Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [32]
“‘Beats me, but somebody did,’ he said. It was done now and I was pleased with it.”
Not every night was tattooed, drunken, or lecherous. The local girls also loved the new American dance, the “jitterbug,” and were mad to learn more about it and work on their technique. There were families that took in some of the boys for domestic, warm, family-style meals and small, relatively sober parties. Men fell in love and got married, some were “adopted” by families and helped out the households with a little cash, and they learned to drink tea, sitting around the kitchen table as they’d done at home. They taught the Aussies our songs and learned theirs. To this day Marines who served Down Under can recite the lyrics of all four stanzas of “Waltzing Matilda” and do a pretty good job on its close harmony. American farmboys vanished for days at a time and then wandered back to the base explaining they’d been helping a local farmer get the crops in. Basilone fell for the younger children of one family and found himself playing on the floor with a little girl who reminded him of a niece in the Reisterstown, Maryland, home of his sister Phyllis Cutter and her husband, Bill.
The Marines who came to Australia, as well as others who went to New Zealand in those days, were there for rest and relaxation and recuperation, to cure the malaria and purge the intestinal worms. To come back from the dead. So that soon they would be sufficiently fit to fight the Japanese all over again on some other lousy island. Or maybe right here up north in the swamps and on the beaches of the northern coast with its malaria and crocodiles. Military bases thrive on rumor, on scuttlebutt; gossip was the circulating blood of everyday garrison life, and here at Melbourne the talk was of when they might be leaving, where they would be going next, about the order of battle and terms of engagement the next time out.
And now, in the spring of 1943 (which was autumn Down Under), other rumors began to circulate through the 1st Marine Division, not about the future but about its so recent past, some of it about Manila John Basilone and his exploits last October on Guadalcanal. There had already been some talk, earlier rumors, the morning after the fight on Bloody Ridge, especially about how Chesty Puller himself had gone out of his way to recognize Manila John and give him a “well done” for having gone back for ammo under fire at the worst of the enemy attack. Basilone heard the talk, of course, but refused to put much stock in it. After all, as he said, “There were thousands of boys fighting and dying. Why should I be singled out?”
Then in May 1943 the scuttlebutt ramped up.
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Perhaps the best account of the time and the place comes not from Basilone family accounts or from neighbors and boyhood chums at Raritan, and certainly not from the taciturn John himself, but from another Marine who was there, the “other” Marine machine-gun sergeant from Guadalcanal, Mitchell Paige.
In January 1943, Paige, a more buttoned-up NCO than the casual, carousing Basilone, had been commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps, his date of rank backdated to October 1942, which meant a nice packet of back pay. Basilone, only slightly junior as sergeant to Paige, was not offered a commission. Later, he would be given several such opportunities, but not in early 1943. Not that he wanted or had politicked for an officer’s gold bars. Manila John was happy being a sergeant. Paige, in his own postwar book, writes about that May in Melbourne where some quite extraordinary things had begun to happen. Fortunately for us, if Basilone wrote very little, Paige took notes or had an exceptional memory.
“One day we received word that a very distinguished person would be visiting our camp at Mount Martha. We were all busy with our machine guns when we saw the inspecting party coming through our area. We were instructed to continue our work. This was a great departure from the standard practice of a troop formation and formal inspection for a visiting dignitary.