kind of joy you get
when stop hitting yourself on
head with the hammer
Don’t ask me why but I was thumbing through the books of Ernie Pyle the other night.
Ernie Pyle, according to wikipedia, was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist and war correspondent who is best known for his stories about ordinary American soldiers during World War II.
If you want a first hand account of life in the Army of the United States during World War 2, Mr. Pyle’s book’s are a great place to start.
In his book, Last Chapter, published posthumously (he was killed while on assignment on the island of Okinawa), I came across this story.
This book is famous for his word pictures of life aboard an aircraft carrier where the enemy was monotony which was fought with clean clothes, clean sheets and good food.
Mr. Pyle contrasted that lifestyle with the lifestyle of soldiers he was with in Italy and France and couldn’t quite get his arms around the differences.
As I said, I came across this story.
Thomas had been in the Pacific thirty- three months.
When it began to look as though he might as well count on settling down for life, he had married a Scottish girl some months back in Honolulu.
Shortly after that he was shipped on out here, and he hadn’t seen her since.
The morning of the day I sat in Thomas’s barber chair the Army was sending a few Japanese prisoners back to Hawaii by airplane and they had to have guards for them.
One of Thomas’s officers told him he would put him down for the trip so that he could get a couple of days in Hawaii to see his wife.
The officer meant to keep his word, but he had a bad memory for names. When he went to write down Thomas’s name for the trip, he wrote another guy’s name, thinking it was Thomas.
By the time Thomas found it out, it was too late. “I could have cried,” he said.
And I could have too.
I felt so terrible about it I couldn’t get it off my mind, and was talking about it to an officer that evening.
“Oh,” he said. “I happen to know about that. I’ll go and tell Thomas right away and he won’t feel so bad. We got orders not to send the prisoners after all, so the whole thing was called off. Nobody went.”
Which is the kind of joy you get when you stop hitting yourself on the head with the hammer, but at least it’s better than if you kept on hitting it.
Last chapter by Ernie Pyle, New York, H. Holt and Co., 1946
No Haiku For You 