Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [44]
How did Sian feel about the news, knowing Basilone as he did? “I knew about him because when he came to Raritan [in 1943 after Guadalcanal] I was at the parade and all that stuff when they had the big time at Duke’s Park. Everybody was buying bonds. My father bought bonds. Then we all went to [Doris] Duke’s and had a big ceremony. I only met him once, when we were kids. I saw him in town. I was no friend of his. I just knew of him.”
Pacifico pressed Sian, but he didn’t know much. “Because, like I said, he’s on the other end of town so we were not friends.”
And about Basilone’s selling war bonds? “Well, he didn’t care too much for that. He didn’t care for the big shots because he was going to Orlando’s bar a lot with Gaburo. Al Gaburo was with him at that time, from when he was delivering laundry for Gaburo’s Laundry. He was pretty cocky later, let’s put it that way. I used to see him around town, not that I was friends with him.”
Did he talk then about combat, or about going back? “Combat, no, and yes, he really wanted to go back.” And at Iwo, did Sian ever land or remain aboard ship? Stayed on board. “Bombarded for two days and two nights. I knew he wanted to go back because he was going around this bar a lot and that’s when he used to talk about it a lot. I didn’t know he was on the island when we were bombarding and we found out he got killed when we got it on the radio.”
Pacifico continued asking about Joe’s relationships with the Basilones after the war. “Well, Dolores was a good friend of mine. She lived with me for a few months. She was the second youngest of the family. She went someplace. She had to take Donald with her. Donald’s the youngest and he’s still alive in Florida, and Dolores died. She died four and a half years ago. And that’s about it.”
There’s an authentic small-town American feel to much of this, my own interviews and what’s on the Pacifico tape, really less a profile of the most celebrated man in town than a last-century portrait of a provincial town and its people, a modest place only an hour from Times Square. In Raritan, if you lived at the other end of town, or on a different street, you weren’t friends. You met people at bars. You worked local jobs, attended Catholic schools. You didn’t belong to the country club but probably caddied there. In Basilone’s town almost everyone seemed to have an Italian surname, they prayed at the same churches, drank at the same bars, had the same favorite Italian restaurants, dated some of the same Italian girls, fell for a guy’s sister, worked at some of the same jobs. And most of the boys joined up during the various wars. They all knew who John Basilone was and remembered him. But how many really knew the man, the machine gunner who in passing through a damp tropical hell killed so many enemy soldiers and became famous?
The other thing about these Raritan interviews was the insistence over and over that Basilone hated the war bond tour, and wanted sincerely to return to the Pacific, to the fighting, to his Marine buddies. Everyone noted it.
Over the past year or two I searched for Basilone, for which of several overlapping or contradictory versions of the man and his war might be the real one, the true John Basilone. I visited Marine bases where he is anything but forgotten, the local libraries, museums, the archives of New Jersey’s largest daily newspaper—the Star-Ledger in Newark—and other newspapers, local and large. I interviewed friends, his fellow Marines, the citizenry of Raritan, his old neighbors, schoolmates, drinking buddies, the mayor, and then in a phone call, the one surviving of ten Basilone children, seventy-eight-year old Donald in Florida.
“So you’re the youngest of the Basilones,” I said as we began, and Donald responded, somewhat amused by the irony, “The youngest and the only.”
As noted, I’d gotten to see even the old undertaker, Anthony G. Bongiovi Sr., who buried John at Arlington. And, yes, Jon Bon Jovi was of the same family, albeit with a different spelling, but according to my Raritan guides, definitely