Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [55]
Some of those maneuvers weren’t at Guantanamo itself but at the Puerto Rican Island of Culebra where, as early as the winter of 1923-1924, the Marine Corps had begun a concentrated and very serious program of amphibious warfare, training troops to land on hostile beaches under fire, from small boats launched beachward from transports, destroyers, or other larger craft. By 1940 and 1941, Basilone was one of many Marines readying for amphibious warfare. There were as yet no specially designed landing craft, and photos of the time show Marines jumping into shallow-water beaches from Chris-Craft speedboats, civilian-style 1920s motorboats of one sort or another, rifles at high port to keep them dry and out of the corroding saltwater.
In a still young country like ours, it’s fascinating the way history can compress and fold in on itself. Here we were in the 1940s training troops on islands and beaches won by Teddy Roosevelt and his generation at the end of the last century during the Spanish-American War, incorporating new assault tactics developed in the 1920s, to be put into action against the Japanese in the mid-twentieth century in World War II.
On New Year’s Day 1941 Basilone joined the outfit with which he would first see combat, D Company, 1st Battalion of the 7th Marine Regiment of the Fleet Marine Force (FMF). On March 1, 1941, he was transferred to D Company of the 1st Marines, a different regiment. There is no explanation for this transfer. Perhaps someone was short of a machine gunner, and indeed Basilone would soon land back in the 7th Regiment.
He wrote little, nothing that came down to us through family and friends or through the years. Instead, we get the spare official record of his service, the flawed memories of his folks, most of them now dead, and beyond that, a frustrating silence.
The paucity of letters from Basilone to the family, or to anyone, is frustrating. The nuns at his grammar school and Father Russo, his mentor, must share the blame for Manila John’s failure to write, even to the family, or keep some sort of informal diary. He must have had some informed, interesting things to say, one young man’s commentary on being in a peacetime American military while much of the cultured and civilized Old World was at war, a war that was maybe coming, and soon, to a still peaceful, complacent America. Why should we be immune? If France with its greatest army in the world could fall, London burn, and Poland, the Low Counties, Norway, and Denmark be conquered, why would we stand untouched?
Or might not machine gunner Basilone have made pungent comparisons between the Marines and his previous employer, the U.S. Army? Did he miss General Douglas MacArthur and his paternalistic cheerleading, yearn for the boxing, ache for Lolita? Was Marine chow better than the crap they fed him in Manila? Or was there anything else from his previous enlistment and two years in a foreign country from which he took lessons? From which fellow Marines might have learned something? When he read the papers, if he did, was he following with even a narrow professional interest what was happening in Europe and North Africa? When he heard of growing tensions in the Pacific, did he once more recall that foursome of Japanese golfers he once took as spies? Might Basilone not have taken scribbled notes, worried about the future, concerned himself about a possible American war, drawn and mulled obvious conclusions?
From Guantanamo Bay, sandy,