The Pittsburgh Press (May 24, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
A B-26 base, England –
Sgt. Kermit Pruitt, whom I spoke of the other day, is the tail gunner in “my crew.” He’s an old cowboy from Arizona – looks like one, acts like one, talks like one. But he’s no hillbilly in the head.
Pruitt is the talking kind. He talks and sings on the slightest provocation. He likes old cowboy songs. They say that every once in a while, he will start singing some cowboy song over the interphone while they’re actually in a bomb run, and the pilot will have to yell at him to shut up.
He likes to tell stories about cowpokes in Arizona. He was telling the other day about one old cowboy who went to the city and registered at a hotel for the first time in his life. The clerk asked him if he wanted a room with running water, and the cowboy yelled, “Hell no! What do you think I am, a trout?”
Pruitt drives the rest of the crew crazy by shooting his tail gun at the most unexpected times. In more than 50 missions he has never yet seen an enemy plane to shoot at, so he breaks the monotony by shooting at gun emplacements and flak ships two miles below. These sudden blasts scare the wits out of the rest of the crew, and Pruitt then catches a little brimstone over the interphone from the pilot.
But this doesn’t faze him, or impair his affection for his pilot. Pruitt says he just shopped around in this Army till he found a pilot that suited him. Back in America he “missed” a couple of trains to avoid coming overseas with an outfit he didn’t like. He says his hunch proved right, for his entire old crew in that outfit were killed on their first mission.
Finally, he got a chance to come with the B-26s. Pilot “Chief” Collins was a wild man then, and most everybody was afraid to ride with him. But when Pruitt saw him handle a plane, he said to himself, “There’s my man.” So, he got on Chief’s crew, and he’s still on it. He wouldn’t think of flying with anybody else.
Pruitt is thin, not much bigger than me, and he usually wears coveralls which make him look even thinner. He goes around poking his head out from hunched-up shoulders with a quizzical half grin on his face. He sure does enjoy living.
Pleasant Valley, Arizona, is Pruitt’s home diggins. He is 30. He is married to a beautiful girl who is part French and 1/32 Indian, and last Christmas Day they were blessed with an heir. Pruitt has a pocketbook full of pictures of his wife and offspring, and he shows them to you every few minutes. If you go out of the room and come back five minutes later, he shows you the pictures again.
I was sleeping near Pruitt one night when the crews were awakened at 2:00 a.m. for an early mission. It was funny to see them come out of bed. Not a soul moved a muscle for about five minutes, and then they all suddenly came out as though shot from a gun.
Pruitt always starts talking as soon as he is awake. On this particular morning, he said:
When the war’s over, I’m gonna get me an Apache Indian to work for me. I’m gonna tell him to get me up at 2 o’clock in the morning, and when he comes in, I’m gonna take my .45 and kill the SOB.
The three sergeants in my crew sort of took me under their wing and we ran around together for two or three days. One night they slicked all up, put on their dress uniforms with all their sergeants’ stripes and their silver wings and all their ribbons, and we went to a nearby town to a singing concert. Then we went into the backroom of the local pub and sat around a big round table with two very old and ugly British women, who were drinking beer and who were very grinny and pleasant. They giggled when Pruitt told stories of his escapades as a cowboy and of his trips to London on leave.
There are about 20 flying sergeants in the same barracks with my crew. They live about the same as the officers, except that they are more crowded and they don’t have settees around their stove, or shelves for their stuff. But they have the same pinup girls, the same flying talk, the same poker game, and the same guys in bed getting some daytime shuteye while bedlam goes on around them.
I got to know all these flying sergeants and I couldn’t help but be struck by what a swell bunch they were. All of them are sort of difficult at first, but they open up when you have known them for a little whole and treat you like a king. They tell you their troubles and their fears and their ambitions, and they want so much for you to have a good time while you’re with them.
With these boys, as with most all the specialized groups of soldiers I have been with, their deep sincerity and their concern about their future are apparent. They can’t put into words what they’re fighting for, but they know it has to be done and almost invariably they consider themselves fortunate to be living well and fighting the enemy from the air instead of on the ground. But home, and what will be their fate in the post-war world, is always in the back of their minds, and every one of them has some kind of plan laid.
