Getting into the skin of Ernie Pyle

There is this weird symmetry between Ernie Pyle and Gary Morrison. And in the end, Morrison couldn’t resist it.

“I was born on the day he was killed,” said Morrison. “I found that out when I was around 12, and it got me interested in him.”

Over time, that interest in America’s most famous and revered war correspondent grew, merging with Morrison’s involvement in community theater in and around Grand Rapids, Mich.

“One day, I heard about a monologue contest in Grand Rapids,” Morrison said, “and so I memorized one of Ernie Pyle’s dispatches so I could enter. Then they cancelled the contest.”

But a process had been set in motion through which Gary Morrison actually became Ernie Pyle — at least for short periods of time.

“A friend told me that I should try my monologue on some veteran’s groups,” Morrison said. “My first performance was in a friend’s living room. Then, I did it under an outdoor pavilion in Hopkins, Michigan, and it went over really well.”

That was dozens of Pyles ago. This weekend, Morrison will be performing at Liberty High School in Bedford (7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday night), sponsored by the National D-Day Memorial.

His one-man show is called “Hi, I’m Ernie Pyle,” and it draws from some of Pyle’s hundreds of wartime dispatches.

The history of covering warfare is as old as Homer and as fresh as the reportage from “embedded” journalists in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor was Pyle the first or the last to write from the perspective of an infantry “grunt.”

Still, something about this frail little man tugged at America’s heart. Like the troops around him, Pyle was homesick. He got depressed. He drank. He was often scared, and there were times when he would kill for a cigarette.

Even the best of modern combat journalists rarely, if ever, get past the perspective of being outsiders. Pyle was very much inside.

“When our infantry goes into a big push in northern Tunisia,” Pyle wrote in May of 1943, “each man is issued three bars of D-ration chocolate, enough to last one day. He takes no other food.

“He carries two canteens of water instead of the usual one. He carries no blankets. He leaves behind all extra clothes except his raincoat.

“You can’t conceive how hard it is to move and fight at night. Everything is new and strange. The nights are pitch black. You grope with your feet. You step into holes and fall sprawling in little gullies and creeks. You trudge over plowed ground and push through waist-high shrubs. You go as a man blindfolded, feeling unsure and off-balance, but you keep on going.”

A native of Indiana, Pyle started with the London Blitz, then followed American troops into North Africa, Sicily, Italy and France. When the war in Europe was over, he moved to the Pacific. On April 18, 1945, he was killed by a sniper on Ie Shima island near Okinawa. “His” troops immediately erected a sign that read: “At This Spot, the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy: Ernie Pyle.”

Gary Morrison is a little bit larger than Pyle (who weighed only around 100 pounds), and about 30 pounds heavier. And yet, he said, “people who knew Pyle have told me that there’s a resemblance. Maybe it’s just in their minds.”

You could tell it pleased him.