Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [48]
The Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser parallel account of that same train ride is juicier, somehow more credible, even when contradictory. In their book, Basilone leaves for California from Grand Central Station instead of Penn Station. Here’s their account leading up to and of his trip west following a couple of days leave in Raritan:
“In July there was a machine gun competition on the base. My unit, D Company, walked away with the pennant. I was in a company of 58 winners. I could easier spend a year with these guys than a weekend at home. They were my family now. This was my home and the army was my life. I was a soldier.
“We shipped out to San Diego on the Super Chief out of Grand Central Station. You might have thought of it as the Wild West by what went on in the saloons in the station. The closer it got to ‘all aboard’ the wilder things got. Fellas who never smoked or drank in their life were doing two at a time. That went for women, too. I’m not proud of the way we acted but I won’t pretend we were choirboys either. We were warriors and likely off to war [once again, a war that wouldn’t begin for them until 1941]. Orders were for the Philippines. Soon enough, the MPs cleaned the places out and got us on the train. They were some of the roughest sons of bitches I ever met, those MPs. If you didn’t hear them the first time they said something you might never hear anything again. They used those white batons the way Ted Williams used a ball bat. [Williams was at this time, in 1935, still an unknown schoolboy, not the major league star who hit .400, so the reference simply doesn’t work.] Five or six boys got dumped into the train bleeding or doubled over with the wind knocked out of them. I hadn’t really seen that kind of rough stuff before. In camp nobody was ever gotten beaten like that, that bad. In a way, after all the ceremonies, and speeches after basic training, this was the real graduation. We were trained for violence and here it was. Every one of us who could still walk wanted to jump off that train and smash those MPs in the face. That’s who we were now. We were violent men. We were a hunting pack and our blood had been spilled. We were ready for our first kill.”
What first kill? No one was fighting; there was no war.
“A long train with soldiers holding full pay envelopes was like a dream come true. The first crap game started before we cleared Grand Central. I was in no hurry because the money wasn’t leaving this train for the next four days. I wanted to see the country since I’d never been outside New York and New Jersey.
“We slept in our seats and washed over a basin the size of a soup bowl with one foot wedged against the bathroom door so we wouldn’t get knocked around by the swaying of the train. By the second day we were starting to smell like goats. Civilians who got on the train didn’t stay around us long. We were irritated as hell from not getting any decent sleep and arguments were breaking out every hour or so. If it weren’t for gambling, I’m sure we would have been at each other more than we were. The fact we still had three days to go didn’t help. We had our choice of three kinds of sandwiches, ham, cheese, or ham and cheese. Pretty soon we weren’t a crack fighting force, we were a gang of squabbling chiselers and malcontents. The Army made sure we were going to get to California alive, but they weren’t worried about morale. The unfunny joke going around was they were going to put down straw for us and give us hay instead of sandwiches at the next stop. I lost interest in the passing scenery. It all looked the same. I just wanted to get off that train and away from my brothers-at-arms. After the third day of sleeping sitting