Jack figured that death had her own timetable and could take those who huddled in fear as easily as those who sailed intrepidly to meet her. Joe Jr. was talking about flying in the Pacific, but Jack told his parents that “he will want to be back the day after he arrives, if he runs true to the form of every one of us.” As for Bobby, if he enlisted, the family was foolish to think that they could fix it so that he would be out of harm’s way. “He ought to do what he wants,” Jack lectured them. “You can’t estimate risks, some cooks are in more danger out there than a lot of flyers.”
Jack and his fellow PT-boat captains were supposedly dashing cowboys of the sea who came sweeping down on the Japanese barges and destroyers, firing torpedoes and sweeping out again before the enemy could fire with accuracy at the small dark boats. That was the beau ideal, but as Jack was learning, this war had little place for romantic adventure but endless room for dark comedy and mishaps. He had come roaring back to base one day, trying to beat the other boats to be first in line to be refilled. He had gone charging into the dock, damaging his boat and earning himself the nickname “Crash Kennedy.”
On the night of August 1, 1943, Jack’s boat, PT-109, sailed out into Blackett Strait along with fourteen other torpedo boats to attempt to intercept the “Tokyo Express”—the Japanese vessels attempting to supply their forces. The U.S. Navy’s big ships had made life improbable and short for the Japanese destroyers and cruisers. The enemy had turned to self-propelled, low-bottomed, armed barges. These were much more difficult targets, and at night they moved up the strait in droves.
On a moonless evening like this one, it was so dark that for Jack and the others it was if they were sailing through an underground cavern. Lookouts wearied of their watch. They looked everywhere and nowhere. It was so dark that men at times saw visions in the blackness. It was difficult to tell foe from friend, land from ship.
A strong searchlight punctured the darkness. Jack thought that a Japanese shore battery had latched on to his boat, and he guided the boat in a twisting pathway until he was once again in the embrace of darkness. The Japanese rarely had searchlights onshore, and the light probably came from a Japanese boat, not a shore battery. PT-109 should have attacked, not roared away from this ersatz island, but Jack hadn’t been briefed as well as he should have been, and he was playing a game knowing only some of the rules.
In the blackness the phosphorescence stirred up by the torpedo boat’s propeller left a shimmering white trail that risked exposing its position. Jack ordered the boat throttled down so that it would operate on only the center engine. As PT-109 idled in the black water, the men saw a ship looming toward them. They assumed it was one of the other PT boats and would soon veer off. The vessel continued its course, bearing down on them.
A Japanese destroyer pressed toward them only a hundred yards away. Jack frantically turned the wheel, but working on one engine, the PT boat responded with languid indifference. The destroyer cut through the PT boat as if it were no more than foam floating on the surface and moved on into the darkness. As Jack fell to the deck, he thought to himself that this was death, that this was what it felt like.
Around the wreckage, gasoline burned furiously. The sea was lit up like a gigantic searchlight sweeping down on the survivors, pinpointing them in the blackness. Luck is always a matter of perspective. Although two of Jack’s men had died, the wind blew the flaming sea away from the eleven survivors.
The front half of the PT boat sat in the water perfectly intact, as if the Japanese ship had performed surgery, neatly amputating the back half of the ship. It was all bizarre and inexplicable. Some of the men paddled in the water half giddy after inhaling gasoline fumes. They tried to make sense of the senseless. The wrecked boat, which to George “Barney” Ross looked like a fishing bobber, was the only mooring. One by one they swam over and laid themselves out on it, the only sound the water slowly seeping into the watertight passages. Pat McMahon was burned and William Johnston was sick, they were all in a state of semishock, and they knew they could not stay on the wrecked boat much longer.
Jack said that he was not the commander, that they were equals in this situation, but the men asked him to lead. And he led them now, not because he outranked them, but because they wanted him to lead, and he was willing to think and to do and to plan and to dare. By midmorning the remnant of PT-109 appeared as if it might soon sink into the dark blue waters. Jack decided the men would have to swim to a small island that they could see three or four miles away. Floating in the water was a plank that they could all cling to as they paddled along, but McMahon was too far gone for the exertion. So Jack took a tie from McMahon’s “Mae West” life jacket, put it like a bit in his teeth, and pulled the stricken sailor along with him as he swam. After five hours, the group reached their precious refuge. The island turned out to be not much bigger than a football field, its only virtue that there were no Japanese soldiers.
Jack and the men huddled on the ground hoping that the Japanese would not spot them. Jack had one wounded man on his hands, one sailor with the look of terror in his eyes, and several others in middling shape at best. If he had decided that they should just stay there on the tiny island, like shipwrecked sailors on a raft, no one would have thought that he had done less than his duty. As Jack lay there exhausted, he called upon much that he had learned in his twenty-six years. Jack’s father had taught his sons that the world was not a place where history was done unto them, but that they had the right and the will and the power to help shape the events of their time. Jack had listened to his father, but for most of his adult life, he had stood on the sidelines, a passive, astute observer of those events.
Jack decided that in the evening someone should swim out into Fergusson Passage to flash a lantern at a passing PT boat. It was in some ways a crazed idea, but it was the only idea they had, and Jack said that he should be the one to make the attempt. Ross, who had had the exquisite bad luck to hitch a ride on PT-109, thought that it was “either courageous or foolish,” though perhaps it was a bit of both. Jack had seen how often Americans shot by mistake at their own comrades. He had observed what the Americans considered the treacherous shrewdness of the Japanese. What did he imagine a skipper might do if he saw a single light flashing in the pitch-black of the strait? Jack’s bravery and foolhardiness were so seamlessly interwoven that it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. He could not lie on the island waiting to see what time would bring, be it Japanese or Americans, or slow death. And so he set out.
Jack swam out to the reef where he could stand up in waist-deep water. From there, he swam for an hour far into Fergusson Passage, scanning the blackness for telltale signs of phosphorescence. Far over the horizon he saw flares flashing in the blackness and realized that this was the one night when the Americans were elsewhere. Jack started back toward his comrades, but he felt weak, and the current seemed to stiffen.
Jack was a competitor, and his foe out here this evening was death itself, which was ready to take him not in a burst of blood and fire but in sweet repose, pulling him gently down into the blackness. Jack did not pray to God, at least he did not remember doing so. He was a child of fate. He stopped swimming, stopped fighting the tide. He gave in to the night, in to his fatigue, in to the endless water, and he drifted along, like a man floating through space. There are indeed strange tides in the life of a man, and as the sun rose he saw that he was back where he had been the night before. For a moment he thought he was mad, hallucinating. Then he began to swim, and he made it back to the island, where he told Ross that it would be his turn next. After saying that, he passed out on the sand.
That night Ross swam out in the strait and had no more luck than Jack in sighting a friendly boat. Jack decided that the men could not lie there any longer. They would have to swim south to a larger island closer to Fergusson Passage. So they set out again, and for three hours Jack dragged McMahon along tethered to a strap in his mouth. This new island had some coconuts l
ying on the ground that they used to quench their thirst, but they appeared no nearer to rescue than they had been before. Once again Jack and Ross set out swimming to another, even larger atoll, Cross Island, directly on Fergusson Passage. The two men found a canoe and supplies and startled two native watchers working for the allies. When Jack and Ross returned the next day, they found the natives there. The natives took Jack’s note carved on the husk of a coconut (NAURO ISL NATIVE KNOWS POSIT HE CAN PILOT 11 ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY) and sailed to Rendova to bring back help to rescue the men.
Jack lay in his bed in his skivvies in Mobile Hospital Number Four at Tulagi suffering from fatigue and from the abrasions and multiple lacerations that covered his body, especially his feet. He looked emaciated and had a slight limp. He was a hero in the eyes of the New York Times, the Boston Herald, and the other papers that celebrated him in their news columns. Out here the word “hero” was not used as often. There were those who thought that Crash Kennedy had mucked up again, by skippering the only boat in the entire war to be sunk after being rammed by an enemy ship, and that he deserved not the Silver Star he received but a court-martial. Others believed that in those waters they could have lost their boat too, and that if Jack was no great hero, he had acted admirably after his boat was struck. “I can say in all honesty, one night out there I had a similar type of thing almost happen,” recalled another veteran, Bryant Larson. “The destroyer missed my boat and he chose to shoot at us and he missed. It was so black you couldn’t see twenty feet.”
The navy’s “Personal and Confidential Report” of the incident concluded judiciously and fairly: “There is no doubt but that the officers and men … are deserving of much praise for the courage, resourcefulness, and tenacity displayed … but such conduct is general in both large and small ships operating in enemy waters and does not appear to have been of such character as to warrant special awards.”
Jack’s own crew—and they were the best judges of his actions—applauded Jack’s courage after the sinking, but they hardly thought of themselves and their skipper as heroes. “Our reaction to the 109 thing was that we were kind of ashamed of our performance,” Ross recalled. “I had always thought it was a disaster.” That was too harsh a judgment, but it was a measure of Jack and his men that they judged themselves by such a standard.
When John Iles, one of Jack’s navy buddies, came to see him in the hospital, he mentioned to Jack that when the crew of PT-109 was presumed lost, he had gone to Father McCarthy and asked the priest to say a mass for Jack. It was the least he could do for his fellow Catholic officer, and he wanted Jack to know about it. “He was furious!” Iles recalled. “He read the riot act to me. He said he wasn’t ready to die just yet and why the hell had I given up hope? I couldn’t understand it.”
Jack’s Catholicism had been more of a minor inheritance than a deeply felt belief, but it was not even that now. “Jack, your family is the Catholic family in the country,” Iles lectured him. “If you lose your religion, just think how many of us …”
“I’ll work it out someday,” Jack interjected, waving off Iles. “I’ll go see Fulton Sheen and get it all straightened out when I get back home.” To Jack, his faith, or the lack of it, had become little more than the costuming of his public life, a matter that could be taken care of by one of the princes of the Church before he moved on to more important things.
Jack no longer seemed to believe in the moral certitudes of his church. In a draft of a letter to Inga, he wrote, “Americans can never be fanatics, thank God,” and, “The Catholic Church is the only body approaching the fanaic [sic], and even they are having considerable difficulty expressing its belief.”
Jack had always seen life from a psychological distance. That ironic shield was gone now when he sat and wrote letters to Inga. His thoughts and feelings flowed together from his mind and his heart to the hands that typed out his truths. “I received a letter today from the wife of my engineer,” he wrote Inga, “who was so badly burnt that his face and hands and arms were just flesh, and he was that way for six days. He couldn’t swim, and I was able to help him, and his wife thanked me, and in her letter she said, ‘I suppose to you it was just part of your job, but Mr. McMahon was part of my life and if he had died I don’t think I would have wanted to go on living….’ There are so many McMahons that don’t come through.”
Jack had gone out into the wilderness of the Pacific with a young man’s bravado, boasting how he could stare death down. He knew now that he was not master of this world. He was a cog in a wheel that turned without his knowledge in a direction he could not foresee. He was no hero, not if a hero is a man who grasps onto fate as if he owns it and steps out into the breach. “A number of my illusions have been shattered, but you’re one I still have although I don’t believe illusion is exactly the word I mean,” he wrote Inga, who was married now to Nils and living in New York. “By an illusion I would mean the idea I had when I left the States that the South Seas was a good place to swim in. Now I find that if you swim, there is a fungus that grows in your ears. So I shall return with athlete’s foot and fungus growing out of my ears to a heroes [sic] welcome, demand a large pension which I won’t get, invite you to dinner and breakfast which I’m beginning to have my doubts about you coming to, and then retire to the old sailors home in West Palm Beach with a lame back.”
Jack had always fancied himself a man who looked truth in the face and stared it down. He wrote Inga that he had “had in the back of my greatly illusioned mind” an idea that he would spend “the war sitting on some cool Pacific Beach with a warm Pacific maiden stroking me gently but firmly while her sister was out hunting my daily supply of bananas.” Jack was hardly so simpleminded as to think that scenario was a real possibility, but he had imagined that out here he would find an overwhelming logic to the war, a rude fairness that he had not observed in what he considered the brothel-like world of Washington politics. But it was the sheer irrationality of it all that was so confoundedly maddening.
At times Jack was drowning in bitterness. “Munda or any of these spots are just God damned hot stinking corners of small islands in a group of islands in a part of the ocean we all hope never to see again,” he wrote Inga. “We are at a great disadvantage. The Russians could see their country invaded, the Chinese the same. The British were bombed. But we are fighting on some islands belonging to the Lever Company, a British concern making soap. I suppose if we were stockholders we would perhaps be doing better, but to see that by dying at Munda you are helping to insure peace in our time takes a larger imagination than most men possess.”
Long before—or so it seemed, though it was but two years—Jack had told his friends that to live you had to believe that you would live. So many times as a boy he had come back from the land of the dying because he knew that he would come back. Out here he had seen how poor Andrew Kirksey had the scent of death on him since the day a bomb landed near the boat and he felt his time was up. It figured that Kirksey was one of his two shipmates to die on PT-109. “He never really got over it,” Jack wrote his family. “He always seemed to have the feeling that something was going to happen to him…. When a fellow gets the feeling that he’s in for it, the only thing to do is to let him get off the boat because strangely enough, they always seem to be the ones that do get it.”
But if a man could will himself to live, then he could will himself to die. Out here a man often died first in his eyes, with that empty, glassy stare, and as often as not the body soon followed. “I used to have the feeling that no matter what happened I’d get through,” he confessed to Inga. “I’ve lost that feeling lately, but as a matter of fact I don’t feel badly about it, if anything happens to me I have this knowledge that if I had lived to be a hundred, I could only have improved the quantity of my life, not the quality. This sounds gloomy as hell. I’ll cut it. You are the only person I’d say it to anyway, as a matter of fact knowing you has been the brightest in an extremely bright twenty-six years.”
Jack could have written a book resonating with the themes of such classics as Catch-22, The Thin Red Line, and The Naked and the Dead. In it he could have grasped his life whole, without parsing every phrase for its implications, political and social. He could have traveled toward the tortured heart of his truth, but he would have taken that journey alone, without his father and his family. This would have been a journey from which he could never have totally returned. He did not want to take it, to travel into the dark caverns of his life and time. The truth as he saw it was embarrassing and untidy; to explore it would have taken an intellectual daring that he did not have, or if he did, that he turned away from.
The Kennedy Men Page 27