The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

  “Are you all right!”

  The look on the kid’s face! Christalmighty!

  “I was in my car! I saw you coming down!”

  “Listen,” says Yeager. The pain in his finger is terrific. “Listen … you got a knife?”

  The kid digs into his pocket and pulls out a penknife. Yeager starts cutting the glove off his left hand. He can’t bear it any more. The kid stands there hypnotized and horrified. From the look on the kid’s face, Yeager can begin to see himself. His neck, the whole left side of his head, his ear, his cheek, his eye must be burned up. His eye socket is slashed, swollen, caked shut, and covered with a crust of burned blood, and half his hair is burned away. The whole mess and the rest of his face and his nostrils and his lips are smeared with the sludge of the burning rubber. And he’s standing there in the middle of the desert in a pressure suit with his head cocked, squinting out of one eye, working on his left glove with a penknife … The knife cuts through the glove and it cuts through the meat of his finger … You can’t tell any longer … It’s all run together … The goddamn finger looks like it’s melted … He’s got to get the glove off. That’s all there is to it. It hurts too goddamned much. He pulls off the glove and a big hunk of melted meat from the finger comes off with it … It’s like fried suet …

  “Arrggghhh …” It’s the kid. He’s retching. It’s too much for him, the poor bastard. He looks up at Yeager. His eyes open and his mouth opens. All the glue has come undone. He can’t hold it together any longer.

  “God,” he says, “you … look awful!” The Good Samaritan, A.A.D.! Also a doctor! And he just gave his diagnosis! That’s all a man needs … to be forty years old and to fall one hundred goddamned thousand feet in a flat spin and punch out and make a million-dollar hole in the ground and get half his head and his hand burned up and have his eye practically ripped out of his skull … and have the Good Samaritan, A.A.D., arrive as if sent by the spirit of Pancho Barnes herself to render a midnight verdict among the motherless Joshua trees while the screen doors bang and the pictures of a hundred dead pilots rattle in their frames:

  “My God! … you look awful.”

  A few minutes later the rescue helicopter arrived. The medics found Yeager standing out in the mesquite, him and some kid who had been passing by. Yeager was standing erect with his parachute rolled up and his helmet in the crook of his arm, right out of the manual, and staring at them quite levelly out of what was left of his face, as if they had had an appointment and he was on time.

  At the hospital they discovered one stroke of good luck. The blood over Yeager’s left eye had been baked into a crustlike shield. Otherwise he might have lost it. He had suffered third- and second-degree burns on his head and neck. The burns required a month of treatment in the hospital, but he was able to heal without disfigurement. He even regained full use of his left index finger.

  It so happened that on the day of Yeager’s flight, at just about the time he headed down the runway on takeoff, the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, announced that the X–20 program had been canceled. Although the Manned Orbiting Laboratory scheme remained alive officially, it was pretty obvious that there would be no American military space voyagers. The boys in Houston had the only ticket; the top of the pyramid was theirs to extend to the stars, if they were able.

  Yeager was returned to flight status and resumed his duties at ARPS. In time he would go on to fly more than a hundred missions in Southeast Asia in B–57 tactical bombers.

  No one ever broke the Russian mark with the NF-104 or even tried to. Up above 100,000 feet the plane’s envelope was goddamned full of holes. And Yeager never again sought to set a record in the sky over the high desert.

  Epilogue

  Well, the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. After Gordon Cooper’s triumph, Alan Shepard had launched a campaign for one more Mercury flight, a three-day mission, which it would be his turn to fly. He had the backing of Walt Williams and most of the astronauts. James Webb headed them off easily, however, with President Kennedy’s tacit blessing, and announced that Project Mercury had been completed. NASA and the Administration were having a hard enough time keeping the Congress in line to support the $40 billion Gemini and Apollo lunar-landing programs without prolonging the Mercury series. The spirit of two years before, when Kennedy had raised his arms toward the moon and congressmen cheered and issued forth a limitless budget, had evaporated. The space race was a … “race for survival”? The United States faced … “national extinction”? Whoever controlled outer space … controlled the earth? The Russians were going to … put a red spot on the moon? It was impossible to recall the emotion of those days. In mid-June 1963 the Chief Designer (still the anonymous genius!) put Vostok 5 into orbit with Cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky aboard, and two days later he sent the first woman into space, Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, aboard Vostok 6, and they remained in orbit for three days, flying within three miles of each other at one point and landing on Soviet soil on the same day—and not even then did the old sense of warlike urgency revive in the Congress.

  In July, Shepard began to be bothered by a ringing in his left ear and occasional dizziness, symptoms of Meniere’s disease, which affects the inner ear. Like Slayton, he had to go on inactive status as an astronaut and could only fly an aircraft with a co-pilot aboard. Slayton, meantime, had made a decision that would have been unthinkable to most military officers. He had resigned from the Air Force after nineteen years—one year short of qualifying for the twenty-year-man’s pension, that golden reward that blazed out there beyond the horizon throughout the career officer’s years of financial hardship. Slayton’s problem was that the Air Force had decided to ground him altogether because of his heart condition. As a civilian working for NASA, he could continue to fly high-performance aircraft, so long as he was accompanied by a co-pilot. He could keep up his proficiency, he could remain on flight status, he could keep alive his hopes of proving, somewhere down the line, that he had the right stuff to go aloft as an astronaut, after all. Next to that consideration the pension didn’t amount to much.

  On July 19 Joe Walker flew the X–15 to 347,800 feet, which was sixty-six miles up, surpassing the record of 314,750 feet set by Bob White the year before; and on August 22 Walker reached 354,200 feet, or sixty-seven miles, which was seventeen miles into space. In addition to White and Walker, one other man had flown the X–15 above fifty miles. That was White’s backup, Bob Rushworth, who had achieved 285,000 feet, fifty-four miles, in June. The Air Force had instituted the practice of awarding Air Force Astronaut wings to any Air Force pilot who flew above fifty miles. They used the term itself: astronaut. As a result, White and Rushworth, the Air Force’s prime and backup pilots for the X–15, now had their astronaut wings. Joe Walker, being a civilian flying the X–15 for NASA, did not qualify. So some of Walker’s good buddies at Edwards took him out to a restaurant for dinner, and they all knocked back a few, and they pinned some cardboard wings on his chest. The inscription read: “Asstronaut.”

  On September 28 the seven Mercury astronauts went to Los Angeles for the awards banquet of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots. Iven Kincheloe’s widow, Dorothy, presented them with the Iven C. Kincheloe Award for outstanding professional performance in the conduct of flight test. The wire services devoted scarcely more than a paragraph to the occasion, and that they took from the handout. After all the Distinguished Service Medals and the parades and the appearances before Congress, after every sort of tribute that politicians, private institutions, and the Genteel Beast could devise, the Iven C. Kincheloe Award didn’t seem like very much. But for the seven astronauts it was an important night. The radiant Kinch, the great blond movie-star picture of a pilot, was the most famous of the dead rocket pilots and could have cut his own orders in the Air Force, had he lived. He would have had Bob White’s job as prime pilot of the X–15 and God knows what else. There were aviation awards and aviation awards, but the Kincheloe Award—for “professional perfo
rmance”—was the big one within the flight test fraternity. The seven men had finally closed the circle and brought together the scattered glories of their celebrity. They had fought for a true pilot’s role in Project Mercury, they had won it, step by step, and Cooper’s flight, on top of the others, had shown they could handle it in the classic way, out on the edge. Now they had the one thing that had been denied them for years while the rest of the nation worshipped them so unquestioningly: acceptance by their peers, their true brethren, as test pilots of the space age, deserving occupants of the top of the pyramid of the right stuff.

  During the summer Kennedy had gone on television to tell the nation that a nuclear test ban agreement with the Russians had been reached. Thereupon the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, had proposed a corollary that would ban even the placing of nuclear weapons in earth orbit. The Soviets themselves were extinguishing the notion of the thunderbolts from space. On August 30 there had gone into service the piece of equipment by which the entire interlude would be remembered: the hotline, a telephone hookup between the White House and the Kremlin, the better to avoid misunderstandings that might result in nuclear war. When Kennedy was assassinated on November 22 by a man with Russian and Cuban ties, there was no anti-Soviet or anti-Cuban clamor in the Congress or in the press. The Cold War, as anyone could plainly see, was over.

  No one, and certainly not the men themselves, could comprehend the meaning of this for the role of the astronaut, however. The new President, Lyndon Johnson, proved to be even more of a proponent of the space program than his predecessor. Due partly to the political genius of James E. Webb, who now came into his own, the Congress swung about and gave NASA a blank check for the missions to the moon. Nevertheless, the fact remained: the Cold War was over.

  No more manned spaceflights were scheduled until the start of the Gemini program in 1965. By then the seven Mercury astronauts would begin to feel a change in the public attitude toward them and, for that matter, toward the Next Nine and the groups of astronauts that were to follow. They would feel the change, but they would not be able to put it into words. What was that feeling? Why, it was the gentle slither of the mantle of soldierly glory sliding off one’s shoulders!—and the cooling effect of oceans of tears drying up! The single-combat warriors’ war had been removed. They would continue to be honored, and men would continue to be awed by their courage; but the day when an astronaut could parade up Broadway while traffic policemen wept in the intersections was no more. Never again would an astronaut be perceived as a protector of the people, risking his life to do battle in the heavens. Not even the first American to walk on the moon would ever know the outpouring of a people’s most primal emotions that Shepard, Cooper, and, above all, Glenn had known. The era of America’s first single-combat warriors had come, and it had gone, perhaps never to be relived.