War Correspondent Ernie Pyle filed this report on life with the U.S. Marines ten days after they came ashore on Okinawa:
“Our first night on Okinawa was uncanny and full of old familiar sounds – the exciting, sad, weary little sounds of war… Flares in the sky ahead, the crack of big guns behind us, then of passing shells, a few dark figures coming and going in the night, muted voices at the telephones, the rifle shots, the mosquitoes, the stars, the feel of the damp night air under the wide sky – back again at the kind of life I had known so long.
“The old familiar pattern, unchanged by distance or time from war on the other side of the world. A pattern so imbedded in my soul that coming back into it again, it seemed to me as I lay there that I’d never known anything else in my life. And there are millions of us.”
