The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [121]
Back at Northwestern, Jack had heard John D. Bulkeley tell the awestruck midshipmen that a mere five hundred PT boats would defeat the Japanese in the naval war. Out in the South Pacific, life was a little different. On the Blackett Strait, the men had much to fear from their own planes shooting at them, and many of them died from shelling by their comrades. Jack had a sense of life stripped of all the literary pretense, all the philosophical garnishes, all the propaganda and cant.
Jack willed himself to health, dismissing his back pains with a twist of wit. He was not as good at disguising his problem, however, as he thought. Leonard “Lenny” Thom, his executive officer, wrote home to Kate, his fiancée, that Jack Kennedy, the new skipper of PT-109, was half sick but pretended he was healthy. Lenny, who had played football at Ohio State, knew what it meant to play hurt, and he admired the cantankerous disregard the man showed for his own well-being, refusing to sign in for sick bay.
Just as Jack believed he could will himself to good health, so too he believed that he could will himself to live. Back in the States in April 1942, he had spent a weekend at George Mead’s family plantation in South Carolina. George, an heir to the Mead paper fortune, had enlisted early and was already a marine corps officer. George had been afraid that his fear of dying might make a coward of him. That spring weekend Chuck Spalding had cheered up glum George with Jack’s philosophy: if you thought you were going to live, you’d live. It was that simple. George just had to get his head in the right place. George would go on to fight at Guadalcanal. He would be no coward, but he would die in those jungles, not that far from where Jack stood now. George Mead was the first of Jack’s friends to go, shot in the head with a Japanese bullet.
Jack figured that death had her own timetable and could take those who huddled in fear as easily as those who sailed intrepidly to meet her. Joe Jr. was talking about flying in the Pacific, but Jack told his parents that “he will want to be back the day after he arrives, if he runs true to the form of every one of us.” As for Bobby, if he enlisted, the family was foolish to think that they could fix it so that he would be out of harm’s way. “He ought to do what he wants,” Jack lectured them. “You can’t estimate risks, some cooks are in more danger out there than a lot of flyers.”
Jack and his fellow PT-boat captains were supposedly dashing cowboys of the sea who came sweeping down on the Japanese barges and destroyers, firing torpedoes and sweeping out again before the enemy could fire with accuracy at the small dark boats. That was the beau ideal, but as Jack was learning, this war had little place for romantic adventure but endless room for dark comedy and mishaps. He had come roaring back to base one day, trying to beat the other boats to be first in line to be refilled. He had gone charging into the dock, damaging his boat and earning himself the nickname “Crash Kennedy.”
On the night of August 1, 1943, Jack’s boat, PT-109, sailed out into Blackett Strait along with fourteen other torpedo boats to attempt to intercept the “Tokyo Express”—the Japanese vessels attempting to supply their forces. The U.S. Navy’s big ships had made life improbable and short for the Japanese destroyers and cruisers. The enemy had turned to self-propelled, low-bottomed, armed barges. These were much more difficult targets, and at night they moved up the strait in droves.
On a moonless evening like this one, it was so dark that for Jack and the others it was if they were sailing through an underground cavern.