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wiping out enemy soldiers right and left. He had been a week on the island, and already “all the newness was worn off by now. We were dirty, tired and mean.” The generally sensible Bruce W. Doorly, in his monograph about Basilone, the privately published Raritan’s Hero , seems to have bought into the Phyllis Cutter version in his own variation on the incident:
    â€œA U.S. patrol had spotted a small group of Japanese on a scouting mission. John was told to bring three machine gun crews and wipe out the enemy, hopefully leaving no survivors that would bring information back to enemy headquarters. Guadalcanal was jungle with low visibility. John and his group snaked their way quietly [dragging those heavy guns?] toward the location where the U.S. patrol had seen the Japanese. Luckily the Marines spotted them undetected. Basilone led the group, moving in closest to observe that the Japanese had stopped to eat, obviously unaware of his presence. Moving back toward his men, John instructed them to set up in a half-circle around the unsuspecting enemy. He cleared his forehead, wiped his eyes. Then started firing his machine gun. The rest of his group also opened fire. John observed the Japanese reacting as they were shot. He later said, ‘They seemed to be dancing up and down. I forgot to realize the impact of heavy bullets was jerking them into all sorts of crazy contortions.’”
    The new-to-combat Marines had been warned about treachery and enemy tricks, playing dead, for one. “John decided to take no chances. He walked around, finishing off the enemy, making sure they were dead by firing a short burst from his machine gun. One of John’s men, Bob Powell, said, ‘Jesus, Sarge, what the hell are you doing? Why waste ammo on dead ones?’ Just as Bob finished his words, a supposedly dead Japanese soldier jumped up with his gun in hand. Another of John’s men quickly shot him down.”
    Wrote Doorly, “On the way back to camp two of his men got sick. This was everyone’s first taste of war. They were very fortunate . . . they suffered no casualties.”
    While Doorly’s version of that first real firefight is more controlled than that of sister Phyllis, there appears to be a need here among Basilone chroniclers, fans if you will, to make him even from the very start somewhat larger than life, bigger, braver, deadlier. But neither account of a first Guadalcanal firefight by Basilone rings true.
    Manila John needed none of this tarting up. He was an authentic hero, the real goods. He was a warrior who fought with an extraordinary courage and resolve, with strength and an instinctive canniness far beyond what might be expected of a man of his background and age (he was twenty-five at Guadalcanal), killing a lot of seasoned enemy troops, and he would be rewarded by a nation with medals and gratitude. But people apparently felt they had to create a Basilone of their own, to concoct and exaggerate, regardless of the hard reality, however difficult it was to ascertain entirely who John really was. And phony yarns gained currency, when really there was no need, only this compulsion to inflate and imagine. It may be that units of Puller’s battalion, possibly including John and some of his gunners under Captain Rodgers, did actually stumble across some Japanese carelessly eating lunch without any perimeter security and wiped them out with machine-gun fire, but it borders on the fantastic to accept that the action came about when a machine-gun unit was sent on a combat patrol unaccompanied by riflemen, or that one of Puller’s captains would breach the chain of command, asking support from another regiment. And in a machine-gun platoon, their sergeant doesn’t have “his” machine gun. He directs the fire of others. But here Basilone does most of the firing himself. In that far-fetched “first fight,” if it ever happened, the legend of Manila John