Solomon Islands, spring 1944.
Sergeant Barrett McGurn moved cautiously atop Hill 260, the notorious “Bloody Hill” northeast of the Empress Augusta Bay beachhead on Bougainville Island. Suddenly, a Japanese knee-mortar shell exploded in front of him with a bright red-orange burst, knocking him onto his back. The ground shivered, as did his hands. A reporter for Yank, the Army Weekly, McGurn watched the smoke dissipate and then took out a pencil and notepad to record how it felt to take a direct hit. But he could find no dry surface on the pad—the paper was drenched in the blood pouring from his face and chest.
McGurn felt no regret. After all, he was a soldier. But he was also a reporter. Perhaps I can remain conscious long enough to dash off a dispatch for Yank, he thought. Then he passed out.
of Egbert White, a World War I infantry veteran who’d written for the American military newspaper . Tracing its origins to a Civil War–era regimental newspaper, the latter publication saw its heyday in 1918 and ’19, when a reported half million soldiers turned to it for news on matters concerning the American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front. It remains in print today. As a complement to , White envisioned a magazine written in the authentic voice of enlisted soldiers—a new magazine for a new war. White’s writers, photographers and artists would understand the ordeal of the enlisted man because they would wear the same uniform, have the same lowly ranks, be excluded from the same officers’ clubs and endure the
