Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [25]
There are many McMahons that don’t come through. There was a boy on my boat, only twenty-four, had three kids, one night, two bombs straddled our boat and two of the men were hit, one standing right next to me. He never got over it. He hardly ever spoke after that. He told me one night he thought he was going to be killed. I wanted to put him ashore to work. I wish I had. He was in the forward gun turret where the destroyer hit us.
I don’t know what it all adds up to, nothing I guess, but you said that you figured I’d go to Texas and write my experiences. I wouldn’t go near a book like that. This thing is so stupid, that while it has a sickening fascination for some of us, myself included, I want to leave it far behind when I go.
Inga Binga, I’ll be glad to see you again. I’m tired now. We were riding every night, and the sleeping is tough in the daytime but I’ve been told they are sending some of us home to form a new squadron in a couple of months. I’ve had a great time here, everything considered, but I’ll be just as glad to get away from it for a while. I used to have the feeling that no matter what happened I’d get through. It’s a funny thing that as long as you have that feeling you seem to get through. 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’m saying it to. As a matter of fact knowing you has been the brightest point in an already bright twenty-six years.
“Now that I look back,” he ended, “it has been a hell of a letter.” He promised to visit her in L.A. when he got relieved of duty.
Jack Kennedy had endured an extraordinary rite of passage. Now there was a kinship with those he admired that went beyond just reading about them on the printed page—Churchill, for example, as a young man had escaped from the Boers, and then there was Hemingway, who’d been badly wounded driving an ambulance for the Italians—and so, in a real way, this linked him with them.
He was a young man who’d “proven himself on foreign soil,” as an excited booster would soon declare. But for all that his courage and fortitude came to mean to others, it counted most with Jack himself. No other challenge he might face, he knew, would ever be as hard as had getting his men back to safety. He had met fear head-on, and it had changed him.
“On the bright side of an otherwise completely black time,” he wrote his parents, “was the way that everyone stood up to it. Previous to that I had become somewhat cynical about the American as a fighting man. I had seen too much bellyaching and layout out here. But with the chips down—that all faded away. I can now believe—which I never would have before—the stories of Bataan and Wake. For an American it’s got to be awfully easy or awfully tough. When it’s in the middle, then there’s the trouble.”
And in a letter to Lem that downplayed his individual heroism, he said: “We have been having a difficult time for the past two months—lost our boat a month ago when a Jap cut us in two + lost some of our boys. We had a bad time—a week on a Jap island—but finally got picked up—and have got another boat. It really makes me wonder if most success is merely a great deal of fortuitous accidents. I imagine I would agree with you that it was lucky the whole thing happened—if the two fellows had not been killed which rather spoils the whole thing for me.”
At the same time he got off a letter to Lem’s mother. He expressed his pride in what her son was doing with the American Field Service Ambulance Corps in North Africa.
Before leaving the South Pacific, Jack Kennedy made it his final task to ensure that all his crew members got back to the States. When he arrived there, too, he quickly found himself in familiar surroundings: