Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [53]
With his Army hitch nearing its end, the young man was torn. He hated the boredom, the weather, not enough to eat even of the usual lousy food, the malaria, the bugs, the chiggers, the snakes, but most of all those “standing orders to retreat” in case of war, the prospect of a fallback to Corregidor if and when the Japanese came ashore. And John knew they were coming. He liked the discipline and much of the structure and purpose he found in the Army but hated some of it. He’s quoted on how enlisted men were handled: “They trained us to be fighters and treated us like convicts.”
John thought he might be in love with Lolita, even considered staying in the islands with her and starting a real business outside the bike shop cum nightclub. But in the end when his sergeant asked if Basilone planned to re-up for another tour, he said no. Twenty-one years old, he headed home to Raritan, as adrift as he had been three years before, as directionless and unfocused, as unskilled in civilian terms. And even worse, having returned home, he realized already that he missed some aspects of Army life—the machine gun, the boxing, the camaraderie. His nephew Jerry Cutter summed it up, supposedly in his uncle’s words: “I had lost the life, the calling I had found. I wasn’t a soldier anymore. I was lost.”
16
Back home, again a civilian, John Basilone recognized swiftly, pragmatically that “there’s not much use for a machine gunner in New Jersey.” If he expected much out of his hometown, he was mistaken. He went to see and seek counsel from his old priest/adviser Amadeo Russo at St. Ann’s. The men talked with the old familiarity, but there were no easy answers. At home Basilone self-consciously told stories of the Philippines but not about Lolita, whom he sloughed off as just another of the generic native girls he’d encountered. Asked about the Army, he didn’t feel that he could explain it very well, not so they would understand—the contradictions, the pull it had on him still, and the other, less appealing aspects of garrison life—not so that anyone “got” his mixed emotions. It was frustrating.
The Depression had eased marginally, and some of Basilone’s boyhood friends were settled down and doing well. Others were as adrift as he was. No high school, no marketable skills, nothing beyond being able to field-strip and rebuild a Browning water-cooled heavy machine gun. Basilone was a good boxer in amateur circles but was sufficiently savvy to know that was a long way from being a professional paid to fight like his old idol, Primo Carnera, in Madison Square Garden. There was always the caddy shack at the Raritan Valley Country Club. As an adult, he was caddying again that summer over his father’s objections: “You can’t be a caddy your whole life,” his father said. For a time he drove a laundry delivery truck for Gaburo’s Laundry (his sleeping atop the laundry bags apparently forgiven). Then he took a job in nearby Bound Brook with the Calco Chemical Division of American Cyanamid. That job lasted a year.
Basilone’s sister Phyllis and her husband, Bill Cutter, were living in Reisterstown, Maryland, near Baltimore, and Bill convinced John to become an installation mechanic for his gas company employer, the Philgas Company. Basilone moved in with the Cutters. He seemed to enjoy the work and was good at it, but after about eight months the old restlessness was working at him.
In a way he missed the orderly, organized misery of an enlisted man’s daily routine on a military post, no matter how distant or alien. And he was again sensing that war was coming to his country, his home, as it had to so many other nations around the world. It got him thinking about again enlisting. But this time he wouldn’t go Army.
Basilone was now twenty-three years old, a veteran, a traveled man, strong and aware of his own highly specialized skills and strengths, a solid 180 pounds, a formidable amateur boxer, and considerably larger than his father. But he didn’t know quite how to break the news to his parents that civilian life wasn