I haven't read the book and don't plan on it as first person narratives are trite and presumptious. What I did find very entertaining and amusing were the number of reviews by Basilones relatives. Conflict of interest? Probably. I have no doubt that a lot of the extended family will bet a slice of any money that is garnered from the book or any future movie deals. The sad thing is that they hitched a ride on a lead balloon. The miniseries The Pacific is no Band of Brothers (BOB). It stinks. It stinks historically and it stinks in character development too. I never cared a wit for the characters they presented. Not like I did in BoB, and I have read Sledges, Burkins and Leckies books. The characters were cardboard cut outs of the real men. The angst protrayed by the Sledge character was moving at times but hollow. The actor playing J. Basilone was handsome enough but he protrayed a kind of mechanical bafflement. The bravado they protrayed of him on Iwo Jima was foolhardy not heroic. Did J. Basilone start to believe his own PR and think he was a "one man army" as Eisenhower said of him? If so the Japs showed him otherwise.
I'm mot belittling his courage and or bravado, we all know that youth instills a sense of invincibility. Those that survived know how naive they were going in.
I think what would be more interesting is publishing his letters and let he readers decide from his own words if he had doubts or if he was full of swagger and fooled by his own notoriety. I don't much like authors filtering or interpreting stuff for me. Its kind of the lazy man's way out. Kind of like going to church so the minister can tell you what the Bible means. Everyone has their own opinion and the majority of them are colored by their own agenda.
I personally wonder if JB wasn't a victim of his own reputation and forgot he had men to lead. Don't you think that a seasoned GySgt would have been a bit more of a leader looking out for his men, rather than getting himself killed the first day of a 5 week long campaign. Who looked after his men after he went down?
Saddly we will never know the answers.Get more detail about I'm Staying with My Boys: The Heroic Life of Sgt. John Basilone, USMC.
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