Dear Cousins; In my forth coming novel "Meanwhile back at the ranch." Hopefully finished by the year 2000 or so, I do quite a bit on our cousin Ernie. Here are two stories that I came across from Stars & Stripes that anyone close to Ernie may appreciate: A Tribute to Ernie by Allan R. Andrews, News Editor, Pacific Stars and Stripes, originally published April 16, 1995 April markes the 50th anniversary of the death of Ernie Pyle, and if the famous correspondent's World War II employers -- Scripps-Howard -- have their way, Pyle will become an even more revered journalistic idol. And well he should, because no writer has provided us words about war that should compel us to peace as has Pyle. An Ernie Pyle museum, struggling for almost 20 years to keep the correspondent's legacy alive, this year got a $250,000 boost from Scripps-Howard's foundation, and on April 18, 50 years after a sniper's bullet killed Pyle on the Pacific island of Ie Shima, the museum is to be dedicated. Located in Pyle's birthplace of Dana, Indiana, the museum takes up two large Quonset huts donated by the federal government and will display rooms full of Pyle and World War II memorabilia. In marking the 50 years since Pyle's death, Scripps-Howard has been reissuing on a weekly basis columns that Pyle wrote during his tenure with the newspaper chain. No matter how one views museums and memorabilia, nothing in the Pyle museum will be able to touch journalists the way his stories from the "beats" of the war are able to touch those of us who make a living as storytellers and recorders of instant history. In some respects, Pyle's columns are a liability to the politically correct because as a product of his times he minces no words in describing the enemy of his beloved U.S. soldiers. In a recent republished column, for example, one written in March of 1945 from aboard the aircraft carrier Cabot in the Pacific, Pyle uses the perjorative "Jap" in referring to the Japanese four times in the space of about 200 words. Beyond the nasty labels, however, is a writer unafraid of the English language, unafraid to describe with colors and similes, and unafraid to show his own emotions in his exposition. Pyle would probably flunk a lot of contemporary feature writing courses. Most young reporters would disdain his quaint ways of gathering news. Pyle often casually mentions men in the field without bothering to give their names. That's a major no-no in journalistm's current preoccupation with informational details. On the other hand, Pyle's observant eye probably tells us more about these nameless men than any contemporary journalist would dare describe. Pyle was biased. he calls the Cabot "my carrier." Pyle was sentimental. He relates his ship to mid-America, saying the carrier has all the gossip and small talk of a small city, and he constantly includes himself among the troops with a collective "we." Pyle was mannered. He used words such as "noble" and "proud" and "cuss" in talking about the carrier and her crew. Pyle was provincial. He compares the ship to a Midwestern town lacking only "a hitching rack and a town pump with a handle." Most of all, Pyle was honest, describing what he saw and knew with words that were common and clear. Consider this passage describing "my carrier," "It doesn't cut thru the water like a cruiser, knifing romantically along. It doesn't dance and cavort like a destroyer. It just plows. You feel it should be carrying a hod, rather than wearing a red sash." (For city-slickers like me, a hod is a trough on a pole borne on the shoulders for carrying loads like bricks or coal.) Clearly, Pyle spoke the language of the common laborer, which was how he viewed the soldiers, sailors and Marines with whom he traveled. In the media before television, Pyle holds the regard of many as one who taught Americans what war is really like. Writer Studs Terkel said of Pyle, "It is exquisite irony that this journalist became celebrated for celebrating the non-celebrated." As one of his biographers, David Nichols, said of Pyle's writings, "Pyle was a novelty as a war correspondent. Only rarely did he write about the so-called 'big picture.' Rather, Pyle focused on the individual combatant -- how he lived, endured by turns battle and boredom, and sometimes how he died . . . ." One of Pyle's most famous columns concerns the death of Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Benton, Texas. (Of about 15 soldiers described in this column, Waskow alone is named.) Pyle's poignant observations of how the men of an Army company in the 36th Division in Italy treated the body of their young -- 27 -- and too-soon dead captain included these words: "You feel small in the presence of dead men, and ashamed at being alive, and you don't ask silly questions." Terkel has also observed that Pyle's writings ironically became quickly "disremembered" at the end of the war. That's how we are when we regard war -- if we regard war. As Eleanor Roosevelt noted, war is easy to forget, and younger generations often recall only the heroism and the glamor. Pyle's writings, however, the former first lady reminded us, help keep "the dirt, the hardships, the horror of death and the sorrow" from fading from our consciousness. No memorabilia in any museum can remind us of war's reality as can the words left us by Pyle. And while the idiosyncrasies of language and labels may date them, his writings remain a mud-covered, blood-spattered, sorrow-filled tribute to the sainthood of those who were damned for an insane season in the earthly landscapes of hell.