|
|
DEEP THINKERS in government and the media hemmed and hawed before and after reporters tagged along with American forces entering Iraq last year--and the debate about the pros and cons of this venture won't be settled soon. But let's hope it can be put aside at least long enough to remember an "embedded" correspondent of yesteryear.
Appropriately (if one can say that death is ever "appropriate"), the last surviving newsman who covered the D-Day invasion died just a few days shy of the day on which the nation specially mourns its fallen military. Where the Axis powers failed, diabetes won out, and Merle McDougald "Doug" Werner passed away May 19 at home.
The United Press writer, who later worked in PR for the State Department, was one of a score of reporters who took to the beaches of Normandy with the Allies on June 6, 1944. His words were some of the first that U.S. audiences received from the front. A sampling, which this newspaper reprinted recently:
"Our expectations of a rough time at the beachhead were more than borne out by the pasting we took from the Nazi mortars. When there wasn't a foxhole handy, I found myself down on my stomach digging one with my hands and feet."
Before easy-to-use global communications, men and women like Mr. Werner provided us with our war news. Americans of his generation and later ones owe him a final salute.