I was a senior-year Fordham student journalist in 1954 when Professor Edward Anthony Walsh, the chain-smoking-Irish-whiskey-sipping mentor of generations of future journalists, pulled the Treasury of Great Reporting off his cluttered shelf and opened to Kirke Simpson's 1921 description of the entombment of the Unknown Soldier, with its lead's allusion to Robert Louis Stevenson's "Under the wide and starry skies, dig the grave and let me lie . . . ."

"That," said the professor, "is great journalism." It was also my first inkling of how even the best reporters needed great topics, notably the big three: battles, executions, and funerals.

We can easily imagine the young Ernie Pyle coming to the same conclusion in 1921, when, as editor of the Indiana University Daily Student, he typed out a dispatch phoned-in from The Associated Press that brought tears to his eyes. It was Kirke Simpson's original piece. He memorized quotes from it and told a reporter years later: this was the way he wanted to be able to write.

Within five years of his death, Pyle's own prose was enshrined in the same volume - a simple description of how burdened soldiers walk. But his most brilliant, often anthologized dispatch from World War II, "The Death of Captain Waskow," depicts not so much a funeral as an impromptu wake: a grim picture from the Italian campaign of a succession of choked-up GIs as they file by the stiffened corpse of their commander laid out by the side of the road and speak to it lovingly as if he could hear. Like: "God damn it!" and "I sure am sorry, sir."

Like so many other Pyle columns that had transformed an obviously talented but obscure Scripps-Howard roving reporter into a journalism phenomenon, the Waskow story, which appeared in December 1943, struck a chord. Staff Sergeant Wallace Irwin, Jr., the Army Signal Corps operator who had to voice-cast it over short-wave radio from a run-down studio outside Naples to United Press headquarters in New York, told biographer James Tobin, "I had to struggle through that piece to make my voice override my tears."

Because it was understated, and deliberately ambiguous, readers could read into it their own interpretations of the war, a war that Pyle himself had steadfastly declined to interpret. A small-town editor in Colorado said the soldier's "damn" was a curse on the war. Others read it as a tribute to the dead captain, though it tells us very little about him. But it is one of the many virtues of James Tobin's beautifully written new study, Ernie Pyle's War, that Tobin can read journalism as a journalist-scholar: the theme, he says, is "the sacred circle of comradeship among soldiers." It is about "nothing less than love - not erotic or romantic love, but the love of comrades who share a kinship that excludes all others."

The Ernie Pyle story has been told before: once in The Story of Ernie Pyle (1950), by Lee G. Miller, Pyle's editor, agent, and confidant, whose personal papers are a major Tobin source; and again in two collections, edited with excellent biographical introductions by David Nichols: Ernie's War: the Best of Ernie Pyle's World War II Dispatches (1986) and Ernie's America: The Best of Ernie Pyle's 1930s Travel Dispatches (1989).

 Those familiar with Nichols will find few surprises in Tobin; nevertheless, the Ernie Pyle myth is ready for reinterpretation. War, reporting, and the public attitude toward both have changed remarkably since a Japanese machine-gunner caught Pyle on the Pacific island of Ie Shima, on April 18, 1944. In the "good war," journalists didn't have to be told to "get on the team"; they shared World War II's goals. They never violated security, and, though subject to military censorship, also censored themselves rather that tell the public truths they sensed the public could not bear. Does this mean Pyle sugarcoated the facts?

Tobin, who began this project as a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Michigan, offers astute literary analysis of Pyle's work and puts him in the broader contexts of the history of war reporting and the American public's tendency to turn its celebrities into myths and saints, to imagine that someone they have never met is their personal friend, to value themselves according to whether or not they are mentioned in the media. Plus the media's tendency to turn a public "hero" into a commodity - to manipulate the image for their various purposes.

Ernie Pyle was basically an ordinary man who was an extraordinary writer. A college drop-out in his senior year who loved journalism and produced extraordinary copy as an aviation columnist, a travel-around-the-country-daily-columnist from 1935 to 1942, and war correspondent with a genius for relating to and writing about common soldiers.

 In the public mind, he came to personify, as well as chronicle, the American Common Man. But his personal life was one long, aching wound. The brutal regime of the on-the-road column - a thousand words a day, six days a week - drove him to exhaustion. He divorced and remarried his wife Jerry, who was alcoholic, drug dependent, suicidal, and frequently confined to mental hospitals. And, like so many World War II correspondents, he carried on at least one affair on the side. For two years he maintained a relationship with "Moran" Livingstone, the wife of an Associated Press reporter, but finally gave her her "walking papers" - as she put it - because he feared news of the affair would "kill" Jerry. Meanwhile, the never-ending tension of deadlines and the piles upon piles of corpses rendered him almost continually sick, sleepless, and drinking himself into a stupor.

But to millions of Americans he was their eyes and ears on the war. I remember seeing The Story of G.I. Joe, the Burgess Meredith movie inspired by his columns, in 1944; I was only twelve, but I knew who Ernie Pyle was. Thousands wrote to him and asked him to look up their sons as he made his way through Europe.

 The first screenwriter for The Story of G.I. Joe, the twenty-eight-year-old, then unknown, Arthur Miller, wanted to rewrite Pyle's experiences to fit Miller's liberal conviction that the war was a crusade to advance the cause of world democracy. But their visions clashed. Miller looked at the war and saw ideals; Pyle saw only "guys" - both American and German - "a lot of guys, millions of them." Radio offered opportunities for even more fame and much more money. Edward R. Murrow wanted a weekly broadcast; NBC wanted to "dramatize" his columns; and Westinghouse wanted him to simply read his columns on the air after they had been published. But Scripps-Howard wisely sensed that no other medium could capture the unique and subtle impact of Ernie Pyle's prose.

Inevitably, the image became his prison. Invited to cover D-Day from General Omar Bradley's command ship, the Augusta, he first accepted, then at the last minute decided he wanted to wade ashore with the troops. One of his most memorable columns simply enumerated the objects strewn on Omaha Beach - from socks, sewing kits, and family snapshots to the feet of a buried GI corpse. He did not sugarcoat death - but the dead, as he described them, were at peace.

 Normandy soon drove Pyle to emotional and physical collapse. Nevertheless, though he wanted to quit, he felt obliged to cover the Pacific front because the Navy wanted his attention, too. But the Navy didn't really understand what the Pyle mystique was all about; they gave him plush quarters and the best liquor, and photographed him like a visiting celebrity. Then when he got down to work and described their "paradise," their comparatively easy living - sunbathing and tennis on the aircraft carrier deck - his hosts were furious. For the first time in his career, resentful enlisted men turned against him and Pyle felt he had to rescue his friend-of-the-GI reputation by covering front-line combat in the battle of Okinawa.

W hen FDR speechwriter Robert Sherwood visited Pyle on Guam in March 17, Pyle took him aside after a night of drinking and asked about Roosevelt. "Tell him I love him," he said. Sherwood said they would have a reunion after the war. Pyle replied, "I'm not coming back from this one."

A few days after FDR's death, Pyle drew up a rough draft of a gritty column, which was never published, on the Allied victory in Europe. " . . . There are so many of the living who have burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world. Dead men by mass production - in one country after another - month after month and year after year. . ."

This, before the Death Camps were liberated. Before Hiroshima.

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