Journalist Ernie Pyle Sends an Explicit, Profanity-Laced Letter from North Africa to His Lifelong Friend Paige Cavanaugh

“They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys,” the venerated war correspondent Ernie Pyle said of American infantrymen, “and in the end they are the guys that wars can’t be won without.” Wire thin, 5′ 8″, and in his early forties, Ernie Pyle lived, slept, ate, smoked, bunked, drank, and marched with the young GIs he so admired in order to depict the daily hardships they endured. By 1943 he had won the Pulitzer Prize, and his syndicated columns were appearing in hundreds of newspapers back in the U.S. While his letters to his wife Jerry in Albuquerque, New Mexico, were guarded in what they revealed about the underbelly of army life, Pyle was more candid in letters to old friends about such matters as sex, booze, and the latest dirty jokes. Pyle’s raunchy humor and raw stories, however, concealed a deep sadness; three months after he left the States in 1941 his mother died from cancer and his wife, who suffered from depression, had tried to commit suicide. She divorced him in April 1942, but they remarried again a year later. Writing to his lifelong friend Paige Cavanaugh in June 1943, Pyle began by needling him about a voluptuous music teacher Cavanaugh had previously mentioned. Pyle then updated him on his life in the sands of North Africa covering Operation Torch, the first major joint Allied offensive of the war. (Please note: Pyle’s letter uses graphic language inappropriate for young readers.)

Dear Egbert—

Congratulations, my friend. Must say you were in excellent literary form in your May 13 epistle which reached my tent flap some four or five days ago. Must be the influence of your new music teacher. Give them protuberances you spoke so highly of an extra stroke or two for me, will you? Who cares if she can play the piano when there are other and better things to play with? I’ll bet you actually don’t get within ten feet of her, and then jack off as soon as she leaves.

I’m in a tent-camp on the Mediterranean shore, starting my first day of a solid week of rest. Since coming back from the front I’ve been working like a bastard trying to get all caught up, and now I haven’t got a thing left except to write a couple of dozen letters. You’d like it here. We’re on a sand dune with scrub pine growing out of the sand, and the beach of the blue Mediterranean is about 100 yards away I have my own tent, and have it fixed up like home, with grass mats on the ground, a light over my cot, a table to write on, and a low wicker settin’ chair just outside the tent. The nights are cool and the days are not too hot. It’s just damn near ideal, and I’ll sure hate to leave here and go back to war. We’re a little self-contained camp, with our own mess, and as there are only two or three other people out here, it’s as quiet as the grave. I don’t go into town but once a week, for my cigaret rations, and then it damn near kills me to go in.

I understand the secret is out at last. They tell me Time Magazine has arrived over here with a full-page piece about me, in which it estimates my annual income at 25,000. Ha ha, you indigent cocksucker. And don’t start that old shit about you being happier than me on account you don’t make much money, because I’m as happy as a fuckin’ jaybird. So yah! How much do you make, incidentally? Think you ought to tell me now. Although of course I aint coming right out and saying that Time is right. Might be more than that for all I know har har.

Your letters are so good I read them aloud to a small circle of select friends, but nobody thinks they’re funny except Chris Cunningham, and he thinks they’re wonderful. Chris is a wonderful little guy. He’s good-natured as hell, gets tight on wine very easily, and soon reaches a stage where he can neither walk nor talk. From then on he just staggers around making vague blubberings which if you listen closely turn out to be the constantly repeated phrase “pig-fucker, pig-fucker!” You’d like him.

Yes, I’ve become quite familiar with soil conditions in Africa. I can quote you the shovel-resistance content of every type of earth from solid rock to playbox sand. Sand is the nicest in our type of work, except it caves in on you. Your suggestion of taking up a little piece of land over here and starting life anew is not a bad one; in fact I’ve given it considerable thought myself Might as well do it somewhere, I suppose. I have very little faith in the future. But I still want to try the South Sea Islands first.

Nicotine still has me in its grasp, but my mind has been cleared of women for a year now, and of alcohol for some seven months. And I must grudgingly admit that I feel a hell of a lot better being rid of both of them. In more than six months I’ve had exactly two bottles of whiskey. I’ve always hated wine, and in the first month here I swore completely off of wine and haven’t had a drink of it for more than six months. However, last week I did run onto two bottles of whiskey at $10 per bottle. I was so out of practice that two drinks before supper almost laid me away, and I had a hell of a hangover next day. So I gave most of it away. I did however have a couple of before-supper drinks every day for about four days, and I’ll be damned if all the old symptoms didn’t come back—eyes out of focus, faintly upset stomach, that tense pain in the back of the head. I never knew all those years they are from the venomous worm, but they must have been. It wouldn’t surpise me at all if I’m not carrying a white banner the next time you see me. The years were dealing heavily with me. No wine, no women, no song, no play—soon nothing will be left to me but my shovel and a slight case of athlete’s foot.

If Tom Treanor doesn’t start home pretty soon (at least by fall) I’ll be catching up with him. That piece you enclosed was kinda thin. Damn near as thin as mine are getting. I’d come home and give it all up except what would I give up to?

So Mrs. Cavanaugh thinks I look like a billy-goat does she? Well, all I can say is, in the language of my esteemed compatriots, the military—fuck Mrs. Cavanaugh. Why don’t you try it yourself sometime; you certainly owe her something for putting up so cheerfully with your mooning all these years.

A funny thing happened at the front just before the finish. A new correspondent arrived from America, and he was a balmy character if I ever saw one. Absolutely psycopathic. Completely devoid of any quality of fear, loudly braggart, always picking quarrels with everybody he met, completely uninhibited as for example, upon being introduced to a very dignified British colonel, his first words were of what wonderful “blow jobs” the British girls can perform.

Well one evening when we got back to camp from Bizerte the boys got about ten gallons of wine in celebration, and everybody got good and tight except me—and I would if I wasn’t off wine. Everybody in camp took a turn of trying to out-insult and out-shout this guy. The arguments went on all evening and could be heard for miles. Finally they went into their own tent; five of them were in a big tent, and Chris and I in a small tent nearby. Being sober, I could hear all that was said in the next tent.

Finally this guy got tired of arguing over which was the best division and who took what hill, and decided to brag about his beautiful wife back home. He got out a picture of her and was saying “Now my wife …” when I heard a voice from the same tent say to him in disgust and with dead seriousness “Fuck your wife.” He let that one pass and then started telling about his eight-year-old daughter. He said “She’s got an I.Q. of 145 …” and the voice said “Fuck your eight-year-old daughter!” That’s the end of that story.

I am not sure what goes on in Albuquerque. Letters from friends there, and from several Washington visitors who were out there in April, report Jerry working hard at her new job, thinner and more beautiful that at any time in years, extremely proud of the house and keeping it neat as a pin, taking Spanish lessons on the side, quite abstemious, and apparently getting over her introversions and aversions to people.

Yet I have not heard from her in almost two months, and a cable to Lee a week ago asking for a cabled message from her has gone unanswered. I can’t make it out. The few letters I did get in the spring were grand, and she said she was writing twice a week. I find it hard to believe that other people’s letters all get through, while all of hers are lost. I try not to think about it too much.

Finally got around to reading Beau Geste last week. Quite a book. I’ve also read James Hilton’s “We Are Not Alone”, Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town,” and any number of short stories by Maugham, Conrad, and so on. Wish I had some of the new books at home to read. I get an old New Yorker once in a while and see what books are out. Did I tell you they’re reprinting the African columns in book form? Due out in August, I think. Better buy one. Don’t suppose I’ll ever get home to give you one.

Had a nice letter from Gene Uebelhardt. Said he might get released from the Army. Any news of the Hardies? Katie Miller has gone to London with OWI. Dick Hollander is over here with same. Hear Palmer got fired again from some other job, but reinstated. How is Joe doing with those tires? Suppose Earl Mount is overseas somewhere by now (Lt. S. G.) in Naval SeaBees, but haven’t heard where. I get mail from a lot of people, but am gradually sinking into my oldtime funk (from which I’ve been free for several months) about Jerry. I’ve a premonition things have gone bad again. God if they have, I don’t know what to do. Don’t think about the war brother, I’ll wake you up when it’s over.

—Mohammed.

In an earlier letter to Cavanaugh, Pyle named several colleagues lost in combat and remarked, almost off-handedly, that the war had “been tough on newspapermen.” In fact, of the estimated 100 American war correspondents killed in combat during the twentieth century, almost half died in World War II. On April 18, 1945, Pyle himself became one of the fifty. Following a convoy of trucks on the tiny island of Ie Shima (near Okinawa), Pyle and four other men were driving in a jeep that was suddenly raked with machine-gunfire. No one was hit, and they all dove into a roadside ditch for protection. After a few seconds passed, Pyle poked his head up, smiled, and called out to one of the men, “Are you all right?” In that instant a Japanese sniper shot Pyle right through the head.