Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [41]
On that exit line, we shoved off to meet the man who buried John Basilone, Raritan undertaker Anthony Bongiovi, ninety-six years old, whose home is attached to the funeral parlor and who received us in his blue wool bathrobe while reclining on a settee in the living room. He began by apologizing. “I’ve got this breathing thing.” He paused to take a breath. Then he went on with a long rambling story, not about Basilone but another wartime casualty, an Air Corps officer killed in a plane crash and how his mother was hysterical and demanded the mortician open the sealed coffin. “The mother is screaming, ‘I want to see my son, I want to see him!’ In those days they held a wake at home, in the living room. So I didn’t want to see that with the Basilones. But I get a call from the Basilone family and I know [Mrs. Basilone’s] not going to be able to see her son.” It was three and a half year’s after his death before he was disinterred from an Iwo grave and sent home. So obviously there was nothing left that a mother should be shown.
“I go to see the family at their home and I say, ‘What the hell!’ This is a local guy and the only one ever receiving a Medal of Honor, so I said, why not bury him right here at Raritan? At the house I calmed Mrs. Basilone. I said we could have John right here at home on the first floor [for a viewing of the casket]. I knew it would be a lot of work for me but what the hell. So I had the body shipped from Dover, Delaware.”
This is confusing. The evidence indicates the body was sent directly from Delaware to Arlington, Virginia, site of the big national cemetery, with the government and the undertaker making the arrangements, the idea of burying John in Raritan having been scrapped. Bongiovi went on, at least in part clarifying the situation. “The funeral mass was said at St. Ann’s in Raritan with the burial to follow at Arlington.”
The old man paused again to catch his breath. This was clearly tiring him, but he wanted to keep going. He was very clear about the last part of his story.
“I had my own limo and the chief of police drove another car and the family rode with me and some others drove behind. I had it timed out so that in three hours [Bruce Doorly says it was four hours] we would meet at Arlington. I had never met John Basilone but it had to be right. We got to the cemetery and expected to see a firing squad and a casket with the flag on it, but when we arrived we got the Marine Corps band and a firing squad and a lot of generals, who they were I don’t know, and I said to myself, ‘What is this?’ I introduced the family to the higher-ups and we had the funeral. And that’s why, ever since, we celebrate this young guy’s death.”
We thanked Bongiovi for his time and help and said our good-byes, his daughter graciously apologizing for not having her dad all dolled up for us. There were cars and limos pulling up outside his funeral home now for another wake as we left the old undertaker and went out into the midafternoon sun. The following month I got a phone call from Raritan that Mr. Bongiovi himself, the undertaker who buried John Basilone, had died on February 1 at nearby Somerset Medical Center.
Before I left Raritan on the late afternoon train into Manhattan, I also learned about Basilone’s “double-dating with a buddy named Augie Sena at Chichi’s pizzeria in nearby Bound Brook before he left for the Army,” and about