Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [73]
Camp Pendleton, where I’ve served (most Marines have), is a big, stark, parched, and rather primitive ranchlike spread of hilly brown terrain given to brush fires in the Santa Ana wind season and floods in the rainy time, covered with wartime acres of dun tentage and flat fields dotted with metal Quonset huts and the newer large, spare two-story wood-framed barracks and similar-looking mess halls and outbuildings, some of them still smelling of newly sawn wood. The landscape was populated, except for the Marines, largely by rattlesnakes, coyotes, jackrabbits, and plenty of tarantulas, the husky, hairy spiders mainly visible by night when the headlights of speeding autos or military vehicles pick them up, slow-moving and shimmering, on the brownish hill-sides. Pendleton is situated on the Pacific coast a half hour north of San Diego, an hour south of Laguna Beach and its beachfront hotels and bars, surfers and pretty California girls, and maybe another hour south of LA and Hollywood.
I suppose there is some way to calculate how many Marines have passed through the main gate of Camp Pendleton, California, since John Basilone arrived there in January 1944, men either reporting in for training or prior to shipping out later for the Asian or the Middle Eastern wars. Named for famed Marine general “Uncle Joe” Pendleton, it is a huge base fronting on its west side the Pacific coastline and the garrison town of Oceanside, whose main drags are a kaleidoscope of bars and small restaurants, uniform tailoring and pressing shops, a couple of small churches, filling stations, pawn shops, fast-food joints, barbershops and beauty salons, and tattoo parlors, with plenty of cute young California blondes and the off-duty, on-the-prowl Marines who hunt them.
This chunk of Southern California is an arid stretch of hills, cut by arroyos that flood swiftly after sudden downpours, the terrain reaching mile after rolling mile to the east where further miles away you can see the Southern California coastal range, mountains that for half the year are topped by snow. Marines began going to war from Pendleton in the 1940s when the enemy was the Japanese five thousand miles away, on all those lethal islands. In the summer of 1950 Pendleton started sending another generation of Marines seven thousand miles to Korea, to the Pusan Perimeter, the landing at Inchon, the desperate fight at the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea, and to the bloody Outpost War in which my class of young Marines fought until the truce of 1953. Then came Vietnam and the awful decade in which 58,000 American soldiers and Marines died, most if not all of the Marines direct from Camp Pendleton. In more recent years, the maws of Iraq I, Afghanistan, and Iraq II, were once again being fed through the main gate at Camp Joseph H. Pendleton.
Sensibly, they gave Basilone a platoon sergeant’s job with a machine gun platoon. The men of the platoon, most of them young, including a kid named Charles W. “Chuck” Tatum, who would write a good book about that time at Pendleton and the battle for Iwo Jima, all recognized who Basilone was. You could hardly have been a Marine in 1943 or 1944 and not known of Manila John. The legend was now a member of the new 5th Marine Division, but his brother George was also on the base, training with the slightly older 4th Division, which would be heading out to the Pacific and the war before the 5th Division got itself organized. At the moment the 5th was nothing more than a skeleton formation peopled by newly graduated Marine boots and a cadre of seasoned noncoms and a few young officers. Basilone