Hero of the Pacific (14 page)

Jim Proser quotes Basilone as delighted with Governor's Island, comparing the place to a country club, noting that it even had a small golf layout where he might hit a few balls. I'm not sure anyone ever filled him in on the island's history, purchased hundreds of years earlier from the Indians for two ax heads and a few iron nails, and then doubled in size to 172 acres by landfill from the excavation of tunnels for the city's brand-new subway system. In World War I a small airfield was built and pilots trained there to fly military aircraft. At some point German sailors were interned here.

But it was also on Governor's Island that, for a variety of reasons, Basilone fell in love with his weapon of choice, the water-cooled .30-caliber heavy machine gun. For the usual enlisted grunt, the gun is far too heavy to be at all lovable or to become a man's personal weapon as it would become Basilone's. The Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser book takes up Basilone's affection for the weapon, purportedly quoting him: “All through the summer [of 1934] I worked on my two specialties, machine gunning and poker. I also had a very active hobby across the harbor in Manhattan when we had passes [recruits aren't usually issued many passes] off the base. This involved young ladies who seemed to be attracted to men in uniform. All in all, the Army was shaping up to the kind of life that was tailor-made for me.

“Even my specialty, machine gunner, suited me down to the ground. When I imagined myself in some future battle, even though I had no idea what a real battle was like, I only knew what I'd seen in the movies. I knew I wanted to be behind a machine gun. Outside of a tank, I figured that was the most powerful weapon on a battlefield, and I was damned if I was getting into a tank if I could help it. I couldn't stand even being in a room all that much. I wouldn't last ten minutes inside a tank.”

Was there a suggestion of claustrophobia? “The first time we rolled our 1917A Browning water-cooled .30 calibers out of the old fort's magazine on their caissons, they looked to me like something I could handle. They were human-sized. They weren't complicated. We rolled them out to the gunnery ranges and spent the next six weeks of our boot camp learning the weapon.”

No one else refers to Fort Jay as a boot camp. But Cutter and Proser press on, describing John's passion for the weapon: “You could see the rest of the boys getting excited as the sarge went through the ins and outs of the machine. He seemed to go on forever—by the book. The 1917A, its military purpose, capabilities, operating procedure, safety procedure, parts, and assembly—it went on all day. By the afternoon we were ready to get our hands on one and try it out. Sarge went on, the strategy of infantry assault, interlocking fields of fire, trajectory, care and maintenance. Just before chow, we set them up on the range and squeezed off our first rounds.”

In 1951 in North Korea with Dog Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, commanded by Captain John Chafee (the future senator), I was briefly in charge of a Marine machine-gun platoon, and this account of a first day's training with the heavy guns sounds like nonsense. This is not to blame Basilone but the family amateurs who wrote about him. For a young soldier, after less than a full day's training in a weapon as complex and deadly as the machine gun, actually to be firing live rounds without even the usual dry runs and “snapping in” without live ammo doesn't ring true. Or is this simply my being a Marine and overcritical of Army procedure? To be sure, I checked with one of my own former machine gunners, Charles Curley, at his home in Olean, New York. After I read him the passage, he went into detail on the education of a machine gunner. “Oh my God, lieutenant. In my case we were trained at Camp Pendleton on the gun, and then before I ever fired a live round, I had to work my way up, from ammo carrier to assistant gunner to gunner. It was never accomplished in just one day. You had to drill on the gun, take the gun apart, reassemble it, name all its parts, even tell them how many air holes cooled the jacket of the air-cooled gun. You learned all that, then you lugged the ammo, before you ever fired a round of live ammo.” Maybe during the ensuing six weeks of machine-gun drill, Basilone actually fired the damned thing, but it surely wasn't that first afternoon.

Basilone, in the Cutter and Proser book, goes on: “For me, it was a God-given moment [those first rounds squeezed off]. It was pure thunder in my hand. The most awesome personal weapon ever built. With correct technique, the gun could fire almost continuously for days before the barrel had to be replaced. It could fire in all weather, in all directions and accurate at 150 yards [This is also silly. The gun's sights are graduated to 2,400 yards and the effective maximum range almost half that and not the meager 150 yards impressionable recruit Basilone supposedly believed.] I was safe and nobody else was. I was like the God who throws thunderbolts.” The mock literary allusion doesn't really fit the Basilone we know.

His enthusiasm wasn't feigned, however. This wasn't just a kid's normal excitement over a new and elaborate toy. Basilone truly loved the machine gun. The passion began right there on Governor's Island and would continue through his army years, the first overseas tour at Manila, his Marine Corps hitch, on the 'Canal, and he would still be lugging a Browning machine gun, fiddling with its head space, fretting over its care and feeding, using it to kill people, up until Iwo Jima, on the last day of his young life.

But long before then, there was that other youthful enthusiasm which also sounds genuine; there were the girls. Just a pleasant ferry ride away, the city of New York, with its millions of women, its Third and Sixth Avenue bars under the elevated trains, the Greenwich Village joints, the German beer cellars, the brauhauses of Yorkville on the Upper East Side. So passed a pleasant season, machine-gun drill, poker, ferry rides, and Manhattan honeys.

And sometime early in the new year of 1935 the young soldier was, for the first time, about to travel at government expense, to begin seeing something of the great world beyond Raritan and neighboring New York City. Basilone was being transferred, first sent to the West Coast, and then overseas, to the distant shores of the faraway Philippines. Had a restless small-town kid really found a home in the Army?

John Basilone had been a soldier long enough by now to have put aside any youthful illusions. You think it was easy earning that twenty-one dollars a month in the Depression-era Army? The corporals and sergeants chivvied and hassled you from reveille to Taps, the officers lorded it over you, and if you cursed back, hit out, or even gave anyone ranked higher than you a sour look, the MPs beat the shit out of you and you went to the stockade where they beat up on you some more. But what were the options? Where were you going to go? There was no money and little hope or opportunity beyond the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) or the Army, only the unemployment lines, the soup kitchens, and the hobo jungles with the rest of the tramps, where the strong screwed boys and weaker men, because there were no women, and thugs would beat a man to death for a pint of rye whiskey or his mulligan stew. As hard as the soldier's life was in the thirties, were you really going to give it up for that and go out on the tramp?

Phyllis Basilone Cutter's story details her kid brother's travels as he departed the garrison at Fort Jay for California and then across the Pacific to Asia. She makes it sound a pleasant idyll.

“The group of us were herded into buses for the quick trip to the Pennsylvania Station in New York. Arriving at this tremendous station our sergeant for the trip counted noses as we filed out of the buses and stood at attention on the walk. To the curious onlookers we must have presented quite a sight as we marched through the station, down the steps to the lower level where our train lay waiting. I was anxious for a window seat as I had never traveled much before and did not want to miss the view. Approaching the vestibule of the Pullman car, I broke ahead and ran for a window seat which I fortunately got. In a few minutes we heard the conductor's ‘all aboard,' the peep-peep of the signal, and we were on our way. I got into my seat, hunched back and munched on my goodies, and we were on our way.

“Reaching Chicago, we passed over a maze of tracks and had a tiresome three-hour layover waiting for the West Coast Limited. Finally we were made a part of this super train and heading westward. Looking back, the huge buildings and skyscrapers of Chicago faded in the distance as our train picked up speed. The trip was uneventful. As I watched the countryside speeding by, milepost after milepost, I was amazed and felt small indeed as the vast panorama spread itself before my eyes. I had never been on such a long trip. I soaked up the ever-changing landscape like a dry sponge, for which, during the dark and anxious days still to come, I thanked God because it gave me strength when I needed it most. Just to feel that I was a tiny part of a vast country that we all more or less take for granted, until we sense the danger of losing it, was the spark that kept us going in the face of odds that seemed insurmountable. So you see, folks, we young-uns do think seriously on occasion.”

There is much in this passage that's both phony and yet quite sweet, natural, and rather innocent. Maybe it was just a protective big sister's efforts years after the fact to shape the narrative in ways to make her kid brother sound better. The phony part isn't simply that self-consciously corny “young-uns” line, but the reference to those “insurmountable odds.” In 1935 as John set off for the coast on his first serious travels, there was no war going on; that was still six years ahead. Such passages, written long after Basilone's much later voyage to a real war in which he would fight heroically and be killed, suggest that his sister was imagining what a boy on his way to war might have felt, translating his wartime emotions to a much earlier, long but essentially uneventful peacetime train ride across a tranquil nation. But some of the passage does ring true: a young man's excitement at embarking on a long trip and seeing the big country for the first time, hustling to find a window seat, munching his goodies—chocolate bars and peanut brittle—gawking at the landscape speeding past, marveling at a first glimpse of Chicago. He was, after all, still a boy, but if it was all a long way from Raritan, Johnny Basilone was to travel farther, and further, much, much further.

The Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser parallel account of that same train ride is juicier, somehow more credible, even when contradictory. In their book, Basilone leaves for California from Grand Central Station instead of Penn Station. Here's their account leading up to and of his trip west following a couple of days leave in Raritan:

“In July there was a machine gun competition on the base. My unit, D Company, walked away with the pennant. I was in a company of 58 winners. I could easier spend a year with these guys than a weekend at home. They were my family now. This was my home and the army was my life. I was a soldier.

“We shipped out to San Diego on the Super Chief out of Grand Central Station. You might have thought of it as the Wild West by what went on in the saloons in the station. The closer it got to ‘all aboard' the wilder things got. Fellas who never smoked or drank in their life were doing two at a time. That went for women, too. I'm not proud of the way we acted but I won't pretend we were choirboys either. We were warriors and likely off to war [once again, a war that wouldn't begin for them until 1941]. Orders were for the Philippines. Soon enough, the MPs cleaned the places out and got us on the train. They were some of the roughest sons of bitches I ever met, those MPs. If you didn't hear them the first time they said something you might never hear anything again. They used those white batons the way Ted Williams used a ball bat. [Williams was at this time, in 1935, still an unknown schoolboy, not the major league star who hit .400, so the reference simply doesn't work.] Five or six boys got dumped into the train bleeding or doubled over with the wind knocked out of them. I hadn't really seen that kind of rough stuff before. In camp nobody was ever gotten beaten like that, that bad. In a way, after all the ceremonies, and speeches after basic training, this was the real graduation. We were trained for violence and here it was. Every one of us who could still walk wanted to jump off that train and smash those MPs in the face. That's who we were now. We were violent men. We were a hunting pack and our blood had been spilled. We were ready for our first kill.”

What first kill? No one was fighting; there was no war.

“A long train with soldiers holding full pay envelopes was like a dream come true. The first crap game started before we cleared Grand Central. I was in no hurry because the money wasn't leaving this train for the next four days. I wanted to see the country since I'd never been outside New York and New Jersey.

“We slept in our seats and washed over a basin the size of a soup bowl with one foot wedged against the bathroom door so we wouldn't get knocked around by the swaying of the train. By the second day we were starting to smell like goats. Civilians who got on the train didn't stay around us long. We were irritated as hell from not getting any decent sleep and arguments were breaking out every hour or so. If it weren't for gambling, I'm sure we would have been at each other more than we were. The fact we still had three days to go didn't help. We had our choice of three kinds of sandwiches, ham, cheese, or ham and cheese. Pretty soon we weren't a crack fighting force, we were a gang of squabbling chiselers and malcontents. The Army made sure we were going to get to California alive, but they weren't worried about morale. The unfunny joke going around was they were going to put down straw for us and give us hay instead of sandwiches at the next stop. I lost interest in the passing scenery. It all looked the same. I just wanted to get off that train and away from my brothers-at-arms. After the third day of sleeping sitting up and eating stale sandwiches, we were all miserable. Liquor bottles, puke, and cigarette butts covered the floor in some cars. The porters wouldn't come near us anymore, and neither would any civilians. We were stuck with each other in our filth and stench. We sat shoulder-to-shoulder unshaven and hung over. All we thought about was getting off that train. Fights broke out and almost nobody tried to stop them.”