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glad to have Windle with us. He was the kind of battle commander we needed around these boys. They looked so damn young, some of them. They looked like the sons or the kid brothers of the boys in the 1/7 [John’s Guadalcanal battalion]. Malaria and combat hadn’t touched these boys yet. Entire battalions started arriving. Many were boys who had trained to be paratroopers, like the earlier group. Once Topside caught on that you can’t parachute into a jungle, where most of our work was going to be, it became our job to retrain them in amphibious assault tactics and jungle warfare. Basilone was back in business.

The only drawback, according to Cutter and Proser, was “dames.” As Basilone said so himself, “Even on base I couldn’t get away from the women and the truth was, I didn’t want to.” There were plenty of Camp Pendleton women, healthy, fit young female Marines working the mess halls, and Basilone had begun looking them over. Despite their shapeless fatigues you couldn’t miss the curves.

You have to wonder why, only a two-hour drive from Los Angeles, it hadn’t even occurred to Basilone to call Virginia Grey, hop a Greyhound bus north to drop by her place, send her a post-card to say hi. After all, on the bond tour, all those overnight hotel stops and their having fallen for each other, it would have been the natural thing to do. Recall Basilone’s determination that there would be no more “love ’em and leave ’em” for Manila John. Not the way he felt about his movie star, Virginia, the lovely, classy, coolly irreverent actress who liked to knock back a drink with him and who made him laugh, the young woman who had nothing of Raritan about her, still less of prewar Manila.

But on her side, Miss Grey must have heard through Hollywood’s gossipy bush telegraph that her good friend John Basilone had been transferred to the West Coast a few hours away. Yet she made no move that we know of, even though it would have been the simplest thing to have the studio set up a PR mission to Camp Pendleton starring Miss Grey with a couple of other pretty actresses along for cover, a singer, and a comedian or two, to entertain the troops. The studios loved to do that stuff. It was good PR, good community relations, it was free publicity for the next movie release, the politicians liked it; in the White House Louis Mayer’s friend FDR would show his gratitude to the industry. But Virginia never came to Pendleton. Basilone never called her. Maybe, on both sides, their storied love affair had been nothing more than a flirt, or at a more basic level, a one-night stand.

Or Virginia Grey may have been off on location, making a movie somewhere, fantasy material; the reality was these mess hall girls on the same base. And Basilone was feeling horny and checking out the women Marines, still in that chauvinist time vulgarly referred to as BAMs, “broad-assed Marines,” though not usually in their earshot. Think of it, all those healthy young men and strapping, fit young women in their late teens or early twenties, eyeing each other, young hormones raging, while wartime husbands and wives, fiancées and girlfriends were far away. All this against the coiled tension of a nation at war and with new battles waiting. Manila John unblushingly admits to his own sexual frame of mind in early 1944, describing his preoccupation at the time as that of “a pig in a pastry shop when it came to females.” However many of the mess hall girls he went through—none of them immune to the fact he was not only handsome and a platoon (soon to be gunnery) sergeant but perhaps the most famous and openly admired noncom on the sprawling base—there must have been a few. “There was plenty of whispering about me being a war hero,” he admitted.

Then, and we can be sure about this, along came a BAM who was different, who cast a spell, who wasn’t just another attractive pastry in the shop. She was sergeant Lena Riggi, a reservist with one less stripe than John, but with other attributes. And Basilone was hooked. Here is his account of the meeting: “I saw her as I came down the serving