Remembering

I have had this article saved since I saw it in the Dallas Morning News in 1994.  Every time I read it, I am reminded why we have a Memorial Day.  Ernie Pyle was a famous World War II journalist who was later killed in combat before the end of the war.  Here are, in part, his words worthy of repeat and reading this day...

The Front Lines in Italy - January 10, 1944 - The Death of an Officer - A Dispatch by Ernie Pyle

"In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them.  But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas.  Capt. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division.  He had led his company since long before it left the States.  He was very young, only in his middle twenties.  But he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.

'After my own father, he came next," a sergeant told me.  'He always looked after us," a soldier said.  'He'd go to bat for us every time.'  'I've never known him to do anything unfair,' another one said.

I was at the foot of the mule train the night they brought Capt. Waskow's body down.  The moon was nearly full at the time and you could see far up the trail...  Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed on the backs of mules.  They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack-saddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly from the other side.

The first one came down early in the morning.  They slid him down from the mule and stood him on his feet for a moment, while they got a better grip.  In the half light he might have been merely a sick man standing there leaning on the others.  Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall along the road.  The soldiers who led (the mules) stood there waiting.  'This one is Captain Waskow,' one of them said quietly.

The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave.  They stood around and gradually one by one I could sense them moving close to Capt. Waskow's body.  Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him, and to themselves.  I stood close by and I could hear."

[Pyle then explained how two soldiers came by and simply cursed and walked away].

"Another man came; he was an officer.  The man looked down into the dead captain's face and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive.  He said, 'I'm sorry old man.'  Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not a whisper but awfully tenderly and said, 'I sure am sorry sir.'

Then the first man squatted down and he reached down and took the dead hand and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

And finally he put the hand down and then he reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain's shirt collar and then he sort of rearranged the edges of his uniform around the wound.  And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone..."

This Memorial Day we have this and much, much more to gratefully remember.

For the journey...

Tim