Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [68]
Basilone sent in an official request through channels to rejoin the Fleet Marine Force Pacific, the famed FMF PAC for which he had fought as a member of the 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division. It was just as officially turned down. The Marine Corps didn’t see any profit in returning a Medal of Honor man to combat and suffering the angst and second-guessing inevitable in getting a hero killed off.
And, the brass told itself, let’s face it, this guy was good at selling war bonds. In a traveling troupe of heroic servicemen and Hollywood stars, Basilone was a movie star himself. The dark good looks, the hint of danger, of a coiled tension, a recklessness that appealed to women sexually and to men who wished they had something of that same aura, these were the qualities that made Basilone so good at what he did on the war bond promotional tour. The best thing about it was that he was a “movie star” who in real life had been as heroic as any Hollywood idol on a make-believe screen.
Basilone was the goods and people got it. They recognized him for the real thing, and when he spoke and cracked that lop-sided Italian smile, the crowd understood this wasn’t just a practiced performer. This was a genuine American legend come to town or to the gates of the big war plant just outside, to say hello, to shake your hand, to congratulate the shift worker who’d exceeded his or her production goals that month, to the factory manager whose assembly line had earned an “E for Excellence” banner from the War Production Agency, to visit the local grammar school, to kiss the baby and muss the hair of the local kid, and to do it all with an easy grin, a half-bashful hello, a dashing young man in an honorable uniform, and, above all, that pale blue ribbon on his chest or the medal itself suspended from his neck by another matching pale blue ribbon. No wonder the girls and the women loved him, the men admired him, the kids shouted and ran after him. Louis B. Mayer of MGM, President Franklin Roosevelt’s close friend and financial backer, couldn’t have invented him, no Oscar-winning screenwriter could have written him, the marquee part of Manila John Basilone, a hero of the Pacific. As Basilone’s brother George had remarked, “Everybody loves you, John.”
Basilone raised money, boosted morale, sold bonds, reaped publicity, did the damned job, a job he was continually told was every bit as vital to the nation’s war effort as had been his ferocity in a fight, his mastery of the lethal Browning heavy machine gun, the man’s sheer animal endurance, the physical courage, the killer instinct.
Basilone, not educated, naive but hardly stupid, must have been aware this was simply pious, full-blown press pageantry. Peddling war bonds door-to-door was important, of course, the war had to be paid for, but there were plenty of good salesmen in America selling everything else, from Fords to encyclopedias and patent medicines. There were only a relatively few men capable, strong enough, and sufficiently courageous to go into the jungle barefoot and armed in a tropical rainstorm at night and fight hand-to-hand against the flower of Japanese imperial infantry, out to kill you and your buddies, and fully capable, as they’d already shown on island after island, of doing so.
Bruce Doorly gives us this evocative and in ways shrewdly illuminating vignette of the restless hero paradoxically at rest, during that monthlong military furlough back home in Raritan as 1943 neared its end: “After bond tours and visits to war industries, John was granted a thirty-day leave which he was able to spend at home. While most of the attention bothered John, when the attention came from kids, he loved it. John’s brother Carlo remembers that kids would gather outside the house at 113 First Avenue, yelling