Will Chris Kyle prove to be as important to history as Ernie Pyle?

Although it’s not an easy find, the love affair with SEAL sniper Chris Kyle helps give context to the legacy and historical value of arguably America’s greatest war correspondent Ernie Pyle.

Kyle’s autobiography “American Sniper,” and the film that has followed, has brought a piece of modern history into a relatively immediate focus much the way that Pyle’s dispatches from the European, North African and Pacific theaters did for thousands of newspaper readers during the longest haul of World War II.

It’s true these men come from very different worlds — Kyle was the man behind the butt of a rifle, while Pyle wrote about the rifle and the men who carried them. Kyle would come home to chronicle his experiences in savage detail, as Pyle embedded himself in foxholes and trenches to tell the human story of the infantrymen.

In the end, Kyle would die in civilian clothes, killed by the very veterans he made it a mission to help reintegrate, and Pyle, a civilian, would die in country, killed in the Battle of Okinawa.

It’s yet unclear what Kyle’s legacy will be in 70 years; will he even be remembered in a room of 100 people asked to raise their hands in response? If that same number was assembled today, how many would have any idea who Pyle is?

That’s the truly unfortunate part of history — it ages, loses immediacy, the people who lived it die off, and it slowly becomes a fact to be researched in a dog-eared textbook rather than a story to be regaled by the participants during spirited conversation.

Pyle has largely been credited with doing more to boost the morale of boots-on-the-ground infantryman during the endless days of World War II than any promise of Parisian liberty and its lure of a fleeting dancehall romance. He humanized — maybe even mythologized a tad — their struggles, cutting through the clutter of the kind of tactical nonsense and rigid reporting of death tolls that we see in modern war reporting, to immediately write on what the war meant to the men fighting it in the real time of that moment.

It was a Mark Twain-like sensibility and sophistication in how Pyle described the fierce loyalty and tender yet unsophisticated final words of young grunts paying their respects to the body of their beloved commander Capt. Henry T. Waskow in Italy in 1944.

It was the grit and intensity of an Ernest Hemingway that Pyle channeled as he wrote of “The God-Damned Infantry” on the frontlines of Northern Tunisia, chronicling “the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness” of these “mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys” in 1943.

And like some modern historian uncannily transported back in time, Pyle provided context that endures today but penned a mere day and a half after the storming of the beaches of Normandy, France, against what seemed an impossibly immovable Nazi stronghold in an amazing piece of reporting in “D-Day: A Pure Miracle,” published June 12, 1944.

As the veterans of the Greatest Generation die off in increasing numbers every day, we will lose our immediate connection with that part of our history, the flesh-and-blood connection the Iraq and Afghanistan war vets now have with Kyle’s life and work.

Right now, the Kyle love affair is passionate, new, in our grasp and embrace. Will that love affair become a distant memory that plays like reference material as this young generation of Middle East veterans ages and eventually passes from this earth?

It would be a shame if it did. But at that point, maybe the Kyle of today becomes the Pyle of tomorrow.

This column originally appeared in Imperial Valley Press, Jan. 23, 2015.

To learn more about Ernie Pyle, here are some links:

http://mediaschool.indiana.edu/erniepyle/1944/01/10/the-death-of-captain-waskow/

http://www.biography.com/people/ernie-pyle-9449009