The Pen

In the army, I was a journalist. It beat having to pick up a gun and shoot at Germans, especially since I always had trouble telling Germans and French apart, and I wasn't really that good and differentiating the Germans and the English either. Some used a rifle, but my weapon was a pencil—you hit a man in the jugular just right, he'll wish you would have shot him instead.

It's no myth that the pen is mightier than the sword, even when you're not using it like a sword. A pen took down some of the mightiest men in the world, like Richard M. Nixon and Gary Condit. No president was ever taken down by a sword. Sure, more than one was taken down by a bullet, but the quote don't say anything about a gun.

I didn't know if I would have it in me to do what the army had to do. I thought you must really have to love war to put yourself in danger like they did. The army jumped off the boat and ran charging into German machine gun fire, or into minefields which blew up and maimed them, which is sometimes worse than getting killed. Some of them parachuted down in the midst of enemy fire to fight. If you think it sucks to have to jump out of a plane, try shooting at the enemy after you've somehow managed to get on the ground in one piece. But for me, there was a worry even bigger—if I had to, if it meant the difference between my life or the lives of my unit, could I kill another man? I was never so sure I could, so I chose the pen over the sword.

Sometimes the pen has to write about the sword, or the gun, and when you're an army journalist for The Stars and Stripes in wartime you don't have much choice. I was sent to interview commander of Allied Forces, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, later of "I Like Ike" fame. He was very philosophical, for a bald guy. He took one look at me with one of those special kinds of eyes, the kind that sums you up and gets you right in one look.

"Many people think the soldier loves war," he told a young Sampson L. Hartwig, which was me at the time, "but the soldier hates war most of all. It is the soldier who has to walk, eyes open, into battle on a daily basis. It is the soldier who has to put himself in harm's way. It is the soldier who has to die to ensure the freedom and safety of his country, and even worse, it is the soldier who has to aim his weapon, fire, and kill for his country. Yes, the soldier hates war more than anyone else."

And back then, it was true. That was before they invented hippies.

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