| The Man Who Told America the Truth About D-Day |
 | | Bettmann Archive/Getty Images | |
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| Dear reader, |
| This week, At War published an article about Ernie Pyle, the journalist whose dispatches from the front changed the way Americans thought about World War II, especially after the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944. Pyle died in April 1945, but his impact on war reporting would be felt for generations to come. |
| Pyle and his legacy got me thinking about how I came to understand World War II and the killing and dying that it spread the world over. |
| I read books about World War II growing up. A lot of them. It was the 1990s, a decade of relative peace, and I started because my father — a Swift boat veteran from the Vietnam War — read them fervently. He died when I was 19, a few weeks after I shipped to Marine Corps boot camp, so I can't ask why he read so many. |
| When I was growing up, we traded books back and forth. A lot by Stephen Ambrose: "Band of Brothers," "D-Day," "Citizen Soldiers," "Pegasus Bridge." We both read "Once an Eagle" by Anton Myrer and "Flags of our Fathers" by James Bradley and Ron Powers. The list goes on. |
| I always liked getting the first pass at a new book we were both going to read because I knew the pages were clean. My father had a habit of lying in bed and eating this peanut-butter candy called Mary Janes, a throwback treat from his youth that I think Cracker Barrel still sells, as do a few old-timey corner stores scattered around the country. But his reading-and-eating habit meant that the page corners would quickly develop a sticky brown residue that would glue entire chapters together. |
| I don't remember my dad reading any books about Vietnam. He didn't talk about it much either. The only two stories I can really remember of his time there are about when he got malaria and when he stole a trash-can-sized tub of ice cream from a destroyer in Cam Ranh Bay. My mother said he walked out of "Apocalypse Now." |
| So I didn't read about Vietnam either. Just the Greatest Generation and the Good Fight they fought, to free the world of tyranny and all that. After a while the books all started to blend together. Soldiers fighting and dying for one another. Stories of unvarnished heroism. D-Day, the Atlantic Wall, Pointe Du Hoc. Nuts! in Bastogne. |
| The show "Band of Brothers" premiered on HBO on Sept. 9, 2001. My grandmother taped it for me. I was ecstatic. My dad and I had both read the book, twice I think. |
| Two days later, the towers fell and the Pentagon burned. There was a crater in a field in Pennsylvania. A lot of people died. As I watched the news that night, something was burning in Afghanistan, a blob of fire filmed through a night-vision lens. My Good Fight had finally arrived, I thought. |
| I was 13. |
| -T.M. |
| Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a reporter in the New York Times Washington bureau and a former Marine infantryman. He can be reached at thomas.gibbons-neff@nytimes.com. |
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