Replies

The only enlisted Marine in WWII to recieve the Navy Cross, The Purple Heart, and the MOH-read his bio from his MOH citation-

Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone, they will tell you, endures as "the Pride of the USMC." When the USMC began the long, bloody process of rooting the Japanese from the islands of the Pacific, Basilone was known as "Manila John."
He had soldiered in Philippines in 1930s, and Manila was his favorite topic of conversation - that and his family in Raritan, NJ, where he was 1 of 10 children of an Italian tailor. But for one long night in October 1942, Manila John had little to think about except an overwhelming force of Japanese. He was on Guadalcanal, trying to preserve a thin USMC and Army defense line around Henderson Field. A wave of Japanese soldiers knocked out the machine guns on his left. Basilone lifted a machine gun and its tripod - 90 pounds of weaponry - raced 200 yards to the silenced gun pit and started firing. Japanese bodies began stacking up in front of the emplacement. Enemy soldiers attacked his rear. He cut them down with his pistol. Short of shells, he dashed 200 yards amid a stream of bullets to an ammunition dump and returned with an armload of ammo. Flares lit up more swarms of grenade-tossing attackers. Basilone fired till heat blistered his hands and kept shooting. At dawn, he rested his head on the edge of the pit. Nearby lay 38 enemy bodies. The line had held.
For proving the Japanese not invincible, Basilone came home with the Medal of Honor. The Government sent him across the country on a tour that prompted $1.4 million in war-bond pledges. The USMC offered to make him an officer and let him spend the rest of the war in Wash, DC. His response: "I ain't no officer, and I ain't no museum piece. I belong back with my outfit."
By 1944, he was back at Camp Pendleton in California, where he met and married Lena Riggi, a fellow USMC Sgt. Before Christmas, he kissed her goodbye and shipped out.
On February 19, 1945 - the day the USMC invaded Iwo Jima -was again in action. Enemy gunfire pinned his platoon to the black sand - everyone, that is, but Basilone, who walked straight up, kicking butts and yelling, "Get off the beach! Move out!" His men moved. An enemy mortar round exploded in their midst. Manila John, among the wounded, he died an hour and a half later. He was 27. NY Times noted in an editorial that there always had been Americans like Basilone, men willing to fight for their country even when they knew their luck couldn't last. "The finest monument they could have," the Times said, would be an enduring resolve by all of us to this time fashion an enduring peace." KIA, Iwo Jima. "Manila John."