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Marines are celebrated for the profane eloquence of their wrath, and Vandegrift was a celebrated Marine. These were his men who for months had been abiding in hell and, despite everything, had met and defeated the Japanese and captured one of their islands after nearly a year of seeing the Japanese invade and occupy our islands. And now this worn-down, fevered corps of heroes had been billeted in a swamp and barred from more salutary precincts by a lack of Army shipping! The situation did nothing to endear the U.S. Army to the Gyrenes or to their general officer commanding. Alexander Vandegrift’s righteous rage swiftly reached the United States Navy, and more to the point, it got to Bull Halsey, a man who appreciated a good exchange of oaths, who on the spot issued orders to send Navy transports to Brisbane to pick up the 1st Marine Division and deliver it to Melbourne. When the Marines out there in the swamp heard the news, they cheered Halsey’s name.

Said Basilone, “Our first sight of Melbourne as we docked in the harbor brought tears to our eyes, it seemed so much like home. That is, the home we knew, the Golden Gate in Frisco, the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, Chicago on the Great Lakes, St. Louis and the mighty Mississippi. We disembarked and with the Division band in the foreground, we paraded through Melbourne to the cheers of thousands of friendly people. During our march through the city our eyes drank in the sights. We had forgotten what a simple thing like a wide city street looked like.”

To men who for months had been slogging through swamps and along narrow jungle trails, such things were startling in their commonplace loveliness, as were the lighted streetlamps of a city not blacked out by night, to say nothing of the dry barracks and clean bunks following the morass of “tent city” Brisbane.

And the girls, the girls! Basilone marveled at them as well. “They weren’t jealous like girls back home, they’d simply ask each other if they’d had a nice time. It was a little confusing, don’t get me wrong, they were nice girls and wonderful company even if your ego was dropped a bit.”

“We had by now gotten over the first flush of liberty,” Basilone is quoted as saying, which sounds rather tame considering that, even today when Marines are asked how a liberty weekend had gone, the cheerfully vulgar but standard response might be, “I got screwed, blew-ed, and tattooed.” Basilone added that he and his buddies now, for the first time, “began to look around and enjoy the people. They were without question the most honest and sincere people we had ever met. They threw open their homes to us and most of the men took advantage of their generous hospitality. Some of the boys fell in love, some lived with families, especially the boys from the Midwest, who really had a ball. They did all the farm chores and, while exhausted, they enjoyed it.”

One local favorite to which the Marines never got accustomed was mutton for breakfast, or pretty much at any meal and anytime. But as Basilone noted, despite mutton, “We were slowly but surely getting back our strength and, with it, our desire to live.” Part of that desire, naturally, was sex.

“There were never enough girls to go around and it was a rat race to get a date and hold it. I did pretty well.” At this somewhat modest boast from the newly arrived but hardly bashful Marine sergeant, it might be well to go to Basilone’s nephew Jerry Cutter on the subject. Cutter quotes Basilone about those early days at Melbourne: “Strangers were buying us drinks, taxicabs gave us free fares and women came out of their houses to meet us. Now the women, what can I say about the women? To begin with they weren’t shy. They stood up square to a man and told him straight out what they liked, didn’t like, and how they expected things to go. And things certainly did go. One of the things going around camp after that [first] night was, ‘what they say about Atabrine [that it rendered a man impotent] ain’t true. ’ One thing I learned about