For three days and nights without sleep he fought a machine gun at the edge of Henderson Field, holding a sector of the line almost by himself against wave after wave of Japanese infantry, until the dead were piled so high in front of his guns that he had to move them to clear a field of fire. John Basilone won the Medal of Honor on Guadalcanal, and he became one of the most famous Marines of the war. Basilone was a machine-gun section leader with the Marines on Guadalcanal, defending the perimeter around the vital airfield, Henderson Field, the whole prize of the campaign I have followed since September. In late October 1942, the Japanese launched one of their greatest efforts to retake the field, hurling a powerful force in massed night assaults against the Marine line along the Lunga River. The attacks came in the dark, in overwhelming numbers, screaming charges meant to swamp the defenders by sheer weight, and they fell on Basilone's sector. What he did over those days and nights became legend. He commanded two sections of heavy machine guns, and as the Japanese came on in wave after wave, his guns did terrible execution, but his crews were steadily killed and wounded and his guns knocked out or jammed. Basilone seemed to be everywhere, moving between the gun positions in the dark under fire, firing the guns himself, repairing them, clearing jams with his hands, feeding ammunition. When one gun went down he manned another. When a position was overrun he fought to retake it. At one point, with his guns critically short of ammunition and the enemy pressing, he ran back through the Japanese lines and the darkness to bring up more, rejoining his men and keeping the guns in action. He fought on almost without rest, by the accounts of those who were there keeping a machine gun going for days on end without sleep or food, and the slaughter in front of his position was so great that the bodies of the attackers choked the ground and had to be shifted so the guns could keep firing. His sector held. The line was not broken, and Henderson Field was saved. Basilone received the Medal of Honor for that stand, and he was sent home a hero, used to sell war bonds, his face known across America. But he was not content to sit out the rest of the war in safety. He insisted on returning to combat, and he went back to the Pacific, and he was killed on the first day of the landing on Iwo Jima in 1945, where he again acted with conspicuous courage, earning the Navy Cross posthumously. He was the only enlisted Marine of the war to receive both the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross. He remains one of the enduring names of the Marine Corps, the machine gunner of Guadalcanal who held the line at Henderson Field through those desperate October nights, and who, having been made a hero and sent to safety, chose to go back to his fellow Marines and died with them on another island. His stand helped save Guadalcanal at the moment of crisis, and his name became a byword for the fighting spirit of the Marines in the Pacific.