence of a more serious Pyle voice, at the core of which was an engaging tension: the enormous moral difference between life at home and life at war. Pyle was well acquainted with offbeat behavior from offbeat people; he had spent years tracking down such characters and writing their stories. Now he found so-called normal men doing bestial things, and he was both intrigued and repelled.

Pyle left the relative comfort of the Garden of Allah in late January 1943 and joined the infantry of General Fred-endall's (later General Patton's) II Corps, headquartered at Tébessa in Algeria, near the Tunisian border. By jeep he traveled to the Tunisian front lines, getting to know the commanders and their men. His unobtrusive style of reporting—mingling, listening, rarely taking notes—ingratiated him with nearly everyone he encountered. He shared in the soldiers' tight-knit company, endured the same privations, subjected himself to the same dangers, and thus began his most significant body of work—describing for those at home the daily lives of the infantrymen who fought the war at its dirtiest level. Reporting the actual news of the war—"the big picture," in the parlance of the time—was the job of numerous other reporters; Pyle was free to seek his own line of inquiry. He could spend a week or two living at the front before withdrawing to write his pieces.

Pyle soon rejected the notion of resuming his travel work, preferring to cover the story unfolding before him. For the first time in his life, he had become morally connected to an undertaking of great moment. His nerves were smoothing out; he had virtually stopped drinking—admittedly for lack of supply—and the combination of the tan he had picked up at the Garden of Allah and the windburn from the front gave him a ruddy look of health and well-being.

Ernie's pleasure in his work was diminished in early February 1943 by a letter from Albuquerque: Jerry had refused his offer of remarriage, perhaps because she still resented him for having committed her to a sanitarium. "It was just dusk when I got the letter," he wrote her, "and I sat on a stump all bundled up against the cold, and read it. I was so disappointed I almost felt like crying."

On February 14, German tanks and infantry under the command of General Erwin Rommel startled the inexperienced Americans by driving fifty miles through their positions at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia. The Americans retreated, Pyle with them. The retreat was for the Army what Pearl Harbor had been for the Navy, and Pyle's frontline description of it was radioed back to the United States for immediate distribution to subscribing papers.

"I've been at the front for seven solid weeks, and although you may not believe it, I like it up there because life becomes so wonderfully simple—even a lot simpler than you've got yours arranged," he wrote Cavanaugh from Algiers, to which he had fled after the retreat. "There are only four essentials—clothes, food, cigarets, and whatever portion of safety you can manage to arrange for yourself."

For the first time in over a year, Pyle was optimistic. Life at the front was invigorating. A letter to Jerry was confident, good-humored, and full of pride in his own capacity. "If anybody had ever told me I could stand to sleep right out on the ground and wake up with snow on my bedroll I'd have called him nuts; but I have and you find you can stand almost anything." While Pyle spent ten days in Algiers writing about what he had seen in the last seven weeks, Jerry sent a cable informing him that she was working as a civil service clerk at Kirtland Field in Albuquerque and that she was moving back into the house. This pleased him. He was elated when, on March 12, during a few weeks' break from the front lines, he received notice that Jerry had reconsidered his offer of remarriage and exercised the proxy on her lunch hour. This made him feel "some peace with the world again.…"

There was also evidence of his quickening stateside popularity. More papers now ran the column, which increased his earnings. Accepting an offer from Henry Holt & Company to reprint his North Africa work in book form was the happy coincidence of two good fortunes—an upswing professionally and personally.

What's more, Pyle had finally resolved the question of what to do with himself. He was committed to staying with the men whose blooding he had only begun to describe. His dilettante's sense of war had evolved into a more mature outlook. He hated the "tragedy and insanity" of war, but "I know I can't escape and I truly believe the only thing left to do is be in it to the hilt."

When Pyle returned to the front lines in early April 1943, he found he had become inured to carnage—"somehow I can look upon mutilated bodies without flinching or feeling deeply"—but not to fitful sleep after a day of watching men kill and be killed; then "at last the enormity of all these newly dead strikes me like a living nightmare. And there are times when I feel that I can't stand it all and will have to leave."

As the Tunisian war wound its way northward toward the Mediterranean port cities of Bizerte and Tunis, Pyle lived and traveled with the 1st Division. It was here that he wrote his most memorable columns of the North Africa campaign, reflecting his new maturity and, as always, his keen eye for detail. What was most engaging was the fusion of Pyle's documentary impulse with his heightened moral sense. He now celebrated true character traits versus absurd ones; gone was the juvenile admiration of racecar drivers and Air Mail pilots who brazened it out in the face of quick and violent death. The infantrymen with whom he now spent his time lived decidedly unromantic lives. They fought, they waited, they endured dive bombings and heavy-artillery shellings—they were the ultimate victims. To Pyle, they were heroes, not dashing or even particularly brave, but men who persisted in the face of great fear and discomfort because they had to. By sharing their lives, Pyle was becoming one of them in spirit if not in age, in practice if not by force of conscription.

By mid-May, the Tunisian war was over. While the troops practiced for the invasion of Sicily, Pyle and the other correspondents retreated to a press camp on the shore of the Mediterranean near Algiers. Lee Miller suggested that he return home for several weeks, but Pyle declined, fearing guilt pangs. Perhaps by fall he could take a leave "with a clear conscience." Meanwhile, he turned his attention to the long essay that would be the last chapter of his book Here Is Your War.

It was a remarkable piece. The war in North Africa had been a testing ground for American men and equipment, Pyle wrote. The men had been well cared for, their food and medical care were good, their equipment less so but getting better. Because Pyle was "older and a little apart," he could see the changes in the soldiers, and he emphasized that no one could undergo what these men had without being permanently affected. War had made them rougher, more profane, and prone to taking what they needed when and where they could find it. "The stress of war puts old virtues in a changed light," he wrote. "We shall have to relearn a simple fundamental or two when things get back to normal. But what's wrong with a small case of 'requisitioning' when murder is the classic goal?"

Six months after Pyle had arrived in North Africa—confused, sickly, and depressed—his fortunes had reversed themselves. He had proved to himself that he could endure. He had found pleasure and purpose in his renewed union with Jerry, and he had forgotten about the woman in San Francisco with whom he had fallen in love. His indecision of six months before had given way to commitment, his lack of interest to singularity of purpose. Battle had brought a terrifying focus to his life, and the clarity that attached to frontline existence was exhilarating, drawing him back whenever he was away. He had yet to prove himself over the long haul, but he was prepared to do so.

On June 29, 1943, a year and ten days after he had arrived in Ireland, Pyle flew to Bizerte in Tunisia. There he boarded an American ship, the USS Biscayne, and settled in for his second invasion voyage in eight months.

The invasion of Sicily marked for Americans and their allies the beginning of the long assault on Axis Europe, and it was with the war in Europe that Pyle would come to be most identified. Even so, his beginning there was slow and unhappy, his work disconnected.

The Sicilian campaign was a short one, lasting only five weeks, from July 10 to August 17. During it Pyle displayed none of the exuberance that had marked his months in Africa. He was tired, sick, and fearful that redundancy would rob his copy of the vitality it had had in North Africa. "I'm getting awfully tired of war and writing about it," he told Jerry. "It seems like I can't think of anything new to say—each time it's like going to the same movie again."

After General George Patton's victory at Palermo two weeks after the invasion, Pyle drove to 45th Division headquarters at Cefalù, where he settled in with the 120th Engineers Battalion. He became ill and spent five days in a tent hospital amidst the "death rattle" of dying men. In the campaign's closing days, Pyle rejoined the 120th Engineers, then the 10th Engineers.

He wrote Jerry, "I find myself more and more reluctant to repeat and repeat the same old process of getting shot at." He added that "the war gets so complicated and confused in my mind; on especially sad days it's almost impossible to believe that anything is worth such mass slaughter and misery; and the after-war outlook seems to me so gloomy and pathetic for everybody."

Ten days after his forty-third birthday, the campaign ended, and Pyle decided to go home for a break. In a wrap-up piece on the Sicilian campaign, he explained:

I had come to despise and be revolted by war clear out of any logical proportion.… Through repetition, I had worn down to the nub my ability to weigh and describe.

Pyle arrived exhausted in New York at four A.M. on September 7, 1943, four days after the Allies had invaded Italy. Within twenty-four hours, he endured several news-paper interviews, countless phone calls from wives and friends of soldiers, requests from the Office of War Information and the WAC recruiting office for radio recordings, and one from Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau to appear on the war-bond radio program We the People. Two radio networks engaged in a bidding war for Pyle's services. He turned both down.

Washington wasn't any better. Pyle had to see the dentist, his lawyer, his tax accountant, and there were more interviews with reporters, more picture-taking. A Pentagon panel of fifty officers questioned him. He had a private talk with Secretary of War Henry Stimson. For a thou-sand-dollar fee, Pyle agreed to be photographed for a Chesterfield cigaret advertisement. A movie producer, Lester Cowan, came down from New York to talk about basing a movie on Pyle's forthcoming book.

After a short visit with his father and Aunt Mary (his mother's sister) on the family farm in Indiana, Ernie flew to Albuquerque, where Jerry met him at the airport. But his stay there was chaotic, too. Cavanaugh flew over from Los Angeles for a visit, and Lester Cowan arrived for more movie discussions. Mail from all over the country arrived by the bagful. The telephone rang constantly. Everyone, it seemed, wanted something from him, including Jerry, who by this time was hardly able to articulate anything of her tortured inner life.

Jerry's condition was tentative, Pyle told friends. Even as she slept, there was "horrible anguish in her face." He knew she loved him, but he was ambivalent toward her: on the one hand, "my normal feeling of love for her has been sort of smothered in an academic viewpoint," and on the other, "she is the only thing in the world that means anything to me.…" In his months of leave from war, Pyle avoided spending much time alone with Jerry—perhaps out of guilt over their prolonged separations (which she abhorred), perhaps because his sexual dysfunction troubled him, perhaps because he had little need of true intimacy, preferring his associations light and cursory.

Jerry broke down shortly before his stay ended, and Pyle admitted her to the hospital. He told Lee Miller that Jerry was depressed about his forthcoming departure and under a great deal of pressure on her job. Pyle feared that his leaving would be too much for her to bear. "But," as he explained in the column a few weeks later,

what can a guy do? I know millions of others who are reluctant too, and they can't even get home.… [At home] you feel like a deserter and a heel—not so much to the war effort, but to your friends who are still over there freezing and getting shot at.

Pyle spent three weeks in Washington before traveling to Italy. Here Is Your War had been published to laudatory notices. He autographed books, went to tea with Eleanor Roosevelt and to film conferences with Lester Cowan. He commented in the column on his own popularity. If, as Lee Miller wrote, Pyle had a "boyish curiosity" about his fame when he had arrived in New York, he now saw celebrity for what it was: an all-consuming claim on his time and a diversion from the things and people who really mattered.

Before he left Washington for Italy in late November, Pyle completed his income-tax return for 1943: he had made about sixty-nine thousand dollars, twenty-nine thousand of which he paid in taxes.

Unlike their German and Italian opponents, who were fighting on or close to native soil, the American soldiers Pyle wrote about saw home as a continuum, a place fixed in the imagination that would stay the same, possibly even improve, in their time away. Before his vacation, Pyle, too, had sustained himself with mildly idealized thoughts of Jerry and the house in Albuquerque. As he began to cover the war in Italy, however, any sense of home as an emotional buffer was gone. What remained was Pyle's ever-growing compulsion to tell the story of the American fighting man from firsthand experience. But that compulsion was now largely a reflex action, a commitment bereft of pleasure.

The winter of 1943-1944 was the worst Italy had seen in years. For soldiers the misery of the cold and mud compounded the confusion of fighting in mountainous terrain. The distant objective was the conquest of Rome, the immediate goal to survive what Pyle called "this semi-barbarian life."

What had been exciting in North Africa, and to a much lesser extent in Sicily, was now debilitating. But even with the chaos of battle and its awful cost wearing on him as never before, his "ability to weigh and describe"—the faculty he said he had lost by the end of the Sicilian campaign—was unimpaired. And the columns he produced in Italy served to further boost his stateside circulation and consolidate his popularity among the troops. Pyle still feared redundancy in his copy, still was reluctant to subject himself to battle, but by Christmas he had already made two extended trips to the front and had written his best piece ever.

The column was an account of the affection an infantry company felt for its commander, young Captain Henry Waskow, who had been killed in the mountain fighting near San Pietro, and whose body had been brought down a mountain on the back of a mule. The column's emotional content was implicit, revealing both the intimate personal waste of war and the depth of Pyle's growth as a writer and observer.

Pyle failed to see the achievement for what it was, but few stateside were so obtuse. The column was a coast-to-coast sensation. The Washington Daily News gave over its entire front page to the Waskow piece and sold out the day's paper. If there were any doubts about who was in the ascendant as America's premier war correspondent, the Waskow column laid them to rest. Pyle was on his way to becoming a central figure of the era, a living, high-profile symbol of the fighting man's displacement from ordinary life and of his sacrifice. He had become the focus of his audience's good will toward the soldiers; assigned to him were many of the same idealized sentiments the public assigned to them. The Saturday Evening Post noted that Pyle "was probably the most prayed-for man with the American troops.…"

At home, just eight weeks before, Pyle had complained that Americans stateside "haven't had anything yet, on a national scale, to burn and crucify [them] into anything greater than [they] were to begin with." His heroes were different because they had suffered and endured and found strength in adversity. Just as Pyle had been drawn away from self-involvement by what he had seen at war, so, too, had the infantrymen. Pyle saw redemption in this collective action, a redemption unavailable to some statesiders who were concerned with the war only insofar as it affected their personal comfort.

After seeing on his vacation how untouched Americans at home were by events overseas, Pyle had arrived in Italy all the more intent upon getting across to his readers the magnitude of the infantryman's sacrifice. While his work in North Africa and Sicily had been largely descriptive reporting, in Italy it became more essay-like. Pyle was not a religious man, but he had been raised in a conservative Christian community, and increasingly he called on the Christian themes and language of his childhood to confer upon his subjects a peculiar brand of secular beatification. He admitted that his admiration for the infantry was obsessive and that to him "all the war of the world has seemed to be borne by the few thousand frontline soldiers here, destined merely by chance to suffer and die for the rest of us." He had found in his heroes an unusual degree of selflessness, of duty perceived and performed, and was deeply moved.

Having acquired a more sophisticated, more fluid, sense of good and evil, Pyle realized the men he wrote about were battling an evil enemy by engaging in murderous behavior themselves—and that, ironically, this often brought out noble characteristics in them. Living with an infantry company of the 34th Division, Pyle encountered Sergeant Buck Eversole, a platoon leader who had been at the front for over a year and who was now "a senior partner in the institution of death." Pyle's pieces on Eversole were the best expression of those characteristics he most admired in the fighting men; Eversole was a killer by necessity, but at core he was a moral man, thoughtful and capable of great feeling in the midst of moral contradictions. "I know it ain't my fault [green replacement soldiers] get killed," Eversole told Pyle.

And I do the best I can for them, but I've got so I feel like it's me killin' 'em instead of a German.

I've got so I feel like a murderer. I hate to look at them when the new ones come in.

Pyle filed his last reports of the Italian campaign in March 1944 from the Anzio-Nettuno beachhead, which was subject to constant shelling and bombing. He was nearly killed when a five-hundred-pound bomb landed near the building in which he lived, blowing a wall into his room, shattering windows, and ripping doors off their hinges. Other correspondents assumed Pyle was dead, but he emerged from the rubble with only a slight cut on his cheek. Despite the constant danger, Pyle told Jerry he was glad he had visited the beachhead; it wouldn't have been "right" for him to have avoided it.

He left Anzio on April 5 "in the clasp of a strange new safety" aboard a hospital ship bound for Naples. From Naples Pyle flew to North Africa, and thence to London. Something big was afoot—he was sure of that—but only later would he learn that the long-awaited invasion of France was imminent.

Shortly after Pyle arrived in London during mid-April 1944, word came that he had won a Pulitzer Prize for "distinguished war correspondence" in 1943, an unexpected but relished honor.

Ernie had received only a few letters from Jerry during his time in Italy and France, but now mail from her was more frequent. He was glad to learn that she was set to undergo a series of hospital treatments. She asked him if he was tired of war, and he replied, "Of course I am very sick of the war, and would like to leave it, and yet I know I can't. I've been a part of the misery and tragedy of it for so long that I've come to feel a responsibility to it or something. I don't quite know how to put it into words, but I feel if I left it, it would be like a soldier deserting."

Later, when Jerry returned home from the hospital in the company of two nurses and reported that she was abstaining from alcohol, Ernie's mood was still somber, and he explained to her his fear that "I'm going to be so torn up inside and maladjusted by the time [the war] is over that I'll take a lot of 'doin' with, so your mission in life is to get well and ready to take care of me when I get back!"

While Pyle fed Scripps-Howard and United Feature copy on invasion preparations and Air Corps crews, Lee Miller saw to plans for a second compilation of Pyle's columns, Brave Men.

Pyle set foot on French soil on June 7, 1944, the day after the Normandy invasion began, at Omaha Beach, one hundred twenty miles to the southwest of Brest, where Paige Cavanaugh had landed with the 36th Division twenty-seven years before. By now, Pyle's post-adolescent fascination with Cavanaugh's war tales was an attitude so remote that a reminder of it would surely have embarrassed him. Intense weariness and a spooky sense of the fragility of life would thread throughout his columns from France. A week after the landings, he told Lee Miller he was "beginning to feel that I've run my last race in this war and can't keep going much longer."

Pyle resumed the advocate's role he had taken on in Italy, writing from the beachhead a description of the effort it took to open a second front so that his audience could "know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you." After writing a series on the ack-ack gunners on the beachhead who provided ground troops protection from enemy planes, he spent time with the 1st Division and the 29th Division, then accompanied the 9th Infantry Division in its assault on Cherbourg.

Pyle had gone far toward making what A. J. Liebling of The New Yorker later called "a large personal impress on the nation" during the biggest war in its history, and now the inevitable American myth-making apparatus, keyed to perfection in this war, took over. As Pyle became ever more weary, the press increasingly lionized him, often turning the facts of his life to its own ends and casting him in the mold of greatest social utility. Pyle was pleased to learn that Time magazine was preparing a cover story on him, but when the article appeared in the July 17, 1944, issue, he was disappointed, then angry. "Some of it of course was swell," he wrote Jerry, "but some was so completely distorted."

Time portrayed Pyle as an anemic Everyman, stumbling willy-nilly into war, all the while suffering silently his sense of inferiority among his fellow correspondents. Moreover, Time said, Pyle had early on been the object of many practical jokes and other indignities perpetrated by the soldiers whose stories he sought. Later, the magazine reported, they had let up on him because he shared their miserable lives and wrote such fine things about them. The forthcoming movie based on Pyle's book Here Is Your War, from whose scriptwriters Time reporters got much of this fictional nonsense, would, the magazine said, "admit his fear of battle, his apprehension about his work, his latest quirk—the conviction that now he is in France, he is going to be killed."

Pyle told Jerry that he had never been the victim of soldiers' scorn or practical jokes, that the article left him "without any dignity, and I believe I do have a little," and that he didn't "have any premonition of death, as they claim." He added, "In fact I certainly plan and dream way ahead all the time about what we'll do after the war." He told Lee Miller the Time story "created a legend that makes me a combination of half-wit and coward, and it'll grow and be perpetuated."

Three days after his invective against Time, Pyle underwent his most horrifying experience of the war, the climax of his combat reporting from the European Theater.

On July 25, 1944, the American First Army began its breakout from the beachhead toward Saint-Lô. Two hours' worth of heavy bombing and shelling were to precede tank and infantry attacks. But before the ground forces could move forward, a bombing error killed hundreds of Americans. Pyle, who had been assigned to an infantry division, was standing in a farmyard when "all of an instant the universe became filled with a gigantic rattling," and bombs began falling all around him. He and an officer scrambled under a farm wagon for shelter, Pyle remembering afterward "an inhuman tenseness of muscle and nerves." He was "grateful in a chastened way I had never experienced before, for just being alive." In the column, he forgave the flyers their mistake on behalf of the infantry, telling them the "chaos and bitterness" of that afternoon had passed. This equanimity in the aftermath of the bombing was great public relations between service branches, but privately Pyle said he would go crazy if he had to endure anything like it again.

Pyle entered Paris with French troops on August 25, 1944. The pleasure of the newly liberated Parisians and the rich symbolism of the event momentarily eased his fatigue, but within two days he was making preparations for a stateside leave. He was proud of not having taken a break for so long, but now he had to go home. "I have had all I can take for a while," he told his readers.

I've been immersed in it too long. My spirit is wobbly and my mind is confused. The hurt has finally become too great. All of a sudden it seemed to me that if I heard one more shot or saw one more dead man, I would go off my nut.…

When Lee Miller met Pyle's ship in New York on September 18, 1944, he handed Pyle a letter from Jerry. She wrote that she was "humbly—and numbly, thankful" he was back, hastening to add that she was eager to see him, and, knowing his propensity for dawdling, jocularly adding that she would try to be patient. But, "if you linger in the East until frost takes the flowers—and nips the lawn—well! Love, darling." The letter's disjointed syntax held a clue to the instability of Jerry's condition. Like thirteen million other Americans, she read Ernie's column, and if she had experienced "real terror—simply stark terror" while he covered the London blitz four years before, it requires little imagination to sense what she had felt when she read of his narrowly escaping death at the Anzio beachhead and at Saint-Lô.

Jerry understood Ernie's devotion to the American troops he wrote about, but she had argued against his going to war from the start, and she suffered each time he ventured out. He was, after all, her only link to a happier past. Childless, living at great distance from her family in Minnesota, alone save for the impersonal attentions of doctors and private nurses, Jerry needed to be engaged emotionally. Sexual intimacy was out of the question, but the emotional intimacy she had enjoyed with Ernie in their youth wasn't—or so her plaintive letter hopefully implied.

As it turned out, it was. Ernie's capacity for intimacy, never highly developed in the first place, was now severely strained. (After the liberation of Paris, he had written that war had so "wrung and drained" his emotions that they "cringe from the effort of coming alive again.") As Jerry doubtless sensed in her more lucid moments, Ernie had abandoned her years before to marry his audience, with which he had a stylized intimacy that neatly suited his emotional needs. He phoned Jerry and told her he intended to remain in New York for several days so that the sculptor Jo Davidson could make a bust of his head. After that, he would spend a few days on the farm in Indiana, then fly to Albuquerque.

With millions of appreciative readers anxious for his every utterance, the pressures on Pyle had redoubled from those of a year before. So many people wanted so many things! Editor & Publisher wanted an interview. People on the street wanted his autograph. Helen Keller wanted to run her hands over his face; John Steinbeck wanted to talk. The mayor of Albuquerque wanted to throw a welcome-home dinner with five hundred guests. Wives and mothers wanted information about their husbands and sons. Roy Howard of Scripps-Howard wanted to have dinner. Lester Cowan wanted to confer about problems with his movie, The Story of G.I. Joe. Photographers wanted to take his picture. Scripps-Howard competitors wanted him to work for them.

Jerry, Paige Cavanaugh, and Jerry's private nurse met Pyle's plane at Albuquerque in late September, and within the week Lester Cowan and his director William Wellman arrived to discuss the movie. Shortly thereafter Pyle flew to Hollywood for more film conferences. Back in Albuquerque he spent mornings at the dentist's, while at home two secretaries worked to keep up with the mail and the constantly ringing telephone.

One day Ernie returned home and found Jerry's nurse in hysterics in the front yard. Jerry had locked herself in the bathroom after repeatedly stabbing herself in and about the throat with a pair of scissors. When Ernie broke open the bathroom door, he found Jerry standing expressionless before the wash basin, bleeding profusely. He held her until a surgeon arrived. Jerry neither spoke nor flinched while the doctor stitched her wounds. Luckily, she had not done mortal damage, but her wounds were severe. Ernie wrote to Cavanaugh: "On the right side of her neck, just below the jaw and just ahead of the ear, she had gouged a hole an inch and a half deep. There was a similar hole, though a little smaller, in the same place on the other side. Right square in front, just above the collar bone, she pounded the scissors straight into her neck nearly two inches, and got her windpipe. Then hacked her left wrist. She cut her left breast about 15 times with the razor blade, apparently stabbed with the corner of it."

He sent a long account of Jerry's suicide attempt and her subsequent confinement in an Albuquerque sanitarium to Lee Miller. It was a narrative remarkable chiefly for its documentary coolness and gross insensitivity. The moral sensibility so sharply present in Pyle's war reporting was absent here. Pyle told Miller he had feared for ten years that Jerry might try to kill herself but had decided "that her indirect threats were all part of her act. She had tried it a couple of times in the past but botched them up so badly they were almost laughable and convinced us she was acting.… But brother this one was no act.…"

While Jerry underwent thirty days of shock-therapy treatments, Ernie accepted honorary doctorates from the University of New Mexico and Indiana University and traveled to Washington to plan his trip to the Pacific Theater and to have his income taxes figured. (His tax bill for 1944 totaled one hundred five thousand dollars.) He had returned to Albuquerque by the time Jerry came home from the hospital, her memory fractured and her behavior erratic. She had learned of Ernie's plans to go to the Pacific and was depressed.

The procession of houseguests resumed. A writer came to prepare a profile of Pyle for Life, and Cavanaugh flew in from Los Angeles to sit in on the interviews. A photographer arrived to take pictures. One was of Pyle, Jerry, and their dog Cheetah in the living room of their house. Jerry sat semi-reclined in a dayseat, half smiling as she read a biography of Samuel Johnson. Pyle sat on a has-sock, his hands pensively clasped, his jaw set, his eyes fixed on the wall opposite. Between them was the needle-nosed dog, staring in yet another direction. It's a lonely photograph; one can't avoid the sensation that all three were caught in the midst of supreme discomfort.

Pyle and Jerry saw each other for the last time at the railroad station in Los Angeles on or about Christmas Day 1945. They had spent a week or so with the Cavanaughs while Pyle visited the set of The Story of G.I. Joe. On their last night together, Lester Cowan took them to Ciro's, the Hollywood nightclub, where they danced together, after which Jerry and her nurse took the train back to Albuquerque. On the evening of New Year's Day, Pyle left Los Angeles for Camp Roberts, near San Francisco, on the first leg of his long journey to the Pacific. He resumed the column in San Francisco by dissembling about his vacation. "Despite all the frenzy, I've felt almost pathetic in my happiness at being home," he told his readers. "I've had a wonderful time." He spoke of Jerry, emphasizing her devotion to him, and ending on a rueful note:

That Girl has been burdened by recurring illnesses, and has had to revolve between home and hospital. But she has succeeded in keeping the little white house just as it always was, which she knew is what I would want.…

She lives only for the day when war is over and we can have a life together again. And that's what I live for too.… I hope we both last through until the sun shines in the world again.

Pyle had doubts about his surviving the war, despite his protests to Jerry after Time magazine had reported that he feared he would die in France. He had recently drawn up a will, laughingly telling Cavanaugh and Lee Miller, "I want you bastards to know that if I'm knocked off in the Pacific, you share in ten percent of my estate." He had arranged with an Albuquerque banker to handle Jerry's immediate financial needs, while his will provided her an income for life. And he told a reporter: "Well, you begin to feel that you can't go on forever without being hit. I feel that I've used up all my chances. And I hate it.… I don't want to be killed."

Jerry continued to plead with him to stay home. "I'm sorry darling," he wrote her, "but it's too late now to back out on this trip. You know that I don't want to go any more than you want me to, but the way I look at it it's almost beyond my control. If I stayed I'm afraid that would defeat both of us, for I'd probably gradually work up a guilty feeling that would haunt me. I hate it, but there's just nothing else I can do." Ernie told her, as he had countless times before, that he wanted her to be her old self again. This was not only a futile wish, it utterly ignored the changes Jerry had undergone. He failed to see that Jerry's old self was in part a product of his steady companionship, a commodity she had gone without for ten years.

In her loneliness, Jerry had begun to approach a spiritual understanding of herself and her condition. She wrote Ernie, "I'm a long way from reaching the honest humility I should have—but I see it clearly enough in moments to long for it.… I don't know the way—but hope and believe I may find it, dear.…" Jerry wanted to learn to pray, but Ernie frowned on the notion. "That has to be up to you, of course," he wrote her, "but it is so different from anything you or I have ever felt. I want you to get better but I wouldn't want you to become pious—for then you wouldn't be you." No, Ernie told her, the solution to her troubles didn't reside in any "mystic device," nor was there any value in what he considered undue contrition. Calmness and a full routine would be her salvation—that and accepting things that made her unhappy, by which he surely meant his again subjecting himself to dangers he publicly admitted frightened him.

Shortly before he left San Francisco, Ernie mailed Jerry a wedding ring. She had never worn one before because she considered such overt symbols of union too conventional for her. Of late, though, she had changed her mind.

Hawaii was to be Pyle's first stop on his way to the Pacific Theater. Shortly before he left San Francisco, he told Jerry, "I think it's the lack of opportunity for calmness in America that has whipped me as much as anything; aboard a ship or in the islands I won't be such a public figure and can get back to normal routine."

It's hard to conceive of covering a war as "normal routine," but for Pyle it was, and he knew that re-establishing his work rhythm was his one hope of regaining peace of mind. But just as he had begun his vacation weary from war, he returned to war weary from home. He never overcame that emotional fatigue, even though Jerry wrote him frequently and at length, and even though her condition seemed improved. Nor did he ever recapture the pleasure work had represented for him. His coverage of the Pacific would be interesting enough, but missing would be the emotional and moral engagement so readily apparent in his European work. Pyle got a bad start in the Pacific, partly because his unyielding loyalty to the European Theater impaired his judgment, and partly because his celebrity forever got in the way.

At San Francisco, the Navy, delighted to have him, presented Pyle his naval insignia—a gold anchor and a gold-braided war correspondent's badge. On a tour of the Port of Embarkation, Pyle was greeted by a thousand cheering soldiers and a fifty-piece band. Newspapers reported that Pyle's presence in the Pacific would be a boost to servicemen's morale, but his comments in San Francisco hardly set the stage. "Ernie is a bit dubious about the prospects of doing a good job covering the Navy," one reporter wrote. "He says it's tougher to dramatize the life of a sailor." In this account, as in many others, Pyle was quoted as saying his time with the Navy would be short and that he would rejoin the infantry as soon as possible.

In Hawaii he told a reporter for a service newspaper that he couldn't "go overboard on sympathy" for men suffering so-called "island complex in the Pacific—not after I've seen the misery and cold and mud and death in Europe." From the Marianas he wrote, "Now we are far, far away from everything that was home or seemed like home. Five thousand miles from America, and twelve thousand miles from my friends fighting on the German border."

Pyle boarded an aircraft carrier, the USS Cabot, in a convoy carrying planes that would bomb the Japanese mainland and heavy artillery that would support landings on Iwo Jima. The Cabot's sailors were an amicable bunch, "just as friendly as the soldiers I'd known on the other side," but Pyle believed they talked "more about wanting to go home than even the soldiers in Europe [did]." The sailors lived well—good food, daily baths, clean clothes, a bunk to sleep in, a locker to store things in. Their work was hard but the hours were regular. "The boys ask you a thousand times how this compares with the other side. I can only answer that this is much better.…" Most could see his point, but

others yell their heads off about their lot, and feel they're being persecuted by being kept out of America a year. I've heard some boys say "I'd trade this for a foxhole any day." You just have to keep your mouth shut to a remark like that.

This was not sterling public relations; Pyle knew better than anyone how intensely service branches competed for attention. Moreover, he had lost sight of the fact that his audience comprised not only stateside readers but also servicemen overseas, many of whom received Pyle clippings from home. Pyle's comments did not go unanswered. In Honolulu, the editors of an Air Corps magazine severely rebuked him for his ignorance of the Pacific war and for his generally dismissive attitude.

Part of Pyle's irritation lay in his trouble with Navy censors, who wouldn't allow him to use sailors' names in his copy. Frustrated, Pyle threatened to clear out for the Philippines, where he might have a better chance of writing his sort of material. (The censorship restrictions were eventually lifted.) Here, too, the remoteness of one Pacific outpost from another injected a note of discontinuity into Pyle's writing. His erratic movement was reminiscent of his travel days in the 1930s. It wasn't until the invasion of Okinawa that Pyle returned to his "normal routine"—and that was only seventeen days before his death.

Traveling from Ulithi, near Guam, to Okinawa with units of the 1st Marine Division, Pyle was sure that this time he would be killed. "There's nothing romantic whatever in knowing that an hour from now you may be dead," he wrote of the landings. Ninety minutes after the invasion began, Pyle went ashore with the 5th Marine Regiment and was relieved at the lack of resistance in his sector. He spent two days with the Marines, then returned to the ship to write.

Pyle had always been squeamish about foreign cultures, particularly in matters of personal hygiene, but his comments on the Okinawan civilians were scathing, out of character for him and an indication of his fatigue. The Okinawans were "pitiful" in their poverty, "not very clean"; their houses were "utterly filthy." Certainly their standard of living was low, but Pyle couldn't understand "why poverty and filth need to be synonymous." The Okinawans "were all shocked from the bombardment and yet I think rather stupid too, so that when they talked they didn't make much sense."

Ironically, Pyle had found peace in the chaotic sounds and sights that filled his first night on Okinawa; they constituted the "old familiar pattern, unchanged by distance or time from war on the other side of the world." These were soldier verities, and with them he was comfortable. They were "so imbedded in my soul that, coming back … again, it seemed to me as I lay there that I'd never known anything else in my life. And there are millions of us."

Pyle returned to shore and spent a few days with the Marines, then boarded the command ship Panamint. So relieved was he to be alive that he promised Jerry this would be his last landing. Short of an accident, he wrote his father, he believed he would survive the war. There was another cause for optimism, too: Jerry's recent letters pointed toward some of the normalcy he had hoped for.

Ernie was pleased with the abundance of mail from her, and he vowed that his next trip home would be for good. She wrote him asking not just for reports on what he was doing, but for an indication of what he was thinking and feeling as well. This was an extraordinary departure from the desperately closed tone of the few letters he had received from her in Europe. When Ernie wrote her about his postwar vision of sitting quietly with no demands on him, she took pleasure in it. She wasn't beyond her troubles, she wrote, but things were better. She now saw as "faulty" her contempt for convention; she had revised her youthful notion that appearances were meaningless, and she regretted she had been remiss in keeping up the house and yard. Now she wanted the looks of the place "to fit in with the honor" bestowed on him when New Mexico had designated his birthday Ernie Pyle Day. She wanted to be worthy of being his wife, and she promised she would be useful to him when he came home to stay. "My love reaches out to you—strongly—and wants so much for you—Bless you my Ernie."

Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper's machine-gun bullet on April 18, 1945, two days after American Marines landed on Ie Shima, a ten-square-mile island west of Okinawa. He had honored his commitment to make no more landings and had gone ashore a day later.

Spending the night in what had been a Japanese soldier's dugout, Pyle was affable and relaxed, glad to be with the infantry again. Shortly after ten the next morning, Pyle set off by jeep with four soldiers to find a commandpost site for the 305th Regiment of the 77th Division. When the jeep was fired upon near the village of Ie, Pyle and the others took cover in ditches on either side of the road. Pyle raised his head to look for a companion and died instantly when a bullet pierced his left temple.

Several infantrymen who recovered his body under fire found in his pocket a draft of a column intended for release upon the end of the war in Europe, which Pyle had known was imminent. In it, Pyle urged the living, in their joy, not to forget that the price of victory had been paid by the dead. For his part, Pyle would never forget

the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.

Dead men by mass production—in one country after another—month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.

Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.

Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.…

Pyle was buried on Ie Shima in a crude wooden coffin a soldier constructed.

In death as in life, Pyle was a democratizer. Reaction to his death was swift and effusive. The news followed by six days that of President Roosevelt's death, and everyone responded to it, from the newly sworn-in President of the United States to GIs all over the world, from General Eisenhower to a blacksmith in La Porte, Indiana. The tone of the comments was unanimous: Pyle's death was a personal loss for everyone. Official comments were no less sincere for their being steeped in press-release sentiment.

"The nation," said President Harry Truman, "is saddened again by the death of Ernie Pyle." War Secretary Henry Stimson felt "great distress," and Navy Secretary James Forrestal said America owed Pyle its "unending gratitude." "I have known no finer man, no finer soldier than he," said General Omar Bradley. Cartoonist Bill Mauldin, for whom Pyle had helped arrange stateside syndication, said, "The only difference between Ernie's death and the death of any other good guy is that the other guy is mourned by his company. Ernie is mourned by his army."

At Albuquerque, Jerry's doctor brought her the news, and newspaper headlines told the public "'That Girl' Takes News Bravely." Paige Cavanaugh was at home in Inglewood, California, when a friend called with the sad message. (He immediately flew to Albuquerque to be with Jerry.) Lee Miller was shaving in the Philippines when he heard a bulletin on Armed Forces Radio. At Dana, a neighbor told Pyle's father and Aunt Mary.

It soon became clear that Pyle's demise meant more than the loss of a personal friend; it also represented the loss of a potent symbol. Because, as one newspaper noted, there was "no vice president to take Ernie Pyle's place," in the weeks following his death Americans sought to reclaim his symbolic value as the perfect embodiment of a democracy at war; and the expression of this reclamation, like the immediate reaction to the loss of him, ran from the eloquent to the bombastic. The poet Randall Jarrell wrote in The Nation:

There are many men whose profession it is to speak for us—political and military and literary representatives … ; [Pyle] wrote what he had seen and heard and felt himself, and truly represented us.

Others sought to canonize him. In their eyes, Pyle was a martyr, and the popular conception of a martyred saint admits no moral ambivalence, much less moral failing. These comments were published in the Congressional Record:

A brave man, a courageous man, a modest man, with the whole world as his assignment, Ernie Pyle looked out on the field of light and life with eyes that were kind and charitable and understanding.… It has been said that the dead take with them clutched tightly in their hands only the things they have given away.… Ernie Pyle took much with him in death, because he had given … [of] the best that was in him every day of his adult life.

Meanwhile, news items appeared in papers nationwide detailing the provisions of Pyle's will, President Truman's wish that Pyle be honored with a special Congressional medal, and the christening of a new troop transport with Pyle's name.

The Story of G.I. Joe was approaching release when Lester Cowan hit a snag with the Hays Office of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. This was to be the movie that faithfully portrayed the roughness of infantry life, including the coarseness of soldier talk. Nonetheless, the Hays Seal of Approval could not be granted the film because "certain lines of dialogue … are regarded as profanity under the Production Code.…" Cowan protested that the dialogue was spoken with "such deep feeling and conviction that it could not be construed as blasphemy," but eventually he changed the lines, and the Hays Office passed on the picture.

On July 4, Jerry and her sister flew to Washington for an advance showing of the film at a meeting of the National Press Club, after which an Army general and a Navy admiral jointly presented her a posthumous Medal For Merit for Pyle on behalf of their service branches and the State Department. Present were the British ambassador, war correspondents, members of Congress, and several Supreme Court justices.

The Scripps-Howard Indianapolis Times had engineered an auction of Pyle's last manuscript ("bearing his own pencilled corrections"), with the proceeds going to war bonds. The bidding had lasted several weeks, with each bid duly reported in the paper. Finally, American United Life Insurance Company had come through with the fantastic sum of ten million five hundred twenty-five thousand dollars, and the company's treasurer accepted the manuscript at the world premiere of The Story of G.I. Joe on July 6. That evening, two thousand people viewed the film, including three hundred wounded veterans whose ten-dollar tickets had been paid for by civilians.

The citizens of Dana, meantime, had decided that a thirty-five-thousand-dollar library named for Pyle would be a suitable way to honor a celebrated native son. A New York public-relations firm got wind of the idea and formed a company, Ernie Pyle Memorial, Inc., through which to promote a grander scheme: a multi-million-dollar, one-hundred-acre, "landscaped, lake-studded park and cemetery, to which [Pyle's body] could be moved from Ie Shima.…" Pyle's tomb was to be surrounded by "honored dead of all states, [and] symbolic scenes of allied nations.…"

The proposal enraged Jerry, who told reporters her late husband would have been "horrified and indignant" at such an ostentatious undertaking. It was "entirely out of keeping with everything that Ernie ever did, or said, or thought, or was," she said. Moreover, she would never "consent to having his body moved," because "Ernie is lying where he would wish to be, with the men he loved." Editorial writers applauded Jerry's comments; Chicago columnist Sydney Harris thought she should be awarded a prize equivalent to the Pulitzer for her "magnificent blast at the press agents and promoters who have attached themselves like body lice to Ernie's well-deserved fame." Harris aptly dismissed the memorial park as "vulgar" and, with Jerry, endorsed "living memorials," like the Dana town library, in honor of Pyle and the other war dead.

Jerry's health steadily declined in the months following Pyle's death. In mid-November, she contracted influenza.

Her weight dangerously low, she checked into St. Joseph's Hospital in Albuquerque, where she died of uremic poisoning the morning of November 23, 1945. One of her sisters told reporters Jerry had lost all interest in living in the seven months since Pyle's death. Paige Cavanaugh flew to Albuquerque to close out the Pyles' house. He retrieved bundles of letters Pyle had written Jerry over the years—"reams and reams of lovely lovemaking by mail," he called them.

Jerry was buried November 27 on a snow-covered hill near Afton, Minnesota. Pyle's body was later moved to Hawaii and buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Punchbowl Crater. That they are buried forty-five hundred miles apart befits the physical and emotional distance at which they lived in the last decade of their lives. But the burial place of each is ironic in its own right.

Jerry had sung in the church choir and been active in the Christian Endeavor Society in her native Minnesota; but she had departed from the conservatism of her upbringing in 1918, when she moved to Washington, hopeful, in a girlish way, of finding excitement and freedom in the nation's capital. She found some of both, but she had spent the better part of her short life rebelling against what she had left behind.

Pyle had accepted the possibility that he would die in a war zone, but he would certainly have preferred to have been buried in Europe, where, after so many years of rootlessness, he had found a home and a sense of purpose with the infantry. Still, there is a curious bit of circularity about his having been buried in the Hawaiian Islands.

On a 1937 trip there, Pyle had visited the Kalaupapa leper colony on Molokai made famous by the Belgian priest Father Damien. His walk into "the foothills of martyrdom" bordered on the spiritual, and he told his readers he felt "a kind of unrighteousness at being whole and 'clean'; I experienced an acute feeling of spiritual need to be no better off than the leper."

Quite accurately, he knew that "in real life I am a 'sprint' martyr; the long steady pull is not for me. I tire of too much goodness, and wish to dart off and chase a rabbit." He abandoned his rabbit-chasing days five years later, when he landed with American soldiers in North Africa. That he was later killed was a direct result of his having taken up the long, steady pull.