Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [21]
Kennedy loved mocking the brass that made occasional visits to the front lines. “Just had an inspection by an Admiral,” he wrote Inga. “He must have weighed over three hundred, and came bursting through our hut like a bull coming out of chute three.” He went on to satirize the flag officer’s recent trip: the absurd questions, the vain jottings down of the obvious, the “inane” comment before he “toddled off to stoke his furnace at the luncheon table . . . That, Binga, is total war at its totalest.”
Finding comedy around him always enlarged the picture. “His back was troubling him, he wasn’t well,” Jim Reed recalled. “But I can tell you this about Jack—he never complained. He always had a terrific humor—a really acute sense of humor. He was very self-deprecating. He claimed to me once that he’d never had an unhappy day in his life. Now, whether or not he’d had an unhappy childhood, he’d come to fall back on his inner resources. He loved to read. He was curious—he had a natural curiosity about anything.” Jack Kennedy often slept with a plywood board under him or, sometimes, even stretched out on a table. In another officer’s most vivid memory, he recalled a day when Jack paced worriedly, holding his torn sacroiliac belt and looking for someone who could lend him a needle and thread. He would rely on that corset for much of his life.
When he did beef, he reserved his sounding-off for the officers above him and the orders they issued. Such predictable behavior eventually won him the nickname “Shafty.” If he got handed a crappy assignment, he’d say, “I’ve been shafted”—although, with his accent, it came out as “shofted.”
Out there in the middle of nowhere, talk was one of the only entertainments, and Jack preferred political discussions. “What’s the purpose of having the conflict,” Red Fay recalled him asking during one of these sessions, “if we’re going to come out here and fight and let the people that got us here get us back into it again?” He was constantly asking questions. “We’d sit in a corner and I’d recall all the political problems in New Jersey and Long Island where I come from,” the PT commander at the Russell Islands base would recall. “He did that with everybody. He had a way of really picking your brain if you knew something he didn’t,” recalled another officer. “He loved sitting around talking with a bunch of guys, and he’d come out with these remarks—remarks like you’d never forget.”
There were twelve crewmen aboard Jack’s command vessel, PT 109—the same number as the Muckers. The job of the PTs in the Russell Islands that August of 1943 was to patrol the Blackett Strait and attack Japanese convoys passing through. His trial by fire would come at 2:30 a.m. on August 2. It was pitch black. There was no radar. Only one of the three engines was running, standard procedure because the propellers stirred up the water, creating that phosphorescent light that Jack had told his parents was so beautiful, signaling their presence to Japanese planes patrolling overhead.
Barney Ross, one of his crewmen, thought he saw a shape out there in the darkness. Jack pegged it as another PT boat, and got consensus. But as it grew larger, the skipper became concerned. “Lenny, look at this,” he told his executive officer. “Ship at two o’clock!” a crewman shouted. Ross, who’d believed the oncoming vessel was running parallel, now saw it turning toward him.
“Sound general quarters!” Lieutenant Kennedy ordered. He spun the wheel to the left in preparation for firing their torpedoes. But, operating on just the single engine, it was sluggish. Before a thirty-degree turn could be effected, a Japanese destroyer, heading at 40 knots, suddenly rammed them through. Jack was thrown hard to the deck, where, lying there, he thought to himself, This is how it feels to be killed. He then watched as the Japanese ship passed him, only a few feet away.
All this had happened in less than fifteen seconds.
In the darkness now, the only sound