Hero of the Pacific

by James Brady

  But John was restless. And with his lack of education and difficulty with books, in a down economy, at some point he must have concluded that going into the Army (a private received twenty-one dollars a month; a uniform; a pair of stout, hard-soled shoes; and three squares a day) might be a way of escaping depressed and jobless Raritan. Not yet eighteen, he needed parental approval, and that took considerable convincing. According to sister Phyllis, their father, Salvatore, “tried to reason with him. ‘Johnny, you’re crazy. You’re only a kid. There’s no war, why do you want to join the Army?’” Raritan was a small town, and John’s mother was reluctant to see her boy leave home and go out into a very large and unknown world. He argued, though without any evidence, “I’ll find my career in the Army.”

  Wrote Phyllis, “He explained to papa that with the Depression all about us, it was almost impossible to get a job. Army life might be just what he was looking for, he said. Then again, when his enlistment ran out, conditions might be better.” On that point, Salvatore, an employed tailor but very well aware of the lousy job market, who’d been pressuring John to start a career in something, anything, reluctantly had to agree with his son. Doorly writes that the senior Basilones may have concluded the military could be “a good match” for a strong, active, out-of-doors kid like their son.

  We know to the day the date on which John would later join the Marine Corps, but there is a debate on when, even in what year, he earlier joined the prewar U.S. Army in the mid-1930s. Doorly believes John joined up in June 1934. Cutter tells me that by his reckoning, John enlisted “about three months before he turned eighteen [on November 4], which would have been August of ’34. I know his parents had to sign on.” His Marine Corps records insist he had joined the Army early in 1936. His 1935 Army service in the Philippines, thoroughly documented, indicates the Marine data is incorrect. But the military records that might solve this small and perhaps unimportant question were destroyed by fire in 1973 at the Military Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, where the archives were held. According to Marine historian Bob Aquilina, Marine and U.S. Navy records went untouched in the fire but Army records of the time were burned.

  There may have been additional arguments within the family about John’s enlistment, some fits and starts along the way, since with the requisite records missing, some contradictory evidence suggests that John didn’t actually enlist until he was nineteen. The Marine Corps, which apparently keeps files on just about everything, even the other military services, reports on John’s military service record that he joined the Army on February 5, 1936, and served on active duty with consistently excellent fitness reports until being discharged back into civilian life and the U.S. Army Reserve on September 8, 1939. Since there is reasonable proof that as a young soldier still on his first enlistment John arrived in the Philippines in March 1935 to start a two-year overseas tour of duty, we can conclude that, at least this once, the Marine Corps got it wrong.

  All we get is a fanciful line or two supposedly from “Johnny” to Phyllis Basilone as he left home for the Army. She describes his getting on the train at Raritan for Newark and then traveling under the Hudson River into Manhattan, no date given. “Well, Sis, I’m on my way. I wonder if this is what I really want; everybody’s advice is still ringing in my ears.” After all, the boy may not yet have turned eighteen.

  11

  When the Raritan Valley local pulled into its last stop one January morning in 2008, the three local men were waiting for me out in the cold in a red Lincoln truck because the station’s waiting room was locked. We’d arranged for me to meet with some people in New Jersey who could tell me about John Basilone, his home and family, his roots. The men were John Pacifico, a Roman Catholic deacon for twenty-five years at St. Ann’s Church on Anderson Street; Herb Patullo, who was driving the truck and who owns a historic piece of high ground in the nearby Watchung Mountains on which Washington and the Continental Army once encamped in a blocking position to mask Philadelphia from the British; and Peter Vitelli, a large, talkative man who used to be in sales and marketing in Manhattan and recalls that at age six at St. Joseph’s parochial school in Raritan, he once shook Basilone’s hand when the nuns trooped the returning hero around to the classrooms to greet the children in 1943.

  Pacifico, Vitelli, and Patullo, are members of the Basilone Parade Committee, three of those who tend to Basilone’s memory and reputation and still stage the march in his honor every September, commemorating the day he returned on leave from the Pacific wearing the Congressional Medal of Honor. Raritan erupted (no other word will do) in a spontaneous welcome as he took a jubilant stroll through the town, the kid who once delivered their laundry, carried their golf bags, and had now become an American folk hero.

  The men saw to it that I got a place in the truck, and it turned out they knew me from the page I wrote every Sunday for Parade magazine, a sort of accreditation as a professional that gave them a small assurance that I wasn’t just another nosy parker but a reporter who might be trusted. I was hoping there would be a station coffee shop where I might get a wake-up cup of coffee, but no such luck. These men were focused, however, and they knew precisely why I was there, and so we drove on.

  Our first stop was the Raritan Public Library, a small, trim white-framed building where on the second floor up the carpeted wooden staircase is the Basilone Room. It is nothing fancy, just a place where they collect and keep memorabilia about him. On a table were three white leather-covered photo albums filled with mostly black-and-white photographs: Basilone, in uniform and out, at various stages of youth (after all, he was still in his twenties when he died), pictures of his family, of friends, of the more or less famous movie stars who traveled the war bond sales route with him. I recognized John Garfield, who would play a Marine in a wartime picture, Eddie Bracken, Louise Allbritton. Vitelli leaned over my shoulder to identify people. He pointed out Virginia Grey. She was the woman who had caught Basilone’s eye, and he hers. There were casual shots set in a soda shop. Basilone, they said, was known to be “the biggest ice-cream soda drinker” in town, while his schoolboy hobby was “chewing gum,” and his ambition was “to be an opera singer”—if not a heavyweight boxing champ appearing in Madison Square Garden like his hero, a huge, strong, but awkward Italian fighter named Primo Carnera. There were pictures of Basilone in uniform, sometimes squared away and crisply tailored, or more casual on liberty with his “piss-cutter” overseas cap jauntily cocked or turned sideways. Beneath the uniform, there were two tattoos: “Death Before Dishonor” and a heart pierced by a sword.

  We then took off in Patullo’s red truck for a tour of the place where Manila John Basilone grew up, crossing the John Basilone Veterans Memorial Bridge over the Raritan River. “That’s the Doris Duke estate over there,” someone said, indicating a smooth, grassy, handsomely treed lawn that seemed to go on and on without ever a house in view. The place was so large you could hide a mansion on it. It had been a relatively warm and damp winter, and for January, everything was very green.

  “He was actually born in Buffalo,” someone said, “November 4 in 1916.” Halfway through World War I, I calculated hastily to orient the time frame we were discussing, “and at twenty-eight he was dead.” My guides showed off buildings where Basilone family or friends had at one time lived, other places of significance to Basilone, anxious to be helpful and at the same time to provide me a positive slant on their town. But not phonying it up. They took turns at talking or sometimes all spoke at once. I scribbled notes.

  “New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly (also a Marine, of the Vietnam era) was here for the Basilone Parade one September, and he called Raritan ‘a Norman Rockwell sort of town.’ It’s really a blue-collar town. Back then most people worked at Johns Manville. Or the Raritan Woolen Mills. Raritan started out Dutch, then it was Irish, and at the turn of the century the Italians and Slovaks came in. The Irish controlled all the justice system. Oh, sure, there was bias (established Irish versus
the arriviste Italians), a couple of incidents.

  “There’s the statue, at Somerset Street and the Olde York Road, the stagecoach road between New York and Philly.”

  We pulled over and got out of the truck to look at the town’s big monument, the outsized statue of John Basilone, a few yards from the Raritan River. “How tall was he?” I asked one of the men. “Five eight, five nine.” Someone else said, “Maybe five ten.”

  Proud of their hometown boy, I think they kind of wanted him to be taller. The statue itself was big and bronze, maybe seven or eight feet high, a muscular young man, bare-chested as he had been in that fight on the Lunga River on Guadalcanal. His arms cradled a heavy machine gun, the weapon he loved, his weapon for killing. He fought that night barefoot in the mud for better traction, but the sculptor had added what looked to me like modern Army combat boots. The replicated Medal of Honor on the statue was also, alas, a mistake, the Army version of the award, not the slightly different Navy version, as is appropriate for a Marine. Patullo pointed out for my tutelage the minor design distinctions in the two versions of the medal. That’s how sensitive these men are about “their guy” John.

  Next, we swung by Bridgewater-Raritan High and parked at John Basilone Memorial Field. We went into the athletic building and were greeted by a huge mural, maybe ten feet wide and about eight high, of Gunnery Sergeant Basilone. Out the other side of the building we walked onto the athletic field made of artificial turf, and the impressively modern composition running track surrounding it. Some boys in the infield played touch football while other kids, boys and girls both, in running shorts or sweats, sprinted or jogged laps. On the exterior walls of the athletic building looking out at the field were replicas of the two citations, the one for the Medal of Honor, the other for the Navy Cross Basilone was awarded posthumously on Iwo Jima.

  We stood there reading the citations. Once again, talking up Raritan as a fine place, someone said, “Out of six thousand people in Raritan, nine hundred or a thousand went into the service during the war.” They meant World War II, it was clear, not Iraq.

  It was obvious that Raritan remembers almost everything about its hero. “He went to St. Bernard’s grammar school. It burned down years ago. St. Ann’s was his parish. Father Russo was his priest. Amadeo Russo.” I noticed no one bothered to use Basilone’s name with me anymore. They realized by now I know who “he” was. As in, “He never went to high school.”

  After grammar school Basilone caddied at the Raritan Valley Country Club. “Could I see that?” I asked. “Will they let us in?” The answer was, “Sure.”

  “Raritan Valley C.C. was very elitist then,” I was informed, once again with a possessive local pride about their country club. “And the only way kids could make a living was to caddy. It was the Depression.” I was interested in knowing more about the caddying, about Basilone’s own golf. “John was good, but his brother Carlo was better.” I’d also read that the young Basilone had premonitions, that he foresaw things, including his own death in war. And that when he was caddying for a foursome of Japanese businessmen in the 1930s, he had one of his premonitions. Because the men were taking snapshots, Basilone sensed there was going to be a war one of these days and America would have to fight Japan. “Ever hear any of that stuff?” I asked. No one I spoke to in Raritan was buying it.

  Nor did they see anything sinister about the golfers. “Johnson and Johnson [of nearby New Brunswick] was just getting started off the ground and they built here. That’s why there were Japanese here then. They were okay.” Vitelli interrupted. “Tony Farese was the pro back then so he might know about premonitions, but he died recently at ninety-five. There was also a story Basilone once caddied for David Niven when he played Raritan. Niven told that to Pete, the bartender at P.J. Clarke’s, and Pete told it to me. Niven was supposed to have said it might have happened, but he couldn’t swear to it. Raritan was a very social club. A lot of people played here.”

  The Basilone house at 605 First Avenue (Basilone’s Marine service records insist 113 First Avenue) in Raritan is now a small office building housing a fire alarm company, All-Out Fire Protection. What kind of house was it then? I asked. “Just a normal up-and-down house.” How did they fit ten kids in there? My guides shrugged. It was Depression time, people made out somehow. We looked over the house and drove past sister Mary’s home and where brother Alphonse used to live over there on the right, on to Gaburo’s Laundry, the outfit that canned young Basilone from a delivery job for crapping out on the job, literally napping atop some piled-up laundry bags. Our next stop was at Basilone Place, a short residential street with small, neat houses on each side and carefully tended lawns, all of them very green in winter. This was where Joe Pinto still lived, and we were going to see Joe.

  My guides had phoned ahead and Mr. Pinto came to the door and welcomed us. He is a slender, very small man bent nearly double at the waist, and very old. In the old days, I was told, he owned the Raritan Liquor Store.

  We all took chairs and Mr. Pinto began to talk. “I grew up with him, more or less,” he said of Basilone. “I’m ninety-nine years old now, and there couldn’t have been a better guy. When he came home from Guadalcanal there was a parade here. He wore his uniform and he went all around town, and I was one of the guys he hung out with, his father and Chief Rossi of the police, Rocky Calabrese whose family had the department store.” I asked what Basilone drank. “Beer, soda, not so much wine, but he’d drink anything. We went up to Villa Firenze one night, a regular night, John and me and two girls, and I was driving a car I’d just bought [probably used, since wartime Detroit wasn’t making any new automobiles] and we had a flat up front. No jack, no lights, and two in the morning after a night of drinking. We’re standing around there, lighting matches so he could see, and John’s pumping the front tire with a hand pump, and we got going again. He was a regular guy, he’d do anything. A happy-go-lucky guy, about twenty-six years old.

  “He left to go back [to the war] and got married out in California. He never brought his wife back.”

  What was it like when you heard he was dead? I asked the old gentleman.

  “It was as if everyone in town went to hell. Everyone knew him, from his time as a laundry deliveryman,” he said. “I had a business, ran a liquor store, came up here in thirty-six. So I knew him, a happy guy, always razzing with the kids.” When I asked, Joe said, “No, he didn’t find the laundry job demeaning.” I asked other questions, about John’s boxing, reports that Madison Square Garden wanted him, that a promoter wanted him to go pro, did he and Pinto ever box? I asked again about his supposed premonitions. For a man his age, Pinto was very crisp in his responses.

  “I never sparred with him, and don’t think he ever gave a thought to turning pro. As for premonitions, no, I never heard any of that. And he was not a guy to brag about the past, what he did [in the Pacific]. A handsome guy, but he didn’t have much time for girls [others disagree bluntly on that point], and not a fancy dresser. I think he had one suit, and his father was a tailor, a man who would fix anything, no charge. His mom was a good looker and very nice. A nice, close family. I don’t think you will ever find another man like John. A good guy, and anyone saying ‘not’ ought to be shot. John was the kind of guy some people can hate because he was so right. They had a funeral mass right here for him at St. Ann’s.”

  On that exit line, we shoved off to meet the man who buried John Basilone, Raritan undertaker Anthony Bongiovi, ninety-six years old, whose home is attached to the funeral parlor and who received us in his blue wool bathrobe while reclining on a settee in the living room. He began by apologizing. “I’ve got this breathing thing.” He paused to take a breath. Then he went on with a long rambling story, not about Basilone but another wartime casualty, an Air Corps officer killed in a plane crash and how his mother was hysterical and demanded the mortician open the sealed coffin. “The mother is screaming, ‘I want to see my son, I want to see him!’ In those days they held a wake at home,
in the living room. So I didn’t want to see that with the Basilones. But I get a call from the Basilone family and I know [Mrs. Basilone’s] not going to be able to see her son.” It was three and a half year’s after his death before he was disinterred from an Iwo grave and sent home. So obviously there was nothing left that a mother should be shown.

  “I go to see the family at their home and I say, ‘What the hell!’ This is a local guy and the only one ever receiving a Medal of Honor, so I said, why not bury him right here at Raritan? At the house I calmed Mrs. Basilone. I said we could have John right here at home on the first floor [for a viewing of the casket]. I knew it would be a lot of work for me but what the hell. So I had the body shipped from Dover, Delaware.”

  This is confusing. The evidence indicates the body was sent directly from Delaware to Arlington, Virginia, site of the big national cemetery, with the government and the undertaker making the arrangements, the idea of burying John in Raritan having been scrapped. Bongiovi went on, at least in part clarifying the situation. “The funeral mass was said at St. Ann’s in Raritan with the burial to follow at Arlington.”

  The old man paused again to catch his breath. This was clearly tiring him, but he wanted to keep going. He was very clear about the last part of his story.

  “I had my own limo and the chief of police drove another car and the family rode with me and some others drove behind. I had it timed out so that in three hours [Bruce Doorly says it was four hours] we would meet at Arlington. I had never met John Basilone but it had to be right. We got to the cemetery and expected to see a firing squad and a casket with the flag on it, but when we arrived we got the Marine Corps band and a firing squad and a lot of generals, who they were I don’t know, and I said to myself, ‘What is this?’ I introduced the family to the higher-ups and we had the funeral. And that’s why, ever since, we celebrate this young guy’s death.”