Hero of the Pacific Read Free Page B

feckless young private Jessica Lynch and Arizona Cardinals football star Pat Tillman? Both became the innocent tools of a military publicity apparatus that ambitiously turned an understandably terrified young woman and a tragic victim of friendly fire into heroic but essentially synthetic symbols of American courage under fire. The New York Times editorial page savaged the Pentagon’s misinformation campaign for conjuring up “the false story that PFC Jessica Lynch had been captured in Iraq after a Rambo-like performance,” when she’d actually been injured in a truck crash. And Tillman’s mother, Mary, in a book about her son, wrote that “officials tried to hide details about the incident because . . . it made the Army look bad.” Ergo the cover-up, trying to persuade a nation that Tillman “had been killed by the enemy in Afghanistan (in a battle that won him a questionable Silver Star) long after the military knew he had been killed accidentally by fire from American forces.”
    But even suggesting half a century later that Basilone’s heroics might similarly have been concocted infuriates contemporary keepers of the Basilone flame. Men such as Deacon John Pacifico of St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church in Raritan seem ever vigilant and ready to stand up to defend the Basilone name and his legend. In May 2007, sixty-five years after the Marine’s death, Deacon Pacifico angrily told Vicki Hyman of the state’s largest newspaper, the Newark Star-Ledger , “That’s not what the Army was like in World War II. That’s not what the Marines were like.”
    Having been a Marine myself and still a working journalist and writer of books about Marines at war, I thought Basilone’s story was worth telling, worth a search for the real Basilone. I’ve grown fascinated by Manila John, sometimes puzzled by him, and I’m still trying to get a grip on him—not the bronze statue but the real man, not the marketing image but the real hero—and what made him tick.
    In the Corps, you meet natural-born warriors, live with them, fight in the next hole to them, men like Basilone. Sometimes you understand them, frequently you don’t. Or there’s nothing to understand; he’s just another Marine you serve with but never really know. In ways, we’re all the same, we’re all different. Maybe you’re a cowboy, a kid off the farm, a young tough, an inner-city smartass, or a college boy like me, a young lieutenant, as mysterious to the other fellow as he is to you. You have nothing in common, you and he, only the one thing: you’re both Marines. You have that, and when you both have also fought in combat, you very much have that, too.
    Fighting a war, especially alongside other soldiers, fighting together, you learn the password, you know the secret handshake of combat, of the Few, the Proud, the Marines. Which is why it was conceivable that before I finished writing this book I might eventually get to know a man I never met, who died when I was a schoolboy, get to know him almost as well as all those folks who loved him so.
    His story begins on an island few people had heard of before 1942.

PART ONE
    GUADALCANAL
    Guadalcanal. On the evening of October 24, 1942, then sergeant John Basilone made a stand on the strategically important high ground near Guadalcanls Lunga River and south of the vital Marine beachhead, which included Henderson Field, His efforts and thiose of his fellow Marines and sailors handed the Japanese their first defeat in the U.S. island-hopping campaign up the Pacific.

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    Like Johnny Basilone, the country itself back then was big and brawny, a bit wild and sure of itself, had never been defeated in war, and was accustomed to winning; still young and tough, not effete or decadent like all of those tired Europeans being bullied by dictators, caving in to and being overrun by the loathsome, menacing Adolf Hitler. Our purported