Photo of Pyle dead, on battlefield, 1945:
A couple excerpts from Pyle's personal correspondence about World War 2:
"Stars & Stripes this morning carried a two-column piece about Ray Clapper being killed. I'm just floored by it. Somehow it had never occurred to me that anything would ever happen to him. What a waste of intelligence and character - as the whole war is. It gives me the creeps.
"The whole thing is getting pretty badly under my skin, Lee. I've got so I brood about it, about the whole thing, I mean, and I have a personal reluctance to die that is always in my mind, like a weight. Instead of growing stronger and hard as good veterans do, I've become weaker and more frightened. I'm allright when I'm actually at the front, but it's when I pull back and start thinking and visualizing that it almost overwhelms me. I've even got so I don't sleep well, and have half-awake hideous dreams about the war."
-- http://journalism.indiana.edu/news/erniepyle/ivehadit.html
"Perhaps you who read this column wonder why I came home just at this special time, when events are boiling over in Italy.
"Well, I might as well tell you truthfully. I knew, of course, that the Italian invasion was coming up, but I chose to skip it. I made that decision because I realized, in the middle of Sicily, that I had been too close to the war for too long.
"I was fed up, and bogged down. Of course you say other people are too, and they keep going on. But if your job is to write about the war, you're very apt to begin writing unconscious distortions and unwarranted pessimisms when you get too tired.
"I had come to despise and be revolted by war clear out of any logical proportion. I couldn't find the Four Freedoms among the dead men. Personal weariness became a forest that shut off my view of events about me. I was no longer seeing the little things that you at home want to know about the soldiers."
--http://journalism.indiana.edu/news/erniepyle/boggeddown.html