Despite what the title says about ‘The Pacific’ Part 8 ‘Iwo Jima’, the episode only has about 12 minutes of the iconic battle. Most of the episode concerns that final months in the life of John Basilone, the hero of Guadalcanal.
Spoilers surely follow.
At the beginning of the episode, John Basilone is really beginning to feel discontented about being a pitchman for the war. A radio broadcast with his brothers and he reading from a script is enough to send him around the bend.
Fortunately the Marine Corps finally decides that it needs Drill Instructors with combat experience more than it needs decorated fund raisers for war bonds. So off Gunny Sergeant John Basilone goes to Camp Pendleton in California.
While he is training a company of recruits in the fine art of killing Japanese, Basilone meets Lena Riggi, a female Marine just turned 30 and cynical as hell about the advances of yet another lonely guy in uniform, especially a celebrity who can still get the best tables at the nicest restaurants.
Still, being a good Marine, John Basilone perseveres, improvises, and finally takes that hill. With his shipping out to the Pacific coming at any time, Basilone and Lena do the one thing many couples do in that situation. They get married and have an idyllic honeymoon in a little place at an onion farm owned by her parents.
Those few months may have been John Basilone’s happiest times. But they had to end, because the Marines were assigned to take a volcanic rock, island Hell known as Iwo Jima, a place of black sand and red death.
In the final scenes of the episode, the landscape is literally covered with the dead and dying. Basilone’s last minutes are magnificent, as he leads his section to take a Japanese bunker and to clear the fortified position around it of Japanese. He carries a Marine gun like a personal weapon, dealing death everywhere he goes.
Then, after leading a tank from out of a mine field, shrapnel takes the life of John Basilone. He falls, unnoticed for now in the chaos and the pain of the battlefield, and dies alone.
John Basilone was awarded the Navy Cross, posthumously, for his actions on the first day of Iwo Jima. Since he did not live to see the flag raising, we did not see the flag raising. All we saw was Lena, looking out across the Pacific, a widow too soon after becoming a wife.
A half a year later, Lena Basilone would christen a Navy destroyer, the USS John Basilone, which saw service for nearly 30 years, with the 6th Fleet, and at Dixie Station off the coast of South Vietnam.
Source: The Pacific, Iwo Jima, TV.Com
