It struck Kennedy that few of the men he met who had been in the war zone for any length of time expressed any longing for combat—they just wanted to get home alive. (“It’s one of those interesting things about the war,” he told Inga, “that everyone in the States…want[s] to be out here killing Japs, while everyone out here wants to be back. It seems to me that someone with enterprise could work out some sort of exchange, but as I hear you saying, I asked for it, honey, and I’m getting it.”) Nor did anyone have many good words for the high command. When told by his parents of MacArthur’s popularity in the United States, Jack answered, “Here he has none—is, in fact, very, very unpopular. His nickname is ‘Doug-Out-Doug,’ ” for his alleged refusal to use Army forces to relieve the Marines at the time of the first invasion of Guadalcanal, and for not coming out of his “dugout” in Australia. “No one out here has the slightest interest in politics—they just want to get home—morning—noon—and night….I didn’t mean to use ‘They’—I meant ‘WE.’ ” It all meant, he added, that Joe Junior, who had received his wings the previous year but was still stateside, should be in no hurry to get out to the South Pacific. “I know it’s futile to say so, but if I were he I would take as much time about [it] as I could.”15

The local commanders seemed scarcely better than the top brass. “Just had an inspection by an Admiral,” he informed Inga in one witty passage. “He must have weighed over three hundred, and came bursting through our hut like a bull coming out of chute three.” At the machine shop, the admiral seemed confused about its purpose.

After it was gently but firmly explained to him that machinery was kept in the machine shop, and he had written that down on the special pad he carried for such special bits of information which can only be found “if you get right up to the front and see for yourself” he harrumphed again, looked at a map, wanted to know what we had there—there being a small bay some distance away. When we said nothing, he burst out with, “well, by God, what we need is to build a dock.” Well, someone said it was almost lunch and it couldn’t be built before lunch….After a moment of serious consideration and a hurried consultation with a staff of engineers he agreed and toddled off to stoke his furnace at the luncheon table….That, Binga, is total war at its totalest.16