WAR OF WORDS

In his April 19 feature “When War Was Hell,” David Freeman describes three classic war pictures, one of which is “The Story of G.I. Joe.”

He says it is William Wellman’s 1945 film based on Ernie Pyle’s celebrated dispatches from the front. He states that critic James Agee said of the closing scene: “It seems to me a war poem as great and as beautiful as any of Whitman’s.” And he says that when he saw a 16-millimeter print, he was shaken and wept and that he found the projectionist also in tears.

Oddly, Freeman--himself a screenwriter as well as author of the wonderful “A Hollywood Education”--never credits the screenwriters of this Academy Award-nominated film: Leopold Atlas, Philip Stephenson and Guy Endore, my father.

And in case Frank Wead’s family doesn’t read The Times, he wrote “They Were Expendable,” which Freeman calls “superb,” from a book by William L. White.

GITA ENDORE

Los Angeles

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Hooray for William Buchman, who mentions Robert Aldrich’s “Attack!” as an extremely important movie about war (Letters, April 26).

In a number of other movies, including “The Dirty Dozen” and “The Choirboys,” Aldrich shows that any military or police apparatus fights far more fiercely within its own ranks than it battles the enemy or criminals.

That is a bitter truth about all armed forces and I wish I had a bomb shelter to dodge the incoming deluge of saccharine SchemeWorks hype while “Saving Private Ryan” is being precision-bombed down the maw of a cheated movie audience.

BEHROUZ SABA

Los Angeles