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as she was very content with her life. She told a friend ‘Once you have the best you can’t settle for less.’ Lena was described by her friends as a great cook, who enjoyed inviting people over for special dinners. She worked at an electrical plant. Always active in military affairs, she volunteered at the Long Beach Veterans Hospital, the American Veterans Auxiliary, and the Women Marines Association. She died on June [11] of 1999 at the age of 86.” Former Marine Clinton Watters, the best man at their wedding in 1944, told me in admiring tones, “When she was in her eighties, she looked fifty.”

With the widow so relentlessly offstage in the various accounts of Basilone’s life, I contacted her niece, Fiddle Viracola, an Emmy-winning actress, singer, and dancer who appeared on Broadway in such plays as The Beauty Part and The Rose Tattoo, and who lives in Greenwich Village. She told me she had met with a writer for a new Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks television series about the Pacific war, and has on her own been collecting material about John and Lena for a screenplay. She’s also had an exchange of letters with the Spielberg office and with the casting people, so she’s anxious to see the finished project. “I’m working on the script now [her own script, not theirs] and I’ve got eighty-eight pages. It’s a powerful love story. Lena was so strong, and they were very compatible. He was very lost, always losing jobs, and Lena gave him a center. She knew his passion to go back [to the Pacific and the war].”

According to Ms. Viracola, Lena met the Basilone family only that one time in Massachusetts and never in New Jersey (as other sources insist she did). “They met up in Boston for the commissioning of the ship. The Basilones had been horrible to her. Raritan was resentful. I gather his sister wanted to run the show, getting all the limelight and the plaudits. There were a lot of self-serving people around.”

To my knowledge, the widow did not attend the 1948 reburial at Arlington. “I don’t know if she was invited,” Viracola said. “I hear the mother [Dora] wanted Lena to come back to Raritan and live there, but that wasn’t her style. She became a master sergeant and left the Marine Corps eventually and ran a company that was in air-conditioning and things like that and was involved in many things for the vets. People were drawn to Lena.”

What about that line explaining why she never remarried, “I was married to the best”? “Yes,” said the niece, “that quote is true. She also said, ‘Great love only happens once.’”

Had she as reported handed over her ten-thousand-dollar government check as next of kin to the Basilone family? “Yes, she gave it to them. And when Lena was asked if she wanted to be buried next to John at Arlington, she said, ‘I don’t want anything to do with them.’” Was “them” the government or the family? “The family. They did not treat her well. And when she died Lena was buried in California wearing his wedding ring.”

28

Sixty-five years after he earned the Medal of Honor fighting on Guadalcanal, sixty-three years after his death on Iwo Jima, there remains within the Marine Corps controversy about John Basilone. Not that anyone seriously disputes his heroism or questions the Medal of Honor, but you encounter differences of opinion about him, and he has his critics.

For instance, did Chesty Puller recommend Basilone not for a Medal of Honor but for a lesser award, a Navy Cross? No, reported Bob Aquilina, of the Marine Corps History Division, who sent me Puller’s formal recommendation of October 30, 1942 (just a week after the October 25 battle), for a Medal of Honor for Basilone.

Aquilina also provided more information about what exactly happened on Iwo. According to a dispatch from Marine combat correspondent Henry Giniger, shortly after the landing Basilone was “wounded fatally” when “he was about to lead his machine gun platoon forward through a heavy barrage.”

More descriptive is part of a cover story in the Marine Corps Gazette of October 1963, which also brings into question the account in Chuck Tatum