Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [45]
That subsequent, gracious, rather sad phone call reminded me not to dawdle. The people I had still to talk with or to visit (mostly Marines) weren’t getting any younger (nor was I myself, to be candid). And gradually, as I went, a picture was emerging of small-town 1930s America where their hero came of age.
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John Basilone, for all his restlessness, turned out to be a dream recruit. He was strong, tireless, not homesick, and for once, eager to learn. Once the drill instructor realized the young boot wasn’t just brown-nosing, he took note of and encouraged the lad. Basilone’s first outfit was Company D of the 16th Infantry stationed not on some hostile frontier or distant military post, but perched right out there in the middle of New York harbor, on Governor’s Island at Fort Jay. According to retired Marine Colonel John Keenan, editor of the Marine Corps Gazette, in the United States Army between the world wars, and specifically in the thirties, there was little or no formalized recruit depot or boot camp such as in the Marines. Recruits were usually assigned to an existing regiment of the regular Army, there to be trained and then incorporated into the ranks of the regiment, depending on its needs and the new soldier’s aptitude and skills, if any. This, on Governor’s Island, was to be whatever recruit training he would receive.
Jim Proser quotes Basilone as delighted with Governor’s Island, comparing the place to a country club, noting that it even had a small golf layout where he might hit a few balls. I’m not sure anyone ever filled him in on the island’s history, purchased hundreds of years earlier from the Indians for two ax heads and a few iron nails, and then doubled in size to 172 acres by landfill from the excavation of tunnels for the city’s brand-new subway system. In World War I a small airfield was built and pilots trained there to fly military aircraft. At some point German sailors were interned here.
But it was also on Governor’s Island that, for a variety of reasons, Basilone fell in love with his weapon of choice, the water-cooled .30-caliber heavy machine gun. For the usual enlisted grunt, the gun is far too heavy to be at all lovable or to become a man’s personal weapon as it would become Basilone’s. The Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser book takes up Basilone’s affection for the weapon, purportedly quoting him: “All through the summer [of 1934] I worked on my two specialties, machine gunning and poker. I also had a very active hobby across the harbor in Manhattan when we had passes [recruits aren’t usually issued many passes] off the base. This involved young ladies who seemed to be attracted to men in uniform. All in all, the Army was shaping up to the kind of life that was tailor-made for me.
“Even my specialty, machine gunner, suited me down to the ground. When I imagined myself in some future battle, even though I had no idea what a real battle was like, I only knew what I’d seen in the movies. I knew I wanted to be behind a machine gun. Outside of a tank, I figured that was the most powerful weapon on a battlefield, and I was damned if I was getting into a tank if I could help it. I couldn’t stand even being in a room all that much. I wouldn’t last ten minutes inside a tank.”
Was there a suggestion of claustrophobia? “The first time we rolled our 1917A Browning water-cooled .30 calibers out of the old fort’s magazine on their caissons, they looked to me like something I could handle. They were human-sized. They weren’t complicated. We rolled them out to the gunnery ranges and spent the next six weeks of our boot camp learning the