Newspaperman Donald M. Murray has died at 82. I shy away from saying “writer” as that’s too generic a term. I feel that writers should be classified as being a poet, or screenwriter, or novelist. Donald Murray was a newspaperman.
I became familiar with Murray from his weekly “Over 60” columns in The Boston Globe. A WW2 combat vet, Murray didn’t appreciate anything florid or fancy in the presentation of an idea. Public relations work wouldn’t have suited him. Murray didn’t accept Tom Brokaw’s label of “The Greatest Generation.” In his 2001 book, My Twice-Lived Life, Murray told some war stories. Here is one of them:
Then a jeep with stretchers lashed to it raced in, and two medics started fighting over the pair of jump boots with the feet still in. I thought it funny but when I got near, one of the bodies on the stretchers spoke. “Hey, Murray. I’m going back to Chicago. I got the lucky wound. You poor bastard, going back to the front.”
He kept taunting me, and I saw his legs had no feet. It was his boots they were fighting over, but he kept taunting me, and when I leaned over I saw it was my friend, high on morphine. He wouldn’t let up, and I felt the hate and envy rise up in me, and I started to move to choke him to death, just holding myself back until I could turn and head back to the front, full of sulfa and rage and fear, and not so much of the enemy but of myself. Are you surprised we are so often silent?
