Hero of the Pacific (22 page)

In the months he'd been away the war itself and even the helmets and the weapons had changed. The new Garand M1 semiautomatic rifles were slowly replacing the old bolt-action Springfields that went into service in 1903, and, more to the point with a machine gunner, there was the relatively new air-cooled version of the .30-caliber Browning machine gun, much lighter. No more pissing into the water jacket with these babies.

But as an Old Breed Marine, an old-fashioned sort of fellow, Platoon Sergeant Basilone took a traditional tack in breaking in the raw Marines of this brand-new platoon in a brand-new division. He requisitioned cleaning gear, buckets, swabs, and pine oil floor cleaner and put his handful of boots to work sweeping and swabbing the wood-frame barracks. It took two days to get the place up to the sergeant's gleaming, polished standards, but that's what boots were for, menial duties, physical labor, snappily delivered orders to keep them busy and out of trouble. And now the new men began to trickle in to fill out the new division's ranks, some of them from a recently disbanded Marine parachute outfit, paramarines, a cocky bunch who thought of themselves as the “elite.” Manila John wasn't impressed by what he thought of as “candy-assed” parachute training and wasn't buying much of that crap—including their penchant for tucking their trousers into their boots instead of wearing them loose outside as proper Marines did. Even the paratroopers knew about Basilone, and that in itself defused potential problems. As did the arrival of a couple of salty noncoms Basilone had known before, men who knew their stuff and didn't take any shit either from boots or from boot-wearing paramarines. We are forever being told that “sergeants run the Marine Corps,” and as a brand-new and still amorphous division like the 5th was forming up and starting to organize itself, the adage was never more valid.

Basilone and his NCOs soon had his platoon out on the ground working with the two machine guns. Nobody knew the heavy better than Sergeant Basilone, but he was no slouch on the LMG (light machine gun) either. He worked them hard, snapping in (drills without live ammo), prepping them for the real thing on the firing range. Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser, in their book, possibly assisted by brother George Basilone, flesh out the Pendleton episode before, in John's voice, he sailed again for “the fleet”: “A young sergeant, Biz Bisonette, checked in at the same time as the paratroopers and assisted with training of the company. [This is a mistake—Basilone had a platoon, not a company.] He was a tough cookie and an expert in hand-to-hand combat. When it came to jungle fighting we learned our lessons on the 'Canal. Any front-line fighter would need hand-to-hand skills as much as any weapon in the arsenal. The first order of business was getting the boys on the firing range with the .30-caliber machine guns, the old water-cooled Brownies and the lighter, air-cooled version. I drilled the boys on the mechanics and took them through the book, my book, on machine gunning . . . the care and maintenance, and of course, blindfold set-up, repair and tear-down, were all chapters in my book that my new boys would learn better than anything they ever studied in their lives. These new boots would also know how to operate all the weapons on the battlefield, ours and the enemy's, in case they had to use them.

“We practiced setting up various pieces of equipment until everyone could recognize any piece of a weapon by its feel and set it up in the dark. A vet sergeant named Ray Windle came on board in the next week or so. He'd seen plenty of action and knew the score on a jungle battlefield. He was a tough talker like Chesty, and a hot head, so I knew he'd be an easy mark in a card game and this gave me hope for off-duty entertainment. I couldn't fraternize with the boys to the point of gambling with them, so I was left with the non-coms. This cut my chances for extra income in half. But I was 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 line. She was dark—Italian or Spanish kind of dark. Black hair, dark eyes, and she walked around like she owned the place. Damn, I had to get to know that one. At first it was just a look between us. There was nothing on it. No wink or smile like we knew something special between us. It was just her looking at me from a distance taking stock of me and me looking back at her. I nodded and she might have nodded, or not, but she wasn't falling all over herself, to get to know me. I liked this girl. She was tough. And she was a sergeant, the rules against fraternizing [with enlisted female personnel] didn't apply.”

Maybe this was the girl he'd been waiting for since Manila and his cockeyed plans to take the bar girl Lolita home to mom, or, alternatively, to stay there in the Philippines with Lolita to start up a good bar or another bicycle shop (and, as things would have turned out, to end up in a Japanese POW camp).

Lena Riggi was a beauty, dark-haired, dark-eyed, like the girls and young women he most admired growing up in New Jersey. She was Italian, probably Catholic (yes, it happened that she was), the daughter of working people like his own, in her case onion farmers back in Oregon. That little nod and look John mentioned was sufficient to get the Pendleton mess hall rumor mill working. “Sergeant Lena Riggi ‘heard all from her lady friends about me. They went on and on about what a hero I was, how brave I was and that I knew all the movie stars.' Sgt. Riggi waited for the gossips to tire themselves out, looked at them and said, ‘So what?' She was the girl for me. When she saw me again she pretended like no one told her a thing about me and that was just the way I liked it.”

Given the exigencies of war and the accelerated training schedule of a brand-new division being formed, the romance wasn't going to be easy. The young lovers had conflicting schedules, there was little privacy, their barracks were several miles apart with very little available transport within the base to shuttle them back and forth. By day he was with his machine gunners, drilling them on both guns, the heavy Brownie of his heart and the more mobile air-cooled light. The pace picked up, the days of battle were coming, and they piled it on the new men and on the 5th Division generally: gunnery, night problems, obstacle courses, leaps into pools to simulate abandon-ship drill. They did underwater rescue and open-ocean distance swims.

Basilone, of course, concentrated on the guns, but as a veteran noncommissioned officer who had plenty of combat time and knew that more was coming, he kept up on the other skills, the intensified training the division was working on. “It was clear to everybody that because of the build-up, that we were headed toward a hell of a fight somewhere. We practiced beach landings and assaulted fortified positions. My machine gunners needed steady hands and cool heads for the work we had assigned to us. Our most important assault exercise was providing covering fire for a demolition man in an attack on a fortified position. We drilled by laying a line of covering fire about a foot over a man's shoulder as he ran toward an objective. One slip or a half second of distraction meant we would shoot our own man. Under bombardment on a beach it would be ten times worse and fatal for both the gunners or the demo man if it failed.” On Iwo Jima, these drills would pay off for Basilone's gunners.

Every Marine infantryman understands, and certainly a hardened close-range combat veteran like Basilone knew, the very risky aspect of covering fire, especially overhead fire, where short rounds meant you were hitting your own men in the back. At the same time, Marines assaulting a dug-in enemy loved accurate overhead fire that would kill or distract the men bringing entrenched fire to bear on them, the vulnerable assaulting infantry. The assaulting Marines were willing to take the risk to reap the potential reward of keeping the other guy's head down. These were among the fundamental truths by which the infantry lives—or dies.

Off duty, the next time John and Lena met, he asked for her phone number and got it. They had a movie date. This was hardly the only event on the Pendleton social calendar. The 5th Division would now formally be recognized as an entity, be awarded its regimental colors: the band would play, the generals gather, the regiments march. A few Hollywood people came down—Edmond O'Brien and Ann Blyth among them, but no Virginia Grey. Basilone feared for a time he might be asked to speak, but the idea of an audience of 25,000 Marines chilled him, and he was relieved the issue did not come up. After the festivities, a remainder of the day's liberty would be authorized. Finally, an afternoon free for Sergeants Riggi and Basilone. And it was obvious John's mind was on the young woman and not on the parade, the visiting Hollywood firemen, the brass, the regimental colors, or his newly minted division, but on Lena and the way her body moved. “She walked easy, like a girl walks when she's on her way somewhere important. She didn't have the kind of sway girls can turn on when they want to impress a guy. She walked right up and stood square on her feet with a beautiful big smile. Damn, she had a big beautiful smile with a mouthful of teeth you could see from a mile away.”

Evidently, John had seen plenty of women walking before, either with a sway or with a squared decisiveness as they approached him. And he knew the difference. Now, on this sunny liberty afternoon following the ritual formalities of the 5th Division's official entry into the Corps, all over the huge base, wherever there was an empty flat space, ballgames broke out, basketball but mostly baseball with one outfit pitted against another, intramural affairs, but well backed by cash-money wagering, the kind of thing on which Basilone had long thrived, betting on himself mostly. But on this particular Southern California afternoon Manila John had another sort of sporting life in mind.

Here is how in his words this rather sweet and very simple homespun mating dance began between a Marine and his girl, between a hero of the Pacific and the young woman who would become his wife. And just how, supposedly in his own words, it came down over the years through family to his nephew Jerry: “We probably walked several miles going from one ballgame to the next, talking all the way. She came from a big Italian family, onion farmers up near Portland, Oregon. That accounted for the stance she had that I recognized right away. She grew up working hard like the farm kids I grew up with. It generally made for a strong back and square shoulders, even on women. She didn't ask me a thing about the Medal. She didn't even seem much interested in war stories. That was good because I wasn't the guy to tell any. We just walked and talked like any other two people getting to know each other. Both being Italian and Catholic, there was a lot we already knew and didn't have to say. Mostly we talked about our families. She didn't mind walking which was always a good sign because I always had to walk to think clearly.”