Hero of the Pacific (23 page)

Basilone and Virginia Grey had also walked for hours the night they met, first for drinks and then back to the hotel. Walking with a girl apparently brought out the talk in the usually reticent Basilone, though this particular stroll on a military base doesn't sound like much of a romantic lovers' lane. “We walked past rows of tanks, trucks, and all types of artillery. She joined the Corps because she wanted to be with the top outfit in the war effort.” It may be difficult to accept in a more skeptical age, but during World War II people in the United States actually did talk in patriotic phrases like that. Basilone continues, “It wasn't hard to figure out that with all this hardware around us, and only a few hours left of liberty, that we didn't have all the time in the world to get to know each other. The talk always circled back to family and how much we missed them.”

That was February 1944. Basilone was twenty-seven years old and had a year to live.

For several months the young lovers saw each other once or twice a week, despite the distance between their barracks. The typical date was a movie on base and a couple of sodas at the PX since John, as he put it, had “stopped boozing,” except on a few occasions when he went out with the boys to the Oceanside bars where they drank 3.2 beer, “getting dizzier” and spending more time “pissing” the weak brew than drinking it.

On March 1, 1944, Basilone had earned that other stripe, being promoted (on a temporary basis, which was the norm at the time) to gunnery sergeant. A few more bucks every payday, increased respect, additional responsibility. The promotion surely was welcomed and enthusiastically accepted, unlike those second lieutenant's commissions he'd flatly turned down.

Out in the Pacific as March became spring, fighting came to a bloody end on Bougainville, where 8,000 Japanese died or were wounded in the last-ditch fighting at a cost of only 300 American casualties, and an air and naval war raged in the Carolines with U.S. forces having the upper hand, while the Australians pushed ahead on New Guinea. Everywhere we seemed to be winning and the once “invincible” Japanese enemy losing. The great Japanese base of Truk was hammered. In a single naval and air attack the ever larger and more powerful American Navy could now typically deploy a dozen carriers. Basilone and his pals could recall bitterly when the United States was so short of operational carriers that Admiral Jack Fletcher asked permission to pull back from the Solomons entirely while we still had one or two carriers left, and in so doing left the fighting Marines ashore bereft of air support except for the handful of shore-based “Cactus Air Force” planes at small, battered Henderson Field. To a veteran of those bleak and bloody months on Guadalcanal, Marines, sailors, and GIs, it seemed another war entirely.

Then at Pendleton word went out. Another of the two big new Marine divisions, the 4th, George Basilone's division, was getting its orders and would be headed west to the fleet, to the war, to the Japanese-held islands. And in early June on the other side of the world, a huge amphibious force of Americans, Brits, Canadians, and French landed on the beaches of Normandy. It was D-Day; Europe had been invaded, Hitler would be dead within eleven months, and Germany would surrender soon after. But here in the Pacific, the Japanese would still be fighting, and few of them ever surrendered.

Once the 4th Division had shipped out for the Pacific, Basilone and his mates in the 5th knew their turn was coming. The tempo and difficulty of the training became more intense; the field exercises stepped up even further. And this just as the poor guy had fallen in love and for the first time in his often chaotic life was seriously thinking about marriage and wondering just what it took to have a lifelong and loving relationship like the one he knew at close range between his own mother and father. Was such an enviable life partnership possible for Manila John and his new love, Lena Riggi?

There were no uncertainties about the growing intensity of his daily military training grind, the pounding the Marine infantry was taking in the hardening process. No one knew precisely when or on which new hostile island it might be, but the 5th Division Marines sensed another landing was coming, and their officers wanted them ready. The Marines themselves wanted to be ready. Basilone summed it up for his machine gunners, who on average had to carry considerably more weight than a mere rifleman, not only the heavier weight of the guns but the ammo boxes, the tripods, the aiming devices, all hard steel, as the men themselves were now hardening into. “We worked a lot on physical training, getting our lungs and legs to the point where we could hump steel and supplies uphill or through deep sand all day.” It sounds reminiscent of Basilone's own training runs off Manila Bay in preparation for prizefights against the likes of Sailor Burt.

Basilone drove his men as he had driven himself, knowing how even more demanding combat could be. None of this facilitated a love affair with the girl he wanted to marry. “It was hard to have energy left over to see Lena even though I was thinking of her all the time now. She was thinking of me too and wasn't at all shy about telling me how she felt.” By the start of May, John knew that his time with Lena, their time together here at Pendleton, was running out. He was trying for once to think ahead. There was much to talk about, to do, if only there wasn't the pressure of time, the need to rush. “I wanted to know how it was to love somebody the way Pop loved Mama. At least I wanted a few days, or weeks if I could get it, to know what it was like to be married. I wanted to be able to say ‘I love you' a few times and mean it. Maybe it was something we wouldn't have done if we weren't in a rush, but Lena agreed to marry me. We set the date for July 10th, 1944.”

There were three problems: the Marine Corps, money, and the Catholic Church. There was also John's brother George, now in harm's way. On June 15, the 2nd and 4th Marine divisions had landed on the big enemy-held island of Saipan, and hard fighting raged with heavy casualties on each side. Was George okay? No one could yet say.

Closer to home, Lena was working out things to be done, and laying plans for something she'd always hoped for: a big, white wedding. The duty chaplain, the Catholic padre of course, declared in ex cathedra tones that he needed two weeks of instruction for the bride. As a Catholic myself, I'm not sure why the priest didn't also need two weeks with John. When Lena explained to the chaplain (all Marine chaplains are naval officers, not Marines) that as a serving sergeant in time of war, she couldn't just take off for two weeks to go to wedding school, the good father was tolerant but firm. She would just have to find the time. Rules were rules, and as not only her priest but as her superior officer, he intended to follow them, and she had better as well. Fed up already, an irritated Lena Riggi demanded of the stuffy priest, “What are you going to tell me? You've never been married.” And that was that.

John liked this girl better all the time. Like him, she was a bit of the maverick. Together, they went to St. Mary's Church in downtown Oceanside and found themselves a more pragmatic Catholic father, Reverend Paul Bradley, to whom they explained their dilemma, and in the end he agreed to marry the young couple with or without the fortnight's instruction, thereby rendering unto Caesar (the Marine Corps and its chaplains) the things that were Caesar's but rendering to God the things that were God's, a couple of Catholic kids in love and about to be separated by the damned war.

The ceremony was set for three p.m. on July 10 at St. Mary's. Lena was a half hour late, the single-vehicle Oceanside taxicab company having forgotten her reservation. Attending, and patiently awaiting the bride, were John's commanding officer Colonel Justin Duryea, the executive officer, Lena's sergeant, and the women in her outfit. Some local people dropped by to wish the couple well, and a few reporters from Los Angeles showed up. Standing in for her dad, Sergeant Frank Budemy walked Lena down the aisle and gave the bride away.

Father Bradley recited the vows, the couple looked into each other's eyes, John kissed the bride, and yet another wartime marriage had been solemnized in a small-town church just outside the main gate of a military post somewhere in America.

The only difference was that here were two Marine sergeants being wed and one of them was one of the more recognizable people in the country. The small reception was held down the street at the Carlsbad Hotel, a convenient and useful favorite of Hollywood studios making war movies and calling on the Marine Corps for cooperation and the use of facilities and open spaces on the nearby base's tens of thousands of acres. The studios and the Washington big shots knew the value of such films to morale and the war effort, and unless a breach of security were involved, the Marine Corps and the other branches tried to be cooperative, even to the extent of having troops appear as extras. Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser describe in Basilone's voice the place and the moment: “The reception wasn't fancy, with meat and everything else being rationed, but even so we managed to have a pretty decent dinner with some of the people from our units. Most of them didn't stay, making up excuses about a night maneuver or something they had to get back to in camp. None of us had much money. Everybody knew I was pretty well tapped after paying for the ceremony and I'd have to pay for them if they stayed to eat. A few of Lena's girlfriends stayed and a few fellas from my unit got a drink at the bar and sat with us, saying they weren't hungry.” Soldiers that age are always hungry, and it's obvious that such men, who liked John and empathized with his financial straits, were giving the groom a gracious out.

“After dinner,” Basilone went on, “we spent our honeymoon night in a room upstairs. We were happy together. Even though it was a rush, I know I did the right thing. I think she felt that way, too.

“We were on the train early next day to see Lena's people in Portland. The train was hot, crowded and dirty. We managed to get a seat while most of the Marines and sailors on board had to stand. We traveled until late the following morning, over 24 hours, with no place to sleep except our seats. I thought a lot about the fancy private cars and having our own plane on the bond tour. I wished I could give Lena some of that kind of treatment. She wanted the fancy stuff that women want for their weddings and it was a shame she didn't get most of it. But she didn't complain, I had to give her that. She didn't make a peep and I started to feel lucky I married her. That was our honeymoon, a stopover in Los Angeles on the way and a few days in her parents' home in Portland.”

Back in Oceanside, there were no apartments they could afford, their joint income at that time being about seventy bucks a month. “Lena got pissed off after a few days and wanted to use my name and status to pry open a place to live. I was having none of that. I wasn't going to trade on the Medal for anything. It wasn't completely mine anyway. Nine boys also owned it with me. I thought this might be a hard idea for her to understand and I expected we would have our first big fight, but she surprised me again. I said what I had to say about it and we never talked about it again. She was a Marine and she understood what I was saying. It was then that I knew I had married the right one for me. We continued to live in camp in our separate barracks.” So much for romance in the middle of World War II.

When the two wangled a seventy-two-hour pass they took a train north to L.A. with less than a hundred dollars between them, zeroing in on Beverly Hills and places that let servicepeople in without a cover charge. When they fell in line outside a joint owned (or fronted) by a former boxer, a very good light heavyweight turned movie comic named “Slapsie Maxie” Rosenbloom, word quickly got out that the young Marine waiting to get into the place was John Basilone, and a flunky murmuring the words “Medal of Honor” began hustling Lena and John toward the head of the line. But John “wasn't having any of that,” and he and his bride abandoned the idea of an evening at Slapsie's and went down the street to a different boîte, named for another comedian, Joe E. Lewis, considered more of a “class place,” where for some reason the young couple was welcomed without incident. Once inside, however, the two Marines found themselves experiencing the same sort of fuss. Basilone sets the scene: “Joe E. Lewis . . . was there. His routine was all about boozing and losing money on the horses. He had almost everybody in the place almost dying with laughter. A few people who said they were somebody in the movies came over to our table and said hello. They left business cards and told me to give them a call. They wanted to introduce me around town to movie people. Joe introduced me from the stage and I had to stand up and take a bow while everybody clapped. Joe was a real patriot. He was close to fifty [to a Marine in his twenties, apparently quite an antique] but he did shows for a lot of the fighting boys who were stranded on islands out on the Pacific.”

It's possible that John might have been thinking of himself on Samoa and the 'Canal or of his brother George that day on Saipan. Or of his own new 5th Division, which would soon be headed west to the islands of the Pacific. Of Lewis, he said, “The brass didn't want him to go [to the war zone] but he needled them until he got himself flown out on a cargo transport. All he brought along, a change of clothes and a few cases of good Scotch. He made a lot of friends and brought a little bit of home out to us. He was a real good guy so I stood up for Joe and fried under the spotlight for awhile. He was a good comic for Marines since his two favorite subjects—drinking and gambling—were pretty much what we liked to do too. Lena didn't mind all the attention, it was all new to her, so I stood up there and let her enjoy it. It was our best night together. We ended up walking back to our hotel as the sky turned from black to deep blue and the stars faded out. We were getting used to each other. That 72 hours was our best time together. Our last day was just rest. We didn't get out of bed until dinnertime.”