The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [119]
Even without his father’s efforts, Jack probably would have been chosen for the Melville Motor Torpedo Boat School in Rhode Island. He was a superb sailor and had all the attributes of a PT skipper except one: good health. In this deception lay a moral conundrum of immense importance. Was it a willful, selfish, dangerous act for this man to attempt to brace himself on a deck where only an officer in good health could stand firmly? By doing so, was he risking not only himself but also his men in an impetuous attempt to prove himself a true man? Or did Jack have a spiritual fortitude that would help him stand up to trials of combat that might send a more physically fit officer crumbling to the deck?
In the Quonset huts at Melville, Jack was cheek by jowl with men of backgrounds as diverse as the country itself. His old friend and new mate at Melville, Torby Macdonald, had wryly commented on the spectacle of his snooty friend among the unwashed and the unlettered. “I swear to God Jack I thought I’d die of exhaustion from laughing—I’d laugh going to bed and wake up at it having dreamt of you in camp with Moe Sidelburg and Joe Louis as bunkmates.”
Now, however, when Jack popped off with an anti-Semitic aside, accusing the Jews of sneaking out of danger’s way by “going into the Quartermaster Corps,” he not only had Torby presumably nodding his agreement—and perhaps adding a few more ugly insinuations—but a Jewish classmate, Fred Rosen, standing there to confront him. Rosen knew how to count, an ability that Torby would most likely have attributed to race. Rosen added up the number of Catholic and Jewish volunteers at Melville ready to risk their lives. When he showed Jack his tabulation, Jack had little choice but to apologize.
After graduating from Melville, Jack served as an instructor for five weeks before he received orders in January 1943 to take a convoy of four of the squadron’s boats to Jacksonville, Florida. It was a tedious journey, the only heartening aspect being that the farther south they traveled the warmer it became.
On the third day, one of the boats ran aground. Jack wanted to throw a towline to the beached boat and yank it out, but as he attempted to do so, not only did his own boat run aground, but the towline managed to snarl itself around the propeller. Someone was going to have to dive into the frigid waters and free the rope. By any measure, including health, seniority, or simple logic, Jack was the last person who should have been designated to strip down and jump overboard.
“It was wintertime, and it was goddamn miserable in those boats in the wintertime,” recalled Holton Wood, who attended Melville with Jack. “Because if you were going at any kind of speed, you got cut by this cold wind and spray and so forth. And he ran aground, and it was cold. It was sufficiently aground so that they couldn’t back it off. If you hit rocks, you could grind up the propellers.
“And so he decided that somebody had to go over the side. Now, he could have designated anybody else, but he did not. He went over himself. He could have been badly injured. He went under the boat to see what the bottom was like. And he then came up, and as he was getting up on the slippery, icy deck, he slipped and fell and injured his back again.”
Jack was successful, but the following day, when the boats stopped in Morehead City, North Carolina, he was so sick that he ended up in a sick bay with what was diagnosed as “gastroenteritis acute.” Jack had performed an act as brave as it was foolhardy, and the boats had to sail the rest of the way to Florida without him. Jack’s conduct had not answered the question of whether he should have been there, but he had displayed one of his psychological paradoxes.