We Were One

He has been about courage, about purity in prose and, above all, professionalism. I speak of author and friend W. C. "Bill" Heinz, who has taught, "To the good ones, professionalism is a religion."

"The reactions of the professional are so pure," he continues. "They are doing the job right, regardless of incentive. And, it is the great professionals that society has to depend on every time it gets in trouble."

During World War II, the United States-indeed the entire free world-was in serious trouble. The American GI, young men and boys, from small towns and big cities, fought hard and well as professional soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, and saved this nation.

Heinz dedicates his 10th book, "When We Were One: Stories of World War II" (Da Capo Press; 2002) to "those who, in all this country's wars, fought for us and died in the doing." As the July 4th holiday approaches, permit this biased columnist, who for more than half a century has regarded Heinz as a surrogate father, and has loved this complex, formidable talent, to suggest the reading of this 262-page treasure of a book, constitutes a patriotic act.

Bill Heinz, war correspondent, newspaper columnist, magazine writer and author (the co-author of M*A*S*H), today is 87, a widower who has lost a left eye to disease and surgery that failed, is frail at 113 pounds, and walks unsteadily. Yet, here he was the other night, on the NBC/TV nightly news program, telling Tom Brokaw about covering the war from D-Day all the way to victory inside Germany.

There wasn't time, of course, to tell the way it really was, and how, if you did your job as a professional correspondent, you had to put yourself in danger. Few went all the way-one of these was Bill Heinz. "A mortar shell came in on my side and hit a wall to the left of me," Heinz recalls. "I remember the hot flame and orange color. I had a splinter in my left cheek and another in my left hand.

"Then I knew what it would be like to get killed," he said, for a journalism review. "That would be the last thing you would know. You would hear this noise and see this orange color and it would be very hot."

His interviewer asked what "kept you going on a day-to-day basis? What went into this decision to go in harm's way?" The answer is quintessential Heinz, the words of the professional-

"You just couldn't leave the GIs alone. I mean, they were doing the fighting. We came back (from the front lines) every day and they stayed up there. I've never forgotten that all my life. I've been overburdened with empathy, but it's good for a reporter. I certainly had it for the GIs. It's amazing what they went through."

Working alongside Bill Heinz was akin to a graduate course in journalism and non-fiction writing. Twice, we collaborated. In 1965, we covered the historic civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama; another time, we worked with football coach Vince Lombardi. Heinz wrote "Run to Daylight," the celebrated Lombardi autobiography.

In one of our long meetings, Heinz remembered a conversation two GIs had over the correspondents' shoulder patch. "They're war correspondents," the first soldier explained.

"Let them get guns," says the second GI.

"Yeah, but they're going to tell the folks back home what it's like here."

To which the skeptic says, "We'll tell them when we get back home."

One of my favorite pieces in the book is titled "Transitions." It is a hark- back piece, about Heinz the civilian, and sports reporter, looking back now at his war. He writes, "Day after day I see those kids going out and sacrificing themselves. They haven't even had a chance to live yet. They're 18 and 19 and 20, and they're giving their lives, and what am I doing for them?

"They deserve the best writers we have, and except for Hemingway, they're not here."

Yes, they had Hemingway, but they also had a brilliant emerging talent, W. C. Heinz, who got better and better with each new experience, and dispatch back to the New York Sun newspaper. Now, those onetime farm boys and city kids who did the nation's dirty work have a literate history of their time during World War II.