• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Basilone had proved himself a natural at war. It was coping with civilians during a peaceful interlude at home that was giving him difficulty.

20

Agala dinner at the Waldorf and there he was on Park Avenue, up on the dais, young, handsome, bemedaled, and dashing, a man’s man, somehow larger than life. But some still thought of John Basilone as the aimless, perhaps even shiftless, half-educated, hard-drinking young Italian Catholic Jersey kid with nine siblings but no “family” to speak of. A gambler and a brawler, a misfit who didn’t get out of grammar school until he was fifteen, who never attended for a single day the local high school, who caddied for a living at the country club, cadging tips from the rich guys, beating the other caddies at cutthroat poker for their tips, and who was fired from one of the few jobs he ever had, working on a laundry truck. And now here he was, Basilone of the U.S. Marine Corps, sitting up there on the dais in uniform and wearing the famous medal, at the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf, alongside such industrial giants as Alfred P. Sloan Jr. and others out of the pages of Forbes and Fortune magazines, a scheduled dinner speaker and an honored guest of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).

Those seating arrangements are one of the many paradoxes of this narrative, and was there ever such an absurd dichotomy? Manila John and the big shots. Seated nearby, the closest thing Basilone ever had to a role model or an icon, a Marine lieutenant general named Alexander A. Vandegrift, honored by President Franklin Roosevelt with the same pale blue ribbon that Basilone wore, a couple of very brave men of disparate backgrounds, the commanding general of the 1st Marine Division (and eventually commandant of the Corps) and the lowly machine-gun sergeant of the same division, but both of them Marines, both of them now, and maybe forever, legends of the Corps. If only Basilone’s battalion commander, Chesty Puller, were here, John could brace Chesty with his plaints. Well, then, with no Chesty on board, the “Old Man,” Vandegrift, would have to do.

With the timing and instinct that in the Philippines had earned Basilone the reputation and the undefeated record of a feared prizefighter, one who recognized and would exploit an opening when he saw one, and could sense weakness in an opponent, Basilone took immediate advantage of the place and the moment. During a (men’s room?) break in the proceedings he pounced on General Vandegrift, who had commanded him on the ’Canal and had that day in Australia pinned the medal on him. Vandegrift wore the same medal and additionally had a flag officer’s clout, but on this night Basilone had his ear, and he didn’t hesitate. The war in the Pacific raged, Basilone was a Marine who’d been there at the start, and now he wanted in at the finish. How could he get back into the fight when the big shots insisted on parading him around the country like a show pony, a traveling salesman working conventions and formal affairs like this one, when all he really wanted to do was to rejoin the war, again lead troops in the field? Could Vandegrift help? The general promised to look into it.

Maybe he did, but all John subsequently learned was that instead of being sent to join one of the Marine divisions now fighting the Japanese in the Pacific (there would eventually be six before the war ended), he found himself shunted off into the ultimate rear echelons of rear echelons, in a Navy yard a hundred miles from the nearest sea.

On August 31, 1943, while the American carriers Essex, Yorktown, and Independence attacked Marcus Island in the central Pacific, and in Europe the Russians advanced on Smolensk, John Basilone was reporting at and would be pulling guard duty in the Guard Company, Marine Barracks, Washington Navy Yard, with frequent timeouts to address a group or hawk another war bond.

Was this bureaucratic coincidence or was the Corps punishing the audacious SOB for having gone outside