Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [20]
Describing the scene to Lem, he wrote: “I had been praising the Lord and passing the ammunition right alongside—but that showed me a bit—the thought of him sitting in the water—battling an entire ship. We returned the fire with everything we had—the water boiled around him—but everyone was too surprised to shoot straight. Finally an old soldier standing next to me—picked up his rifle—fired once—and blew the top of his head off. He threw up his arms—plunged forward—and sank—and we hauled our ass out of there. That was the start of a very interesting month—and it brought home very strongly how long it is going to take to finish this war.” What he’d now witnessed for himself was that the Japanese they were fighting were not only willing to risk their lives but to sacrifice them.
Lieutenant (JG) Kennedy found for himself a new world in the navy. His fellow officers posted to the South Pacific were, by the fact of their commissions, college men, and many from the Ivies. Yet there were also self-described “weed leaguers,” young men from state universities. What united them all was merit; each had earned his place there. It was Jack’s first time in such a company of dedicated equals, all facing the same discomforts and, of course, the same danger of getting killed.
“It’s not bad here at all,” he told Lem in one letter from Tulagi Island in the Solomons. “They have just opened up an Officers Club which consists of a tent. The liquor served is an alcoholic concoction which is drawn out of the torpedo tubes known as torp juice. Every night about 7:30 the tent bulges, about five men come crashing out, blow their lunch and swagger off to bed.”
Soon he was collecting around himself new lifelong friends, just as he had at Choate and Harvard. One was Paul “Red” Fay, a Stanford grad whose father ran a San Francisco construction company. The two met when Fay, being instructed by Jack, ignored orders and got on the wrong PT boat. Kennedy dressed him down in powerful language Red Fay never forgot: “Do you realize that if what you did was compounded by every single person in the United States coming through training the war would be won by the Japs inside of three months!” Trust a pair of Irishmen to start a good friendship with a good fight.
One day Bill Battle, another officer on Tulagi, noticed that all the Catholics, including Jack Kennedy and Red Fay, seemed to head off each afternoon to visit the chaplain, Charlie Webster, who’d played football at Princeton and was now a Franciscan. It turned out that Father Webster was doubling as a bartender, complete with his own stock of medicinal alcohol of some kind. Kennedy, who hardly ever drank, would join them for the ritual but spend more of his time reading and writing letters. “Jack was a big letter writer,” one of his crew members attested. But Jack would join other Catholics on a boat trip every Sunday to nearby Sesape Island for mass.
“Getting out every night on patrol,” he wrote his parents in May 1943. “On good nights it’s beautiful—the water is amazingly phosphorescent—flying fishes which shine like lights are zooming around and you usually get two or three porpoises who lodge right under the bow and no matter how fast the boat goes keep just about six inches ahead of the boat.”
He had found an unexpected comfort in the South Pacific. “That laugh of his,” Red later recalled, “the laugh was so contagious that it’d make everybody laugh.” Jim Reed was another friend Jack made for life out there. “There was an aura around him that I’ve never seen duplicated in anybody else. He had a light touch and a serious side,” said Reed. He once tossed a book onto an officer’s bed. “Get acquainted