The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [123]
Jack decided that in the evening someone should swim out into Fergusson Passage to flash a lantern at a passing PT boat. It was in some ways a crazed idea, but it was the only idea they had, and Jack said that he should be the one to make the attempt. Ross, who had had the exquisite bad luck to hitch a ride on PT-109, thought that it was “either courageous or foolish,” though perhaps it was a bit of both. Jack had seen how often Americans shot by mistake at their own comrades. He had observed what the Americans considered the treacherous shrewdness of the Japanese. What did he imagine a skipper might do if he saw a single light flashing in the pitch-black of the strait? Jack’s bravery and foolhardiness were so seamlessly interwoven that it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. He could not lie on the island waiting to see what time would bring, be it Japanese or Americans, or slow death. And so he set out.
Jack swam out to the reef where he could stand up in waist-deep water. From there, he swam for an hour far into Fergusson Passage, scanning the blackness for telltale signs of phosphorescence. Far over the horizon he saw flares flashing in the blackness and realized that this was the one night when the Americans were elsewhere. Jack started back toward his comrades, but he felt weak, and the current seemed to stiffen.
Jack was a competitor, and his foe out here this evening was death itself, which was ready to take him not in a burst of blood and fire but in sweet repose, pulling him gently down into the blackness. Jack did not pray to God, at least he did not remember doing so. He was a child of fate. He stopped swimming, stopped fighting the tide. He gave in to the night, in to his fatigue, in to the endless water, and he drifted along, like a man floating through space. There are indeed strange tides in the life of a man, and as the sun rose he saw that he was back where he had been the night before. For a moment he thought he was mad, hallucinating. Then he began to swim, and he made it back to the island, where he told Ross that it would be his turn next. After saying that, he passed out on the sand.
That night Ross swam out in the strait and had no more luck than Jack in sighting a friendly boat. Jack decided that the men could not lie there any longer. They would have to swim south to a larger island closer to Fergusson Passage. So they set out again, and for three hours Jack dragged McMahon along tethered to a strap in his mouth. This new island had some coconuts lying on the ground that they used to quench their thirst, but they appeared no nearer to rescue than they had been before. Once again Jack and Ross set out swimming to another, even larger atoll, Cross Island, directly on Fergusson Passage. The two men found a canoe and supplies and startled two native watchers working for the allies. When Jack and Ross returned the next day, they found the natives there. The natives took Jack’s note carved on the husk of a coconut (NAURO ISL NATIVE KNOWS POSIT HE CAN PILOT 11 ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY) and sailed to Rendova to bring back help to rescue the men.
Jack lay in his bed in his skivvies in Mobile Hospital Number Four at Tulagi suffering from fatigue and from the abrasions and multiple lacerations that covered his body, especially his feet. He looked emaciated and had a slight limp. He was a hero in the eyes of the New York Times, the Boston Herald, and the other papers that celebrated him in their news columns. Out here the word “hero” was not used as often. There were those who thought that Crash Kennedy had mucked up again, by skippering the only boat in the entire war to be sunk after being rammed by an enemy ship, and that he deserved not the Silver Star he received but a court-martial. Others believed that in those waters they could have lost their boat too, and that