The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [125]
Jack had always fancied himself a man who looked truth in the face and stared it down. He wrote Inga that he had “had in the back of my greatly illusioned mind” an idea that he would spend “the war sitting on some cool Pacific Beach with a warm Pacific maiden stroking me gently but firmly while her sister was out hunting my daily supply of bananas.” Jack was hardly so simpleminded as to think that scenario was a real possibility, but he had imagined that out here he would find an overwhelming logic to the war, a rude fairness that he had not observed in what he considered the brothel-like world of Washington politics. But it was the sheer irrationality of it all that was so confoundedly maddening.
At times Jack was drowning in bitterness. “Munda or any of these spots are just God damned hot stinking corners of small islands in a group of islands in a part of the ocean we all hope never to see again,” he wrote Inga. “We are at a great disadvantage. The Russians could see their country invaded, the Chinese the same. The British were bombed. But we are fighting on some islands belonging to the Lever Company, a British concern making soap. I suppose if we were stockholders we would perhaps be doing better, but to see that by dying at Munda you are helping to insure peace in our time takes a larger imagination than most men possess.”
Long before—or so it seemed, though it was but two years—Jack had told his friends that to live you had to believe that you would live. So many times as a boy he had come back from the land of the dying because he knew that he would come back. Out here he had seen how poor Andrew Kirksey had the scent of death on him since the day a bomb landed near the boat and he felt his time was up. It figured that Kirksey was one of his two shipmates to die on PT-109. “He never really got over it,” Jack wrote his family. “He always seemed to have the feeling that something was going to happen to him…. When a fellow gets the feeling that he’s in for it, the only thing to do is to let him get off the boat because strangely enough, they always seem to be the ones that do get it.”
But if a man could will himself to live, then he could will himself to die. Out here a man often died first in his eyes, with that empty, glassy stare, and as often as not the body soon followed. “I used to have the feeling that no matter what happened I’d get through,” he confessed to Inga. “I’ve lost that feeling lately, but as a matter of fact I don’t feel badly about it, if anything happens to me I have this knowledge that if I had lived to be a hundred, I could only have improved the quantity of my life, not the quality. This sounds gloomy as hell. I’ll cut it. You are the only person I’d say it to anyway, as a matter of fact knowing you has been the brightest in an extremely bright twenty-six years.”
If he lived, he would have a new life to make back in America. Inga had seen those two roads before Jack, roads that did not simply divide but headed in opposite directions. “You said that you figured I’d go to Texas, and write my experiences,” he told Inga, referring to the journey westward. “I wouldn’t go near a book like that, this whole thing is so stupid, that while it has a sickening fascination for some of us, myself included, I want to leave it far behind me when I go.” The road west, then, was no longer a high climb into the pristine reaches of life. It led through valleys of darkness now.
Jack could have written a book resonating with the themes of such classics as Catch-22, The Thin Red Line, and The Naked and the Dead. In it he could have grasped his life whole, without parsing every phrase for its implications, political and social. He could have traveled toward the tortured heart of his truth, but he would have taken that journey