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to track down and capture the “guerrillas,” but the Americans never caught anyone in the rough terrain of the countryside. And there might have been the odd firefight, though how did you chase bandits through the bush lugging a Browning water-cooled heavy machine gun, basically a defensive weapon, and with its tripod, water jacket, elevating and aiming devices, and the pintle on which everything turned, weighing when loaded nearly a hundred pounds? The answer was, you didn’t, so it is highly unlikely the young machine gunner ever fired a shot in anger in the Philippine years.

For the bored, card-playing, womanizing, and randy young Basilone, there were, however, the attractive charms of the petite, dark-haired, dark-eyed local women, who he thought resembled some of the handsome Italian-American girls he’d known at home in Raritan. There were plenty of compliant “amateurs,” and there were the favorite girls at the local bordellos. According to a few dubious, entirely unproven allegations, Basilone actually became a junior partner in running one of these establishments of easy virtue. I found no credible evidence of that, but almost surely he patronized the brothels. The whorehouse “management” rumors may have derived from the small “nightclub” he and his girl, Lolita, set up inside her uncle’s bicycle shop, which sounds colorful and fun but reasonably innocent.

All of MacArthur’s troops looked forward to their R&R stints every six months in New Zealand, with its temperate climate, pretty girls, local beers, and “people a lot like us.” Some of the farmboys and ranchers among the enlisted men spent their R&R, and voluntarily so, living with families and working without pay and happily on farms and cattle stations (ranches). The Yanks found New Zealanders wonderful, but really they would have welcomed almost anything to get them out of the Philippines for a time. Some of Basilone’s fellow soldiers, their enlistments up, instead of going home to the States returned to New Zealand to marry local girls.

Beyond his acknowledged skill as a machine gunner, there was at first little to distinguish Basilone’s first overseas tour of duty, apart from his card-playing expertise and a penchant for going barefoot in monsoon season. Army-issue wool socks, when wet, itched, and men developed fungus and jungle rot. Cotton socks sent from home rotted quickly. Basilone had a simple cure—go without—and was regularly chewed out about it. But his feet toughened up, he developed surer footing, and he didn’t itch anymore. Going barefoot was just about all that set him apart from his mates—or it was until he began to box.

In the jock-happy prewar regular Army, service athletes, especially competent boxers, might do pretty well for themselves. MacArthur, who served once as superintendent of the Military Academy at West Point, understood the constructive role military athletics could play in a bored peacetime Army and encouraged the athletic culture. James Jones wonderfully (and tragically) portrayed the scene in prewar Hawaii in From Here to Eternity with fighter and trumpeter Robert E. Lee Prewitt as his hero. Young Basilone’s experience was more rewarding. He began boxing, horsing around at first in ad hoc fights. “A lot of steam had been building up in my head.”

Part of that “steam” was a professional and rather patriotic frustration. The soldiers had been told that if the Japanese (the closest, perhaps the only potential enemy) ever attacked, the plan was for American regulars of MacArthur’s little Army to retreat to Corregidor and fight it out from there. As Jerry Cutter reported the situation from Basilone’s point of view, “I didn’t like sitting around waiting for an attack just so we could run for it. And I didn’t like that we were stuck on this island [Luzon] and we weren’t even important enough to get soap. Sparring let me blow off steam and kept me sharp. Being a fighter got you privileges sometimes like an inside bunk and credit at card games—which I didn’t usually need.” Based on his success in those pickup bouts, he volunteered for