Joe Galloway would have marked 80 this coming November if he hadn’t died the other day. He was the greatest war correspondent of his generation and they called him “the reporter with the gun.” He understood and hated war. But he was friend to the troops from the lowest dogface in camos to the highest of Colonels and Generals.
He was competitor and then comrade.
Those Vietnam days he worked for United Press international
and often wrote circles around the bigger Associated Press. He wrote from the
battlefield while most of the rest of us wrote from a shabby-chic office
building on Rockefeller Plaza in then-safe Manhattan. We at the AP in New York
were surrounded in art deco. Our reporters were over there, too and in
relatively large number. In the big battles, Galloway, often alone, was
surrounded by trees and tents and death.
He wrote books that were turned into movies. “We Were
Soldiers Once, and Young.” Was a best seller. He wrote for US News & World
Report, then Knight-Ridder, then McClatchy. His lectures were held in
packed houses when it was still safe to pack a house.
In retirement, he grew tomatoes -- maybe it was peppers --
on a patch of land in North Carolina, not all that far from his birthplace, a
few states away, in Texas.
He was in and out of hospitals over the last few years. What
finally did him in was what the doctors call “complications” from a heart
attack. That was a huge heart to attack.
The thing about Joe wasn’t that wall of awards. It
wasn’t even about how he brought the war into focus for America. It wasn’t the
Ernie Pyle phrasing, or the brilliant columns that followed. It was Joe,
himself.
You can’t separate the man from that. They were one and the
same. Sharp witted, sometimes cynical, sometimes poetic. The eyes
always open.
In death, everyone had everything good to say about
Joe. In life, mostly, they did, too. That happens rarely. The
painter Dali said in death everyone is 10-thousand times greater than he was in
life. Not true with Galloway. Everyone knew. Everyone.
Now come the great wringing of hands, the “our thoughts and
prayers are with his widow, “Doc” Gracie, a onetime circus performer turned
medic. Keep all that. And keep Joe's books at hand for when you need to
remember how to write.
Let me leave you today with a long quotation
“We were children of the
1950s and John Kennedy's young stalwarts of the early 1960s. He told the world
that Americans would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship"
in the defense of freedom. We were the down payment on that costly contract,
but the man who signed it was not there when we fulfilled his promise. John
Kennedy waited for us on a hill in Arlington National Cemetery, and in time we
came by the thousands to fill those slopes without white marble markers and to
ask on the murmur of the wind if that was truly the future he had envisioned
for us.”
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome
to them. ®
Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com
© WR 2021
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