Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [66]
During the Frelinghuysen remarks, Basilone’s small niece, five-year-old Janice, sneaked up onstage to sit with him, drawing a roar in response, and remaining with her heroic uncle throughout. That was the press photo everyone ran the next day, the war hero and the little girl in her party dress on his lap. Fox Movietone News got it all, and the newsreel ran coast to coast the following week, including a recording of Basilone delivering a short speech about the country and its good people and promoting the sale of war bonds. His delivery is a bit stilted, but his voice is deep, almost rich. Catherine Mastice returned to sing a new song entitled “Manila John,” composed by the organist of St. Ann’s, Joseph Memoli with words by W. A. Jack.
Basilone at times seemed overwhelmed by what organizers called “the biggest day in the history of Raritan.” But for some stupid reason, pure military bureaucracy at work, I suppose, Basilone wasn’t to be permitted to enjoy the night at home. On orders, and pointlessly, he was hustled back to New York and a Manhattan hotel for the night. Maybe they feared that this close to home and family, he might go AWOL and they’d have difficulty getting their boy back to the tour. By Monday the call of the war plants was heard, and Basilone was back in New Jersey at the Johns Manville factory in Manville, just north of Raritan, meeting war production workers, shaking hands, and talking up war bonds.
The next day Basilone was at Calco Chemical, where he’d worked as a laborer. The Somerset County Bar Association beckoned that same day. One can only imagine what Basilone managed to say to the Bar Association: citing torts and precedents? Then it was off to Pittsburgh for a bond rally at a big steel plant. Within hours he was back in New Jersey, speaking to the Rotary Club at Somerville. It is not clear any of this coming and going so close to Raritan included a trip home to his mother and father’s house for a meal or a night with the family. Or what Gene Lockhart and Eddie Bracken and the actresses thought of small-town and industrial New Jersey as they were trotted around.
Doorly reports that someone, somewhere, finally decided to give the poor guy a break. A thirty-day leave came down from the top. Thirty days of no speeches, no war plants, no bond rallies. And by now Basilone badly needed a rest. He spent the time at home in Raritan, where he played with the local kids and slept late, bunking in with little brother Don, nights where he and his Raritan pals all did a little drinking and admired the local girls. But there was a letdown, a long-delayed reaction. Doorly details it. He quotes Basilone as telling friends in Raritan that as much as he appreciated the admiration and attention, he was a soldier and wanted to get back to the war. This is the first mention of Basilone’s yearning for the Pacific.
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There are men who quite literally love war, the rattle of auto matic fire, the crack of a single rifle shot, the song of the bullet’s ricochet, the sweet reek of gunsmoke hanging blue in the air, the heightened tension, the living (and too often dying) on the edge, the adrenaline rush, the yelling and shouting, the sound and the fury. Many of such men are Marines, veterans of different wars in different climes and down through the ages. I have myself after a firefight heard Marines coming out of the fight and back inside the wire coarsely enthusing, “Lieutenant, I love this shit.” In a book I wrote about motivation, about what draws Marines to the guns rather than, more rationally, away from them, a few Marine critics carped that of all the various reasons Marines fight, I had scanted the sheer love of a fight, the appeal of battle, the call to the guns, the passion warriors bring to battle. Manila John Basilone seems to have been one of those men, one of the war lovers.
By the late summer and early autumn