I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can't be won without. Ernie Pyle, May 2, 1943
BRADENTON
If the old man is to be believed, and we have no reason to suspect otherwise, then when Ernie Pyle was killed by a Japanese bullet on the Pacific island of Ie Shima, on April 18, 1945, inside his satchel were notes the respected war reporter had taken the day before.
These notes contained the name of a soldier and a hometown: John Smit, Chicago.
An unfinished story.
Here's the rest of it.
• • •
The foxhole is small and tight. Five guys, maybe six, sitting around one afternoon.
Another slides in. He's clean. They're not.
"Hey guys, whaddayah say?" the stranger asks. "Where are you guys from?"
"Chicago," says one of them, a tall, slim grunt resting in the dirt.
"New York," says another.
"Chicago, eh?" the stranger says. "Northern boys. Mind if I join you?"
Of course not, they say.
The stranger is Ernie Pyle, war correspondent, whose columns ran in some 400 daily and 300 weekly newspapers. They'd heard he was coming.
He plops down in the dirt and pulls out a pad. It's about 3 p.m. and he stays into the evening chatting up the GIs with the 77th Infantry Division, 305th Regiment, about what it was like to land in Guam, to be here island-hopping in the Pacific.
The tall kid from Chicago is John Smit, another grimy face in a war full of them.
Pyle asks how Smit came to be sitting in this bunker.
Smit explains that he's the son of a Dutch printer, a reverent man who believed if you didn't peel potatoes on Saturday, you didn't eat potatoes on Sunday. He tells Pyle he was fresh out of school, working for People's Gas and Electric, when the draft letter came.
Greetings from the President, it began.
Smit was dating three girls at the time. He asked them all on a final date. "I don't want to break any hearts, but I'm going to war and I might get killed," he told them. They all started crying. "I don't want you to write letters," he told them.
He joined the infantry and tried to stay alive.
Pyle asks them how it felt to land in Guam, an operation that cost about 7,000 American and 17,500 Japanese casualties.
The men speak of fear so intense you couldn't do anything but run and pray and pull the trigger.
Pyle asks about the Guam landing again and again.
They do not mind. War reporters are respected. They walk into harm's way without a weapon, and they're a link to the outside world. If Pyle wrote about John Smit, it's likely Smit's folks would see the story back home and know their boy was all right. See, Pyle told of the war from the perspective of the muck-faced grunts, rather than that of the brass. He brought the war home in a way no one else did.
The soldiers talk about the Cubs and the White Sox and other things until they fall asleep, Pyle in the dirt next to them.
• • •
A photograph surfaced recently. It showed a man lying on his back on a hillside, a lens missing from his eyeglasses, a thin line of what looks like blood in the corner of his mouth.
The Associated Press reported that this photograph, published just twice before, was one of two taken of Pyle after his death. The photographs, the AP reported, had been kept confidential in deference to Pyle's family.
John Smit saw that photograph. A friend brought him a copy after it ran in the newspaper last month.
It all came back.
• • •
The old man has lost most of his eyesight. He doesn't drive anymore, save his golf cart. His wife's heart quit a few years ago in the middle of a bowl of Jell-O, so he's alone now.
He turns 87 in June.
He lives in a little brick house on the edge of a neighborhood on the edge of Bradenton called Missionary Village. He flies a large American flag from the porch.
His story didn't end in World War II.
He made it home, married a woman who wanted to be a missionary. The two started a Bible church in Mitsuke, Japan, in the early 1970s. They taught children English and led Bible studies. They stayed for 20 years before coming home to Illinois, then retiring to Bradenton.
Smit remembers the day he met Ernie Pyle. He remembers how Pyle was likable and quick-witted, and how they made fast friends, even if they knew each other only a few hours.
He remembers the following day, when he and about 350 men were marching toward an airstrip on Ie Shima. Pyle was riding in the back of a jeep with two other men.
Smit saw bullets bite the dirt. He saw Ernie Pyle jump out of the jeep.
He tried to tell him to get down.
Ben Montgomery can be reached at bmontgomery@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8650.
[Last modified: Mar 29, 2008 06:03 AM]
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