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Pierre "Peter" Ortiz-"To Live a Man's Life" ORTIZ: To Live a Man's Life. By Laura Homan Lacey. Published by Phillips Publications. 200 pages. Stock #0984960511. $17.96 MCA Members. $19.95 Regular Price.
You can't make this stuff up. Historian and author Laura Lacey realized early on that if someone wrote a novel about a daring-do swashbuckler similar to Pierre "Peter" J. Ortiz, nobody would take it seriously.
Fortunately for Lacey, Ortiz was one of those rare individuals really bigger than life. Her problem was to give the readers facts, which even when field-stripped, defy credulity. Ortiz's life was a series of rousing adventures that were the basis for several Hollywood screenplays.
He was a handsome adventurer, a decorated French Foreign legionnaire with two awards of the Croix de Guerre, a World War II Marine officer with two Navy Crosses and two Purple Hearts, a member of the covert Office of Strategic Services and captured by the Germans only to escape and three years later be captured again. Tie spoke five languages including French, German and Arabic. His countless escapades seem like the stuff of dime novels, except that they are all true.
Lacey had her hands full during five years of research trying to separate the man from the myth and still "make him come to life" in her biographical book: "Ortiz - To Live a Man's Life."
"That's one of the biggest problems about writing that book, because as a historian I feel strongly about documentation, not using poetic license," she said. "And a lot of the things were very difficult to confirm."
She discovered that Ortiz was indeed all that his escapades made him out to be. "I lere's this phenomenal hero, but [today] you don't hear much about him, yet his is the ultimate sea story."
Even in a Corps full of legends, Ortiz "certainly was a man for his times," said Lacey. "I think about that when I look at a lot of the Corps' heroes. There is that warfighter. That's where they shine. There are men who are just meant to be...