HBO's 'The Pacific' shines light on Irish soldier Robert Leckie

Robert Leckie, a certified member of the “greatest generation,” was born in Philadelphia in 1920. As Leckie’s HBO biography notes, “He was the youngest of eight children in an Irish Catholic family” who was raised in New Jersey.

A few days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Leckie enlisted with the U.S. Marine Corps. He eventually became a machine gunner, serving in Guadalcanal as well as Peleliu, where he was wounded.

Until a few weeks ago, not many people recalled Leckie’s exploits. But these days, thanks to two fellows named Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, it’s hard to get away from Leckie.

Leckie is one of the soldiers featured in HBO’s critically-acclaimed new drama The Pacific. Played by James Badge Dale, The Pacific follows Leckie and his fellow soldiers as they fight their way through the treacherous series of islands in the later phases of World War II.

Leckie’s autobiography A Helmet for My Pillow was one of the main sources used by The Pacific producers Hanks and Spielberg, who previously brought the greatest generation to life for HBO with the popular Band of Brothers.

Needless to say, The Pacific, so far, has not had much time for the glamour and heroism of wartime.

“Jungle rot and malaria, not to mention dysentery, hunger and nervous breakdowns, are as much a part of The Pacific as machine guns and bombing raids,” is how The New York Times put it in a recent review, which nevertheless called the series “mesmerizing.”

Most critics agree. However, there is one small detail worth noting.

As opposed to previous depictions of Irish military families, from the Sullivan brothers to numerous Jimmy Cagney roles, Leckie’s parents, in The Pacific, seem oddly disinterested in their son’s desire to go halfway around the world and put his life in peril.

Generally speaking, it has been believed that World War I and World War II helped Irish Americans enter the mainstream of life in the U.S.

In fact, that is the argument made in a new book which also depicts an Irishman marching off to war. In The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War (Harper), author David Laskin tells the story of a dozen immigrants who joined the U.S. military after America entered the fight against Germany in World War I.

Among those immigrants is Peter Thompson, born in Antrim. Thompson “went to work at the age of 12 sorting flax fibers at the Whitehouse linen mill.”

Thompson was a bright student, but his mother Rose believed the family simply could not survive without the money Peter brought in.

So work was a bigger priority than school. This, sadly, is understandable.

Rose had a dozen children, including a sister named Mary, who eventually joined an uncle who had emigrated to the heavily-Irish mining town of Butte,

Montana.

In 1914, Peter himself left Ireland and settled in Butte. As the luck of the Irish would have it, that was the year war exploded across Europe and mine production plummeted.

Two of Thompson’s brothers back in Ireland went off to fight for the British Army. On this side of the Atlantic, however, Thompson listened to older relatives explain that they hoped the Kaiser and Germany prevailed.

After all, weren’t they fighting the hated British?

In the end, Thompson joined the U.S. Army in 1917, rising to the rank of sergeant.

Perhaps we remain fascinated by the likes of Peter Thompson and Robert Leckie because they seem to have been living in a simpler time. The wars Americans are fighting these days seem so messy that we often seem to forget about them entirely.

If nothing else, both Laskin’s book and The Pacific, with their diverse groups of soldiers trying to maintain grace under pressure, are solidly in the tradition of the marching song penned by another Irish American, John Mullin, a corporal in the 77th so-called “melting pot” division: “Oh the army, the army, the democratic army/All the Jews and Wops, the Dutch and Irish cops/They’re all in the army now.”



(Tom Deignan will be discussing “Twenty Books Every Irish American Should Read” at the mid-Manhattan branch library, 455 Fifth Avenue, April 17. Contact

tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan.)

Why "The Quiet Man" Endures

This St. Patrick’s season you surely came across it. On Turner Classic Movies or on a DVD player.

John Ford’s 1952 film The Quiet Man has been a St. Patrick’s Day staple for nearly 60 years now.

And for just as long the film has had its detractors. Those who grumble that the film is little more than a brightly-colored jaunt through Irish stereotypes -- the drunks, the brawlers and all those befreckled redheads.

Well, I have some bad news for the haters. The Quiet Man is growing in stature, not merely as entertainment, but as a work of art.

The sign of any great, enduring story is that it can be reimagined and reinterpreted by younger generations. And so, The Quiet Man -- for all of its legitimate flaws -- is going to be with us for many more St. Patrick’s Days.

Martin Scorsese, who’s got tons of cinematic street cred and just had a smash hit with Shutter Island, recently said The Quiet Man was a major inspiration.

Meanwhile, last month, it was announced that Aidan Quinn is among the stars of a new movie entitled Connemara Days, a romantic comedy which is actually set during the film shoot of The Quiet Man.

But the most interesting new take on The Quiet Man is Roddy Doyle’s forthcoming book The Dead Republic.

Doyle is one of Ireland’s more famous

contemporary writers. His book The Commitments went on to become a classic indy film, while his novel Paddy Clarke Ha, Ha, Ha won several major awards.

Doyle’s latest project is a trilogy or Irish historical novels based around the character Henry Smart, a sort of Irish Forrest Gump, who floats through the country’s history and has a knack for being at the center of key events.

In previous books, A Star Called Henry and O Play That Thing, Henry rose from the Dublin slums to become a leader of the Easter Rising, before traveling to New York and Chicago to rub elbows with gangsters and guide the career of a young musician named Louis Armstrong.

One of Doyle’s key aims here is to reexamine Irish American history. Believe it or not, this has made him some enemies.

Traditional historical writers such as Morgan Llywelyn believe Doyle is playing fast and loose with the facts.

The problem is, history is more than just a collection of facts. So, Doyle feels free to have some fun undermining readers’ conventional wisdom about the past.

In Doyle’s latest book The Dead Republic, Henry Star finds himself on the set of a film with Henry Fonda and the irascible Irish American director John Ford.

They are shooting a western, but Ford desperately wants to make a movie about

Irish rebellion. So, he has hired famous rebel Henry Smart to serve as “IRA consultant.”

But what began as a gritty tale of Irish liberation gets crammed into Ford’s myth-making machine and what emerges, instead, is what some believe to be the worst piece of paddywhackery Hollywood ever produced -- The Quiet Man.

Along the way, Henry Smart sees that Ford is transforming the story. “All references to the war and the IRA had gone. The Sean in the picture wasn’t a kid of the Dublin streets, and all the killings had become one big punch in a boxing ring,” writes Doyle.

But Doyle is not merely lamenting the whitewashing of Ireland’s past. He is examining the deeply complicated way myth and reality collide. How complicated?

Well, if it seems like an “IRA consultant” for a Hollywood movie is a priceless slice of Doyle’s imagination, guess again -- Ford’s film, indeed, had just such a hard man on set, the Irish Civil War veteran Ernie O’Malley.

And that begins to explain why The Quiet Man endures. For all of its donnybrooks and thatched-cottage charm, there are deep, violent undercurrents in the film.

As Notre Dame professor Luke Gibbons has written: “The Quiet Man bears out the Celtic stereotype that, in Ireland, the tear and smile seem twin-born, and comedy is shadowed by tragedy.”

Is that why millions love the film? No. Many, indeed, love Barry Fitzgerald’s drunken shenanigans. But such stuff cannot carry a film for decades.

This St. Patrick’s Day, give The Quiet Man another viewing. And really watch it this time. You might be surprised.



(Tom Deignan will be discussing “Twenty Books Every Irish American Should Read”

at the mid-Manhattan branch library, 455 Fifth Avenue, April 17. Contact

tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan.)

The green roots of the yellow ribbon tradition

Did you ever wonder why people wear yellow ribbons to express their respect for soldiers? Was it that song from decades ago? That one about the yellow ribbon on the oak tree?

Is that also (if you will) the root of the new movie called The Yellow Handkerchief, starring William Hurt and Twilight's Kristen Stewart, which carries this mysterious obsession with yellow garments into the 21st century?

Not quite. Erin Dignam (the screenwriter of The Yellow Handkerchief) is just the latest, and not even the first person with Irish roots, to tell a new version of this time-tested story.

Some believe this story begins in biblical days, or that its origins lie in the John Wayne movie "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon."

What can’t be denied is that the legend grew thanks to a son of Belfast who scoured the gritty streets of New York City for great stories.

To begin to unwrap this obsession with yellow ribbons, let us step back in time and belly up to the bar at the Lion’s Head, the bygone Greenwich Village watering hole best known as a haven for “drinkers with writing problems.”

It was there that the likes of Frank and Malachy McCourt, Newsday’s Dennis Duggan and so many other Irish American ink-stained wretches bent their elbows.

Perhaps the best known of the bunch was Pete Hamill, author, columnist, son of parents from Belfast.

Hamill recently explained that he was at the Lion’s Head one evening when he heard a durable tale which no one ever seemed to have actually written down.

The details might have changed with each dramatic telling. But the core of the story was more or less the same. A quiet man gets out of jail and wonders if his onetime wife will take him back.

In 1971, Hamill was writing (of all things) a short story column for the New York Post. The column was called “The Eight Million,” a reference to all of the souls living in the five boroughs of New York.

In October of ’71, Hamill published a column about college-age kids who get on a bus at 34th Street in Manhattan and head off to Florida. A man named Vingo is also on the bus with them.

The kids try to engage the mysterious stranger in conversation, but nothing ignites. That is, until one asks, “Are you married?”

Vingo replies, “I don’t know.”

Vingo finally opens up, “I told her, I said, Martha, I understand if you can’t stay married to me. I told her that. I said I was gonna be away a long time and that if she couldn’t stand it, if the kids kept askin’ questions, if it hurt her too much, well, she should just forget me.”

Vingo simply had one condition.

“We used to live in this town, Brunswick, just before Jacksonville, and there’s a big oak tree just as you come into town, a very famous tree, huge. I told her that if she’d take me back, she should put a yellow handkerchief on the tree and I’d get off and come home.”

And so the story ends with the revelation -- will he stay on the bus or go home?

Will there be a yellow handkerchief tied to the big oak tree?

Swiftly the Hamill column was a smash. People all over the country got a look at it when Reader’s Digest published it.

A TV movie starring James Earl Jones, based on the yellow handkerchief story, was aired. A Japanese film was also produced.

But it may well have been the 1973 song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” sung by Tony Orlando, which has stuck in people’s minds for the longest time.

When the song came out (two years after the Hamill column), the Vietnam War was in its last regrettable stages. Many soldiers had not yet come home.

Some people linked yellow ribbons to the hope that a loved one would return from southeast Asia. It is a tradition that went nationwide during the Iran hostage crisis in 1980, and has stuck with Americans through the first Gulf War and Iraq and Afghanistan.

So now we have a new movie, "The Yellow Handkerchief." Every charity from autism to breast cancer to AIDS uses some form of ribbon as its colorful symbol.

This might never have been the case, however, if Pete Hamill was not listening so closely one night in the Lion’s Head.

(Contact Tom Deignan at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)