Writing through the trenches

It was June 6, 1944, a date that would soon be known as D-Day. War reporter Ernie Pyle walked across the blood-soaked beach in Normandy, France, watching as the waves from the English Channel brushed against the cheeks of dead men gently floating in the shallow waters. His fingers weren't itching for his pad of paper or a pen to write down the details quickly, to help him remember the images later when he sat in front of his typewriter. There was no way he could forget.\nHis prose captivated the minds of readers across the United States, earning him front-page stories and a large following in the 1940s.\nToday, Pyle is considered the typified ideal of the war journalist: the correspondent who finds an average person to relate the impact of war to the audience at home. He revolutionized the practice of war reporting.\nPyle, who attended IU but left before graduating, inspired the University to name its journalism building after him, an anomaly in the world of alumni gift-giving. His untimely death in the South Pacific turned him into a myth: the war correspondent that wasn't afraid to hunker down in the foxholes with the average GI. \n"I think a huge shift in war reporting came with Ernie Pyle," Associate Professor of Journalism Claude Cookman said. "Before he came along, newspaper war reporting was primarily passing along the official line."\nYet Pyle would never have considered himself a literary artist, at least not in the same vein as great novelists at the same time.\n"If you had asked him if he was a writer -- like John Steinbeck -- he would have laughed himself silly," said Associate Professor of Journalism Owen Johnson, an expert on Pyle's life and works.\n"Pyle's fame is associated with the fact that for the readers, Pyle's columns meant that they could picture for themselves what their friends and families were going through," Johnson said. "Art gives you the experience. Pyle could do it in the telling of the story."\nBut, like Pyle, not many war journalists would appreciate the word "artist" being added to their resumes. \n"A lot of journalists who generally try to expose pretension in other people would see pretension in the word 'art' and would try to avoid labeling themselves with it," Cookman said.\nThe facts, however, reveal an inordinate amount of men and women who have returned from wars and turned their writing talents to other forms of literary art, relating their memories of war in a smooth combination of fiction and fact. From Toronto reporter Ernest Hemingway's book "A Farewell to Arms," about the fictionalized events of a medic in WWI, to National Public Radio correspondent Anne Garrels' 2003 memoir "Naked in Baghdad," war reporting creates a breadth of experiences journalists come home and write about.\n"It's no wonder that there's a strong compulsion to write about this experience," Cookman said. "War is an extremely intense experience, whether you are a soldier or a journalist."\nAnd the people who write about these experiences are often just trying to sort out what the war meant to them, Johnson said.\nAfter all, war correspondence is dangerous business. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, more than 60 journalists have been killed just in Iraq since 2003, making this war one of the deadliest for the media since Vietnam.\nBut memoirs are a booming business in America right now. A quick search through www.amazon.com using the specific terms "war correspondent" revealed more than 300 books about the subject, while a broader search for war memoirs culled over 3,000.\nAustralian historian and journalist Keith Windschuttle doesn't find this surprising. \n"The art of war reporting goes to the very core of Western culture," he wrote in a 2005 academic piece called "The Journalism of Warfare."\nHe explained that the "origins of journalism lie in exactly the same place as the origins of history." The first "genuine" historian, Thucydides, a Greek who wrote The History of the Peloponnesian Wars, was also the first journalist, said Windschuttle. He just didn't know it.\n"The responsibility of the journalist is the same as that of a historian: to try to stand outside his own political interests and his own cultural preferences and to tell his audience what actually happened," Windschuttle said.\n"Telling a story is one of the oldest things humans do, and it's deeply embedded in who we are," Cookman added. \nFor the public, there remains a certain amount of mystique surrounding the war correspondent. They are heroes and heroines, wrote book editor Ralph Berenger in an essay exploring modern war correspondent memoirs. They brave flying bullets and shrapnel to help readers understand why they should care about a conflict so far removed from their own world, Berenger said. They keep the stories told from the frontlines on the front page.\nIn part, the allure of being a war correspondent is being able to watch history unfold, and making the readers back home part of that larger history. \nKim Komenich, a Pulizter prize-winning photojournalist for the San Francisco Chronicle visited IU in the fall on his way back from a stint in Iraq. He told the students who attended his presentation that what kept him out there on the frontlines every day was knowing that his was helping to shape history. \n"This is history -- it's on my watch," he said. \nWar correspondents are also driven by a need to understand the unexplainable.\n"So many people now know individuals who have served in Iraq and can't yet talk about it," Johnson said. "People who have gone into the military to serve -- they don't know if they are coming back. It changes their outlook."\nAnd the public continues to read.\n"It's a respect for courage, although some people would say it's foolhardiness," Cookman said. "It's a certain amount of envy. These people have seen something we aren't likely to see and we want to tap into this"