Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds

by Joe Haldeman

  So how did this happen? Aren’t space ships supposed to be sleek graceful things? Sure, they’re built by committees—but the shuttle is the first one that looks it.

  To understand why, we can follow various threads of history that pass through one point in space and time: the aforementioned VIP viewing area at Cape Kennedy in July, 1969. There were some interesting people there—like the only surviving American slave, Charlie Smith, who thought it was all a waste of time. President Nixon couldn’t make it, too busy with his tape recorders and things, but Spiro Agnew was there. And an old man who started out as a school-teacher in Transylvania: Hermann Oberth.

  Oberth was the only one of the three early rocket pioneers who lived long enough to be there when Apollo 11 blasted off to put men on the surface of another world. He was also, curiously, the one most directly related to that rocket’s genealogy, by way of Adolf Hitler.

  Here’s a quick gloss of the history of modern rocketry. The other two pioneers were Konstantin Tsiolkovski, a Russian, and Robert Goddard, an American. The three men, working independently over a couple of decades, all came up with the notion that liquid-fueled rockets could be used to escape the Earth’s gravity. What made Oberth’s 1923 book, The Rocket Into Interplanetary Space, the most important was that Wernher von Braun read it.

  Von Braun wound up head of a club called Verein für Raumschiffahrt—the Society for Space Travel—which built small experimental rockets and launched them (at the cost of some fingers and toes and three lives) and made grandiose plans for the eventual conquest of outer space. But the club fell victim to Germany’s runaway inflation and the Great Depression. Until 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power.

  The Treaty of Versailles had put strong restrictions on the kind of munitions that Germany could build and accumulate, but it hadn’t said anything about rockets. By 1934 von Braun and many former members of Verein für Raumschiffahrt were members of Hitler’s army—not, they later affirmed, because they had any sympathy for Hitler’s mad ideas of racial purity and world conquest, but because that was the only way they could continue their researches into rocketry. (In their defense, it should be noted that von Braun was arrested under Himmler’s orders, in 1944, for being more interested in getting to the Moon than winning the war.) The V-2, the development of which cost more than the Manhattan Project, turned out to be a dramatic but rather ineffective weapon, and there were still thousands of them in storage when the Allies overran Germany in 1945. The rocket engineers, far enough from Berlin to have some freedom of choice, had to decide to whom they should surrender. In the words of one admirably frank scientist, “We despised the French, we were mortally afraid of the Soviets, we did not believe the British could afford us, so that left the Americans.”

  So the Americans wound up with von Braun and most of his planning staff, and three hundred freight cars worth of V-2 components. The Russians claimed they captured more, both men and material, but we had the cream and besides, they were just a bunch of communist peasants who probably couldn’t even find a match for the fuse.

  For nearly a decade these German scientists languished in an outfit called the Army Ordnance Guided Missiles Development Group, shooting their V-2’s into the New Mexico sky and trying to scrounge money from the army. The people who made money decisions, though, had decided that guided missiles were just an exotic adjunct to the overall defense picture; specifically, nuclear weapons were too heavy and guided missiles were too small for them ever to be mated. The same argument retarded the parallel, and independent, missile projects that were going on in the Air Force and the Navy. The Army stayed well ahead of them because they had the Germans.

  Meanwhile, von Braun and his mentor Willy Ley proselytized energetically about the coming wonders of space travel. With the help of Collier’s magazine and (later) Walt Disney, they got the American public pretty excited about their ideas. More excited than the military was.

  After twenty years of planning and experience, these ideas were pretty well thought out. Note the sequence: First you build a shuttle. Then you build a space station. Once the space station is finished, you might use it as a staging area to go to the Moon or Mars. That would be interesting. In their 1952 book Across the Space Frontier, out of 142 pages, they spend two paragraphs on the idea of a Moon landing.

  Suddenly things started to happen. In 1953, the AEC let it be known that they were on the verge of producing a small, light atomic bomb. The idea of an ICBM started to look attractive, especially after we found out the Soviets had been pursuing that goal since 1947. Money and manpower were suddenly available to all three missile groups. In 1954, von Braun said his bunch would be able to orbit a small satellite by the end of next year.

  This is where it gets really complicated, and I’ll spare you all the complications except to note that they involved the muckraking columnist Drew Pearson and an unfortunate note written on Air Force stationery. Anyhow, the government did finally get around to authorizing a space satellite, but the competition was won by the Navy’s Project Vanguard rather than the Army and von Braun. Before they could get off the ground, the Sputnik went up, 4 October 1957.

  Which leads us to “The Space Race,” of which you may have heard. Through the magic of arithmetic, I perceive that most of this audience was born around 1960 or later. So the Space Race might be to you something like Pearl Harbor is to me: the history books say it’s important, but since it happened before I was born, it can’t be that important.

  That fall of 1957, Vanguard was hamstrung by interservice rivalry and administrative indifference. Eisenhower, like Truman before him, thought the Soviets were silly boobs a priori—they’d fallen for Communism, after all—and that missiles were little more than toys. Vanguard was drastically under-funded—$20 million when it needed $100 million—and was set back for 18 months of redundant construction when the Army refused to let the Navy use its launch facilities.

  The crowning blow came a week after Sputnik. Eisenhower misunderstood a Vanguard report and told the press America would launch its first satellite in two months (in fact, it was just to be a systems test). They tried to push it, but the untested system blew up three inches off the launching pad. The Soviets responded with sarcasm and orbited a dog, keeping it alive for four days.

  Vanguard went back to the drawing board, but von Braun had grown impatient; a month after the Vanguard explosion, the Army was given a green light and in four days launched its Orbiter satellite. The race was on but we seemed ’way behind.

  It’s interesting to speculate what might have happened if there had been no bureaucratic screw-ups, if von Braun had been allowed to continue from the beginning with decent funding and the blessings of the Defense Department. He would have launched a satellite at least a year before Sputnik—and though the Soviet launch would have been worrisome, it wouldn’t have resulted in panic.

  Hindsight is a wonderful tool. We were really far in advance of the Russians except in the area of large boosters, and catching up fast there. If we had gone along with von Braun’s scheme we would have had a space shuttle by the early sixties, and then a permanent space station, and maybe a man on the Moon some time in the seventies. But an election year was coming up.

  Nixon was running more-or-less on a platform pledging to continue Eisenhower’s policies, which had given the country a period of peace and prosperity. One slogan was “He kept us out of war”—but Mad magazine reflected a large segment of popular opinion by twisting that into “He kept us off of Mars.” Kennedy played this sentiment for all it was worth, promising an aggressive, well-funded space program that would pull us into the lead of the Space Race.

  Well, right after Kennedy was inaugurated, the Russians beat us by three weeks in putting the first man into space. In between came the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The new president had to do something, and what he did was call for an all-out drive to put a man on the Moon before 1970. Or at least before the Russians.

  NASA was delighted. It did look barely poss
ible, with enough money, cutting corners here and there. We would have to forgo the luxuries of a space shuttle and permanent orbital station, but those were things they could go back and do later.

  As a matter of fact, the lunar program might not have got off the ground if we’d known how frightfully expensive it was going to be. NASA called for $7-$9 billion; even allowing for inflation, the cost overrun was about $20 billion. What happened, of course, was that Oswald’s bullet made Kennedy a martyr and his rash promise, a sacred trust. And throwing money into space was a nice smoke screen, partly obscuring the fact that we were dumping twenty times as much in the process of losing a war against a third-world Asian country.

  It was that war, of course, that forced LBJ out of office and put Nixon—who had never supported space, or science, or anything tainted with intellectualism—into the ludicrous position of taking credit for the Moon landing. Which takes us back to that VIP viewing stand in July of 1969.

  After the rocket went up and the cheers died down, Agnew gave a stirring speech affirming the administration’s commitment to even greater activity in space—culminating in a manned flight to Mars by 1990. While he was speech-making in Florida, Nixon and the OMB were busy in Washington, muttering “enough is enough,” slashing NASA’s appropriation to the bone.

  NASA offered three scenarios for a future space program. The most ambitious called for a 50-man permanent space station, a manned base on the Moon, and a Mars mission by 1985. Of course these would require a space shuttle and a deep-space tug for lunar resupply.

  Less ambitious was a program that called for a later Mars mission and no lunar base. Finally, a rockbottom plan called for just the shuttle and space station, deferring the Mars flight decision.

  Nixon, the OMB, and Congress came back with a resounding no. No Mars mission, no moon base, no space station, no shuttle. NASA was allowed to go ahead with Skylab and some of the remaining scheduled moon flights (though three had to be scrubbed), since those projects had gone too far to stop. And they could have some loose change for studying the space station and shuttle, but don’t go building anything.

  NASA was shocked, but they shouldn’t have been. After all, they had done what the public had demanded, put the Russians in their place, and most of the public were quite ready to see the government spend their taxes elsewhere. I think NASA was surprised for the same reason I was—we were suddenly forced to admit that not everybody is a space junkie.

  (There was nearly a second Revolution when a Bowl game was interrupted to show men walking on the moon—well, Cronkite’s a space junkie, too.)

  What it boiled down to was a choice between the space station and the shuttle—which is Hobson’s choice, since you couldn’t really build the station without the shuttle, and it was hard to justify the shuttle without the space station. They finally managed to come up with a rationale that the shuttle would save money in the long run, by providing a less expensive way to orbit satellites and also an orbital repair service. If a $2 integrated circuit blows out in some comsat, you don’t have to build a new comsat and orbit it. You just hand the $2 component to an astronaut and have her install it next time she’s in the neighborhood.

  The design they proposed was much more elegant than von Braun’s original model (he hadn’t counted on the advances in cryogenics that would allow us to use liquid oxygen and hydrogen routinely). Remember those F-1 motors? This machine, the F-l Flyback, was a two-stage vehicle with both stages manned. The first stage was a huge jet plane, powered by five F-1’s. It would boost the second stage into the upper atmosphere and fly back to the Cape, where it would land like an airplane and just gas up for another trip. The second stage was a winged vehicle similar to the existing Orbiter, but fancier and roomier.

  The price tag was $10 billion. Congress was rather sarcastic about that, since NASA didn’t have a very good track record for meeting projected costs. Also, it was obvious that the main reason for the shuttle was to provide NASA with an excuse for existing—as Nature pointed out, it had “all the appearance of being a device that would create for its designers the need for credible employment.”

  Finally, Congress and the OMB told NASA they could have a shuttle if they could hold the price down to $5.15 billion, with no more than 20% cost overruns, on the understanding that development costs would eventually be recouped by users’ fees (causing one official to complain that they were turning NASA into a “trucking company”). NASA came up with and discarded literally hundreds of designs—most of them involving the reliable but rather expensive F-1—before coming up with the strange configuration that sits on pad 39A today. The use of solid-fuel boosters was forced on NASA by cost considerations. If recovery fails and the booster sinks, they’ve only lost a metal tube. A liquid-fuel engine would cost fifty times as much to replace.

  Because there wasn’t enough money for the usual slow, careful procession of interim testing, NASA has had to proceed with building its most complex, most radically designed vehicle with crossed fingers, hoping each stage would go without a hitch. It didn’t, of course. Engines overheat and crack. Tiles fall off. So now we have the spectacle of two heroes sitting on top of enough high explosive to level a small town, arranged in a complicated system that has never been adequately tested. The Kennedy Space Center Director claims “the space shuttle will be safer than the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft, because of the added experience NASA has gained.” I hope he knows what he’s talking about. I hope he’s not just whistling in the dark.

  And I hope I haven’t given the impression that NASA is the villain of this story. There really aren’t any villains, other than the ones already condemned by history—Hitler, Oswald, Nixon (and only one of them appears here as an obstructing force). What I’ve been trying to do for the past hour is to give you a sense of how complex and deeply-rooted the problems are, that forced NASA into such an unusual compromise in design and testing procedure. If the shuttle hadn’t been built—in whatever design—it would have been the end of manned space flight in America for the foreseeable future. So we’re gambling; gambling lives and money, but from my point of view the stakes justify it. Not just so I can see another fireworks display. I really think that successful exploitation of space is the only way we can give hope to our crowded, hungry, jittery world. That’s another lecture, but I hope that most of you here today know the broad outlines of it. And hope against hope that most of our fellow citizens appreciate what will be at stake come May or June, and NASA will show those of us who watch the countdown with fingers and toes crossed and ready to duck, that we had nothing to worry about.

  War Stories

  Savagery toward the enemy is the common stuff of any war. Here a British officer describes handling enemy casualties in World War I:

  I am afraid I ceased thinking of Germans as human beings from that time. I may as well frankly admit that through all my experiences in trench fighting since then, my habit became that of calling into a dug-out [of surrendering Germans]:

  “How many men are down there?”

  If the answer came (let us say) “Six,” we would throw three bombs into the dug-out and call:

  “Here—share these among you.”1

  An American officer describes the way the Japanese cared for American prisoners who collapsed during the Bataan death march:

  Skulking along, a hundred yards behind our contingent, came a “clean-up squad” of murdering Jap buzzards. Their helpless victims, sprawled darkly against the white of the road, were easy targets.

  As members of the murder squad stooped over each huddled form, there would be an orange flash in the darkness and a sharp report. The bodies were left where they lay, that other prisoners coming behind us might see them.

  Our Japanese guards enjoyed the spectacle in silence for a time. Eventually, one of them who spoke English felt he should add a little spice to the entertainment.

  “Sleepy?” he asked. “You want sleep? Just lie down on road. You get good, long sleep.” />
  On through the night we were followed by orange flashes and thudding shots.2

  And this one is from an American paratrooper:

  For about six months I’d been living with this mamasan and her three kids. We got along real well; she was a good fuck and did all the cooking and cleaning and kept my uniform strack.

  Well, we get the word we’re moving out before dawn, flying north for a drop. Got to keep it absolutely secret from the gooks.

  So what the hell can I do? I can’t tell her. I can’t just leave, because she’ll know something’s up and might pass the word. So what I do is wait till after midnight and sneak in and cut all their throats, just kill them in their sleep, then go join my unit. Made me feel like shit, but what the hell can you do?

  This last anecdote was told to me in the early ’70s by a middle-aged sergeant, killing time in a bar in O’Hare International, stranded overnight by a snowstorm. I had long hair and a beard but was wearing the brass bracelet that serves as a recognition signal for Vietnam veterans; he was in dress greens with a chest full of fruit salad bespeaking valor and woundings during service in Korea and Vietnam.

  It’s significant to me that the story comes from Korea, in 1952. Not Vietnam.

  Why did he feel he had to confess this atrocity to a total stranger? We had talked enough for him to know that I was a combat veteran, slightly decorated and disabled, and perhaps he thought that that would make me sympathetic to cold-blooded homicide, so long as they were gooks being killed. It didn’t. I tried to be civil but finished my drink quickly and left, even with noplace to go but another airport bar.