The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [120]
Jack’s health was so bad, and his denial so extreme, that he was attempting to will himself not only into some semblance of normality but also into a veritable superman. He had such a need to test his manhood and his courage that he telephoned Senator David Walsh for help in getting reassigned to a PT-boat squadron in the South Pacific.
11
A Brothers’ War
On the troop ship sailing eastward, Jack told a new friend, James Reed, about his favorite book, Pilgrim’s Way by John Buchan. The book tells the story of the generation of upper-class British who fought and died in World War I. Buchan knew the dread realities of the trenches, but the stench of rude death does not hang over the book. Young men die, but there is perfect beauty in their deaths. “For the chosen few … there is no disillusionment, they march on in life with a boyish grace,” Buchan writes of one fallen hero. “Death to him was less a setting forth than a returning,” he writes of another.
There is no sentimentalist like a cynic in his moments of vulnerability, and as Jack sailed toward combat, Pilgrim’s Way was among his bibles of life. Jack was skittish when it came to blood. So were Buchan and Teddy Roosevelt and other philosophers of true manhood.
When Jack arrived in the New Hebrides, there were no philosophers present to explain the unexplainable, no eloquent memoirists to take away death’s sting. He saw life and death and combat not through another’s lens but through his own clear eyes. In April 1943, Jack was ferried on a small transport ship to Guadalcanal. The young men crowded on the deck knew that death might face them out there over the horizon, but few of them realized as intimately as Jack did that death resided within their own bodies. He had already cheated mortality even before he saw the enemy and was carrying into combat a body that in some ways was already wounded.
All his life Jack had been a rich boy among rich boys, but now he was among young men who ridiculed his strange accent and his seemingly affected ways. These men figured they knew life the way a rich boy never could, and he became the butt of their jokes. One of them, Ted Guthrie, a poor boy from the hills of South Carolina, joined in the merriment. “We made fun and called you a sissy,” he wrote Jack later. “This due to the fact you were a rich man’s son.”
Then they sailed into the midst of an air attack on other boats and the joking ended. Jack’s boat was so loaded with fuel oil and bombs that it risked exploding in instant conflagration. Those on board were no longer rich and poor, northerner and southerner, but men who knew that they might soon die together. “I was only sixteen years old and scared to death,” Guthrie remembered. “Our ship had just been straddled by bombs and our gun tub was knee deep in water. I wanted to run but gained strength by the courage shown by Mr. Kennedy.”
Jack figured the captain would hightail it out of the battle zone. Instead, in a pause in the attack, Jack’s boat sailed over to pick up a Japanese pilot who had parachuted into the water. “He suddenly threw aside his life-jacket + pulled out a revolver and fired two shots at our bridge,” Jack wrote Lem. “I had been praising the Lord + passing the ammunition right alongside—but that slowed 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.”
Jack was startled to discover that what Americans considered mindless fanaticism was the common code of the Japanese officers. In Why England Slept, he had described how hard it is for democracies to come together in peacetime on difficult issues. Now he observed why democracies find it so hard to fight a war with the narrow will and focus of totalitarian regimes. The Americans had the finest planes, the newest ships, and equipment beyond measure. Their weakness was human lassitude. He was appalled