The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [124]
The navy’s “Personal and Confidential Report” of the incident concluded judiciously and fairly: “There is no doubt but that the officers and men … are deserving of much praise for the courage, resourcefulness, and tenacity displayed … but such conduct is general in both large and small ships operating in enemy waters and does not appear to have been of such character as to warrant special awards.”
Jack’s own crew—and they were the best judges of his actions—applauded Jack’s courage after the sinking, but they hardly thought of themselves and their skipper as heroes. “Our reaction to the 109 thing was that we were kind of ashamed of our performance,” Ross recalled. “I had always thought it was a disaster.” That was too harsh a judgment, but it was a measure of Jack and his men that they judged themselves by such a standard.
When John Iles, one of Jack’s navy buddies, came to see him in the hospital, he mentioned to Jack that when the crew of PT-109 was presumed lost, he had gone to Father McCarthy and asked the priest to say a mass for Jack. It was the least he could do for his fellow Catholic officer, and he wanted Jack to know about it. “He was furious!” Iles recalled. “He read the riot act to me. He said he wasn’t ready to die just yet and why the hell had I given up hope? I couldn’t understand it.”
Jack’s Catholicism had been more of a minor inheritance than a deeply felt belief, but it was not even that now. “Jack, your family is the Catholic family in the country,” Iles lectured him. “If you lose your religion, just think how many of us …”
“I’ll work it out someday,” Jack interjected, waving off Iles. “I’ll go see Fulton Sheen and get it all straightened out when I get back home.” To Jack, his faith, or the lack of it, had become little more than the costuming of his public life, a matter that could be taken care of by one of the princes of the Church before he moved on to more important things.
Jack no longer seemed to believe in the moral certitudes of his church. In a draft of a letter to Inga, he wrote, “Americans can never be fanatics, thank God,” and, “The Catholic Church is the only body approaching the fanaic [sic], and even they are having considerable difficulty expressing its belief.”
Jack had always seen life from a psychological distance. That ironic shield was gone now when he sat and wrote letters to Inga. His thoughts and feelings flowed together from his mind and his heart to the hands that typed out his truths. “I received a letter today from the wife of my engineer,” he wrote Inga, “who was so badly burnt that his face and hands and arms were just flesh, and he was that way for six days. He couldn’t swim, and I was able to help him, and his wife thanked me, and in her letter she said, ‘I suppose to you it was just part of your job, but Mr. McMahon was part of my life and if he had died I don’t think I would have wanted to go on living….’ There are so many McMahons that don’t come through.”
Jack had gone out into the wilderness of the Pacific with a young man’s bravado, boasting how he could stare death down. He knew now that he was not master of this world. He was a cog in a wheel that turned without his knowledge in a direction he could not foresee. He was no hero, not if a hero is a man who grasps onto fate as if he owns it and steps out into the breach. “A number of my illusions have been shattered, but you’re one I still have although I don’t believe illusion is exactly the word I mean,” he wrote Inga, who was married now to Nils and living in New York. “By an illusion I would mean the idea I had when I left the States that the South Seas was a good place to swim in. Now I find that if you swim, there is a fungus that grows in your ears. So I shall return with