Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/The Library of Congress/National Archives
I’ve beaten Ernie Pyle’s lifespan by 10 years. Came 10 feet from losing that race, with a mortar landing on that side of a T-Wall in Iraq, instead of this side. A mundane near-miss during a summer 16 years ago, when I was a reporter embedded with the 82nd Airborne Division. I can listen to the mortar’s incoming rustle on the digital recording I didn’t know was running. I can hear the shotgun blast of the explosion and the shrapnel and my sharp breath. I can hear my first word a few minutes afterwards: “Fuck.”
“It’s good, though. You need a close call,” a soldier tells me, his voice recorded for posterity. “Make your stories more interesting.”
It’s too strong to say I felt Post-Traumatic Stress, reading David Chrisinger’s The Soldier’s Truth, his biography of World War II war reporter Ernie Pyle, but if you’ve been there, then you’ve been there.