Hero of the Pacific

by James Brady

  We thanked Bongiovi for his time and help and said our good-byes, his daughter graciously apologizing for not having her dad all dolled up for us. There were cars and limos pulling up outside his funeral home now for another wake as we left the old undertaker and went out into the midafternoon sun. The following month I got a phone call from Raritan that Mr. Bongiovi himself, the undertaker who buried John Basilone, had died on February 1 at nearby Somerset Medical Center.

  Before I left Raritan on the late afternoon train into Manhattan, I also learned about Basilone’s “double-dating with a buddy named Augie Sena at Chichi’s pizzeria in nearby Bound Brook before he left for the Army,” and about “a red-haired girl named Josephine Cianciella, a local babe who went out with John in the late thirties, after he got out of the Army. He was dating Josephine and then he left to go back to the war. Her father was the local druggist.”

  But when we phoned, Augie Sena wasn’t available, nor were several other promising sources, so I provided Pacifico a list of questions for the deacon to ask if he could nail any of the sources down and convince them to sit still for a tape-recorded grilling.

  12

  As good as his word, later that month John Pacifico sent from Raritan an audiotape of three interviews he’d conducted.

  First was ninety-four-year-old Augie Sena, who said he’d lived all his life in Raritan. As to when he and Basilone met, he said, “In the late thirties at the Raritan Valley Country Club, we both caddied there together. I didn’t know him that good. We lived on different streets. He was very friendly, made friends with a lot of people.” About sports, Sena said, “I knew him as a football player out there. No, I never knew him as a fighter.” Nor did he remember any premonitions about the Japanese golfers. “We caddied for the Japs because they played a lot of golf there. I think [he went into the Army] for the excitement. He wanted to travel. But [contradicting Joe Pinto] he had a lot of girls. He was a good-looking fella. So he had a lot of girls as far as I know.”

  Sena remembered Basilone when he came back from Guadalcanal with his medal. “I knew him back then, knew him pretty good. He used to deliver my laundry. A lot of times we used to meet at the Checker Diner around the circle in Somerville and we used to talk a lot. They had a big parade for him and then after that we were having coffee one day together and he was telling me he was going back [to the Pacific war] and I told him he was foolish. He would sever a lot of bonds like that. He told me he had to go back, wanted to go back. I don’t think he changed much from when he went in and when he came back [from the war]. He liked to go back to the Army [Augie meant the Marines], he told me. He had an easy go and was selling bonds and he didn’t have to go back, and I asked him why he wants to go back. He said he had to go back. That’s what he told me.”

  Pacifico asked Sena whether he and Basilone discussed combat. “No, we never talked about that.” Was it patriotism that had John out selling war bonds with movie stars? “No, he didn’t think it was patriotic. He’d rather go back and fight. He’d rather go back with his buddies, he said. That’s what he told me. He was anxious to go back, he told me. I told him he was foolish but that’s what he said, that he wanted to go back. He really wanted to go.” Augie kept stressing that. And when the brass said okay? “He really wanted to go back. It was the last time we had coffee and he was telling me he was leaving the next day, and that was the last time I seen him and I never seen him no more after that.”

  And when Sena learned his friend and neighbor had been killed? “I think Steven Del Rocco told me. He told me John Basilone got killed on Guadalcanal [actually Iwo Jima]. I’m pretty sure Steve told me on Anderson Street.” And his memories of Manila John? “That he was a good person, that’s all. He fought for the country. He had to go back. He died for his country. He was a good man, that’s all I could tell you.”

  Former mayor Steve Del Rocco is eighty-nine years old and a lifelong Raritan inhabitant. He recalls, “I grew up with John and the whole family and got to know John pretty well on the golf course at Raritan Valley C.C. where he excelled in golf and he was a very good golfer. He was a very ambitious kid. [The family certainly didn’t think so, and his father was forever asking John what he was going to do with his life.] He was always looking to do something, like he had ants in his pants and he couldn’t stand still. Always looking to do something. Times were tough then. It was during the Depression, the biggest depression of our lifetime. The sport that I know he was the best in was golf. One of the best golfers in town. Every Monday was caddies’ day and John would always be there, playing golf. He was a real good golfer. He played for a little bit of money and the more he played for, the better he was. Other sports, I’m not familiar with.”

  Did Del Rocco believe Basilone went into the Army because there were no jobs, or for excitement and travel? “I think he went in because [he] wanted to do something and there was nothing [here] to do. It was a depressing time those years in the thirties and I think it was a great challenge for him to go into the Army.” And after that tour in the Army? “We knew him. He used to hang around what they called the joint down Ellison Street, and that’s the last time I saw John [before the war]. We were playing cards there that night and he was leaving the next day to join the Marines, and that’s the last time I saw him. He looked like he was anxious to get in the Marines, he thought it was something a little tougher, or something better. He would like it better than the Army, and I’m sure that he found it a better place to go. That is, for him. What motivated him, you know, he worked in the laundry, and I remember he got the job there and he stayed around for a while, and he got a little tired of the job and I think that’s why he left.”

  And after Guadalcanal and the medal? Was he still one of the boys or distant? Scarred by the war or something like that? “Well, he wasn’t scarred by the war. The only thing I can say about that is that I knew he missed it. He wanted to go back to it. He wasn’t very happy selling war bonds. That wasn’t his forte. He couldn’t wait to get out of here and go back into the Marines. He never talked about combat. We never, one of us, brought it up. I think that was what drove him back to the Marines that he didn’t want to sell war bonds. He just didn’t want to do it. He wasn’t up to it. He’d much rather be with the boys he left behind. Very anxious to get back, to get back in the worst way. He had a chance to spend the rest of his life as a Marine without going back to battle, but he chose to go back to battle to be with his friends, and that’s something you got to admire.”

  And when the future mayor learned his local pal was dead? “I got a telephone call from I forget who it was who called me and told me about it and I didn’t know anything about it until this phone call, and of course the next day it was all over the papers. That’s when I knew for sure. There’s not much I can say except to say his love for his country, to go back when he didn’t have to go back. He could have stayed here and laid around and lived a good life, but he chose to go back and sacrificed his life for his country.”

  Del Rocco was one of the pallbearers, “the last pallbearer still alive. The big regret,” he said, “that John’s mother passed away before his body came back to Raritan or was taken to Arlington. [Not so; Dora Basilone attended her son’s funeral at Arlington.] But when anybody was killed or died in the service, ten thousand dollars was given out to the family, and at that time John was married to a Marine girl from California and when she got the check for ten thousand dollars she turned it over to the Basilone family in respect of John Basilone. “She returned ten thousand dollars to the family.”

  Lena Riggi’s niece later confirmed that story to me that her aunt, John’s widow, gave the ten thousand dollars to the family. That didn’t mean there wasn’t some family hostility toward the widow, for whatever reason. Later I would get some insight into that.

  Pacifico also got another neighbor on tape. Joe Sian is also eighty-nine and a lifelong friend of the Basilone family but one with a special perspective: “During the war when he got killed at Iwo Jim
a, I was there at the time [aboard a Navy warship providing naval gunfire support to the Marines ashore]. Yes, I heard it the same day because I was in the radio gang and when it came over our speaker I knew about it. It was the same that day as every day with that invasion. You were there two days of bombarding, day and night. And then we went back to the Philippines.”

  How did Sian feel about the news, knowing Basilone as he did? “I knew about him because when he came to Raritan [in 1943 after Guadalcanal] I was at the parade and all that stuff when they had the big time at Duke’s Park. Everybody was buying bonds. My father bought bonds. Then we all went to [Doris] Duke’s and had a big ceremony. I only met him once, when we were kids. I saw him in town. I was no friend of his. I just knew of him.”

  Pacifico pressed Sian, but he didn’t know much. “Because, like I said, he’s on the other end of town so we were not friends.”

  And about Basilone’s selling war bonds? “Well, he didn’t care too much for that. He didn’t care for the big shots because he was going to Orlando’s bar a lot with Gaburo. Al Gaburo was with him at that time, from when he was delivering laundry for Gaburo’s Laundry. He was pretty cocky later, let’s put it that way. I used to see him around town, not that I was friends with him.”

  Did he talk then about combat, or about going back? “Combat, no, and yes, he really wanted to go back.” And at Iwo, did Sian ever land or remain aboard ship? Stayed on board. “Bombarded for two days and two nights. I knew he wanted to go back because he was going around this bar a lot and that’s when he used to talk about it a lot. I didn’t know he was on the island when we were bombarding and we found out he got killed when we got it on the radio.”

  Pacifico continued asking about Joe’s relationships with the Basilones after the war. “Well, Dolores was a good friend of mine. She lived with me for a few months. She was the second youngest of the family. She went someplace. She had to take Donald with her. Donald’s the youngest and he’s still alive in Florida, and Dolores died. She died four and a half years ago. And that’s about it.”

  There’s an authentic small-town American feel to much of this, my own interviews and what’s on the Pacifico tape, really less a profile of the most celebrated man in town than a last-century portrait of a provincial town and its people, a modest place only an hour from Times Square. In Raritan, if you lived at the other end of town, or on a different street, you weren’t friends. You met people at bars. You worked local jobs, attended Catholic schools. You didn’t belong to the country club but probably caddied there. In Basilone’s town almost everyone seemed to have an Italian surname, they prayed at the same churches, drank at the same bars, had the same favorite Italian restaurants, dated some of the same Italian girls, fell for a guy’s sister, worked at some of the same jobs. And most of the boys joined up during the various wars. They all knew who John Basilone was and remembered him. But how many really knew the man, the machine gunner who in passing through a damp tropical hell killed so many enemy soldiers and became famous?

  The other thing about these Raritan interviews was the insistence over and over that Basilone hated the war bond tour, and wanted sincerely to return to the Pacific, to the fighting, to his Marine buddies. Everyone noted it.

  Over the past year or two I searched for Basilone, for which of several overlapping or contradictory versions of the man and his war might be the real one, the true John Basilone. I visited Marine bases where he is anything but forgotten, the local libraries, museums, the archives of New Jersey’s largest daily newspaper—the Star-Ledger in Newark—and other newspapers, local and large. I interviewed friends, his fellow Marines, the citizenry of Raritan, his old neighbors, schoolmates, drinking buddies, the mayor, and then in a phone call, the one surviving of ten Basilone children, seventy-eight-year old Donald in Florida.

  “So you’re the youngest of the Basilones,” I said as we began, and Donald responded, somewhat amused by the irony, “The youngest and the only.”

  As noted, I’d gotten to see even the old undertaker, Anthony G. Bongiovi Sr., who buried John at Arlington. And, yes, Jon Bon Jovi was of the same family, albeit with a different spelling, but according to my Raritan guides, definitely a cousin. There had been something of a family falling-out early in Jon’s career, a disagreement over his dropping a family marketing and commercial connection as his reputation grew. A neighbor in Raritan congratulated me for having been just about the last reporter to see the undertaker, to ask about Basilone and do an interview. And now I was going to have somehow to arrange an interview with Donald Basilone in Florida, the kid brother, the only Basilone left.

  That subsequent, gracious, rather sad phone call reminded me not to dawdle. The people I had still to talk with or to visit (mostly Marines) weren’t getting any younger (nor was I myself, to be candid). And gradually, as I went, a picture was emerging of small-town 1930s America where their hero came of age.

  13

  John Basilone, for all his restlessness, turned out to be a dream recruit. He was strong, tireless, not homesick, and for once, eager to learn. Once the drill instructor realized the young boot wasn’t just brown-nosing, he took note of and encouraged the lad. Basilone’s first outfit was Company D of the 16th Infantry stationed not on some hostile frontier or distant military post, but perched right out there in the middle of New York harbor, on Governor’s Island at Fort Jay. According to retired Marine Colonel John Keenan, editor of the Marine Corps Gazette, in the United States Army between the world wars, and specifically in the thirties, there was little or no formalized recruit depot or boot camp such as in the Marines. Recruits were usually assigned to an existing regiment of the regular Army, there to be trained and then incorporated into the ranks of the regiment, depending on its needs and the new soldier’s aptitude and skills, if any. This, on Governor’s Island, was to be whatever recruit training he would receive.

  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.”<
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  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.