Genesis

by Robert Zimmerman

  Canal zone. Anders's clothes have been improvised from his parachute.

  The Anderses moved to Houston and built a home in El Lago, the same development where the Bormans lived. In the two years since the Bormans and Lovells had arrived in Clear Lake, it had become a thriving community. The only evidence that Valerie saw of those once-empty farm fields was the immediate lack of a supermarket. That too soon changed.

  For a church, the Anders joined the small Catholic chapel at Ellington Air Force Base. They liked Father Vermillion, the church was close by, and several of their neighbors, including astronaut Gene Cernan, belonged.

  For the next five years Bill Anders worked as hard as he ever had, doing whatever NASA asked him to do. He went on field trips to the deserts of Nevada and the jungles of Panama (where he and Mike Collins captured and cooked iguana for food). He made speeches to schools, community groups, and colleges (where once he buzzed the famous “Chicken Ranch” brothel of Texas from his helicopter on his way to a commencement). He studied both the Gemini and developing Apollo spacecraft (taking thousands more hours of academic study). And he flew endless simulations.

  But he didn’t fly into space. His lack of test pilot experience, while not mandatory for NASA, had put him in the lower echelons of the astronaut corps, and it was four years before he was finally assigned to a flight, as back-up for Gemini 11.

  During the Gemini years the closest he ever got to the real action was during the Gemini 8 mission in March 1966. Bill was one of the capcoms, and on his watch one of the capsule’s thrusters began firing uncontrollably, forcing Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott to make an emergency return to earth. For a few short minutes Anders was at the center of the action, relaying information between the ground and the capsule as the astronauts regained control of their spacecraft and planned their sudden reentry. Then it was over.

  Anders didn’t give up. He pushed harder. Eventually he knew he’d fly: it was only a matter of time.

  * * *

  A preliminary inspection of Gemini 6’s first stage rockets indicated that the engines had cut off because a small electrical plug had been jarred from its socket. Closer inspection revealed a second, more significant error. A dust cover, which in July had been placed on an engine valve during maintenance work, had mistakenly never been removed. This also would have caused Gemini 6’s engines to stall, and would have done so in October -- had they tried to launch then.121

  At 7:37 AM (CST) on December 15th, after three tries, Gemini 6 finally took off. Six hours later Wally Schirra eased the capsule within ten feet of Gemini 7. The two ships now flew in formation, nose to nose.

  Schirra looked across at Borman and Lovell, who after twelve days in orbit looked pretty disheveled. “Bluebeard, you don’t have much of a mustache,” he kidded Borman.

  Gemini 6 approaches Gemini 7. Note the loose wires.

  “Don’t let them kid you,” Borman answered in defense. “I’m just a blond.”

  Later Schirra pointed out some loose wires that were trailing from Gemini 7’s rear. “You guys are really a shaggy-looking group with all those wires hanging out.”

  Borman’s serious response was typical. “Where are they hanging from?” he asked instantly, worried about the integrity of his spacecraft. Schirra immediately got serious and carefully described the wires to him.

  For four hours the capsules circled the globe together, taking pictures and joking with each other. “There seems to be a lot of traffic up here,” Schirra noted when the many voices on the radio grew especially confusing.

  “Call a policeman,” the capcom answered.

  At another moment Schirra, a Navy man, held up a sign saying “Beat Army” so that West Point graduate Borman could see it. Borman quickly flashed his own “Beat Navy” sign in response.122

  Near the end of the rendezvous period, Stafford startled Borman, Lovell, and mission control when he suddenly announced “We have an object in view. Looks like it’s in a polar orbit and in a very low trajectory, traveling north to south.”

  The two spacecraft mere feet apart. Gemini 7 is slowly tumbling as Gemini 6 approaches.

  The flight controllers in Houston jerked awake in alarm. Nothing should have been coming at the astronauts from that direction. Were the Soviets firing missiles at the two Gemini capsules? Was a meteorite racing towards them?

  Stafford continued, “It looks like he’s trying to signal us. Stand by -- we’ll try to pick this up.” There was a long, pregnant pause.

  And then Wally Schirra began playing “Jingle Bells” on a harmonica, accompanied by Tom Stafford with a string of bells.

  After a few seconds the ground controller laughed. “You’re too much,” he told Schirra.

  When asked how the two astronauts had smuggled this “unneeded” equipment on board, NASA officials decided they really didn’t need to know. “I’m sure it wasn’t a case of smuggling,” one official rationalized.123

  The two spacecraft broke formation, and after a little more than a day in orbit Gemini 6 returned to earth, hitting the ocean only twelve miles from the aircraft carrier Wasp.

  Borman near the end of the Gemini 7 mission. The hatch window is on the right.

  Borman and Lovell, however, continued their confinement in space. After twelve days in orbit their spacecraft’s operation was beginning to sag. The Gemini capsule (as would the Apollo spacecraft) used fuel cells to generate electricity. By now, however, two of Gemini 7’s three fuel cells had failed. In addition, the two thrusters for controlling the ship’s yaw no longer worked properly, and the ship’s attitude control fuel was almost gone.

  And the astronauts were tired, very tired. Borman, worried about the fuel cells, badly wanted to come home. At one point Chris Kraft, flight director, got on the radio to go over the problems and ease Borman’s mind. When mission control noted that they only had three and half hours to go, Lovell responded, “Right-o. That carrier will feel good.”124

  Finally, at 8:28 AM (CST) on December 18th, the retro-rockets fired automatically, and after two hundred six orbits and more than five million miles, Gemini 7 came home.* And though for scientific reasons the doctors asked the two astronauts to stay in their capsule until it was hauled unto the Wasp, both men refused. They insisted on being airlifted immediately by helicopter back to the aircraft carrier.

  * Despite Gemini 7’s immense total travel distance, it never rose higher than 203 miles elevation and was never far from home. Apollo 8, which flew one-tenth the total distance, traveled almost 1,200 times farther from the earth.

  On the ground, both families were relieved. “I thought two weeks was an eternity, but the last thirty minutes seemed even longer,” said Marilyn Lovell, describing how she had felt as the capsule fell to earth.

  Then she returned to her role of supportive wife. “It was the most perfect mission I could have hoped my husband could possibly be connected with. He could come home, beard and all, and I would welcome him with open arms.”125

  Susan Borman also played her part. She looked at the televised picture of her husband on the deck of the Wasp and told reporters, “He looks marvelous. I think the flight was wonderful and great.”126

  Even as Borman and Lovell arrived on the Wasp, mission control in Houston was filled with cheers of celebration and triumph. Robert Gilruth, director of the Manned Spaceflight Center, noted that “it has been a fabulous year for manned space flight.”127

  In the next year, the United States launched five more Gemini missions, one every two months. Each was more successful then the last, achieving every goal and proving that humans could not only survive in space, they could work there as well. Furthermore, the next generation of American rockets, the Saturn 5, was rolling off the assembly line. This was the rocket that, if all went as planned, would take three Americans to the moon sometime in 1967.

  During this same period the Soviet space program under Brezhnev was working non-stop to develop its new Soyuz space capsule. With this spacecraft they also hoped
to fly two cosmonauts around the moon and back to earth by 1967.

  If all went well, 1967 would finally be the year that both nations flew human beings to the moon.

  GREGORY

  Fred Gregory stared at his knees. Until his co-pilot slapped him on the shoulder to point them out, he hadn’t realized they were shaking uncontrollably.

  Gregory laughed. While his nervous system might have a mind of its own, he was having the time of his life.

  It was 1966 and America was embroiled in the war in Vietnam. Fred Gregory was a helicopter pilot, and he now hovered about seventy-five feet above the jungles of South Vietnam. Below him burned the wreckage of a small reconnaissance plane, its pilot dead and its one passenger, a local scout, waiting desperately for rescue. Bullets were flying everywhere, and all around him American planes strafed the ground with cover fire.

  Two years earlier, North Vietnamese gunboats had attacked U.S. destroyers patrolling international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin, off Vietnam.* President Johnson, having taken over as President after John Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, immediately responded with the first American bombing strikes on North Vietnam, proclaiming that “aggression by terror against the peaceful villages of South Vietnam has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America. The determination of all Americans to carry out our full commitment to the people and to the government of South Vietnam will be redoubled by this outrage.”128

  * In later years it was learned that, while one gunboat attack did occur, a so-called second more serious attack almost certainly did not happen, even though this second attack was used by the Johnson Administration to justify the bombings and Tonkin Gulf resolution. Herring, 133-137; Karnow, 365-373; Moss, 156-165.

  Shortly, Congress overwhelmingly passed what became known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. This law authorized the President “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent any further aggression.” It also gave Johnson the power “to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.”129

  The complexities and failures of the Vietnam War can hardly be analyzed here. What can be said is that few Americans at the time questioned the need for this military action. Like Berlin, it merely seemed another front in the war with communism, tyranny, and Soviet power.

  Unlike Berlin, however, the war that President Johnson and Congress had so quickly decided to join was much more tangled. While Vietnam was partly an internal civil war between capitalist and communist factions, it was also a war of independence from colonial rule. And unlike Berlin and Europe, it appears now in retrospect that the faction that wanted a communist Vietnam was probably in the majority.

  In the twenty-four months following passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution the U.S. contingent in Vietnam increased from 23,000 men to 170,000. The fighting had escalated, and the casualties had mounted, with little sign of progress or settlement.

  During the build-up, Fred Gregory was an Air Force helicopter rescue pilot stationed at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma. Though his job in Oklahoma was to perform rescues, little ever happened. And because Gregory had to always be on call in case of emergency, he could never fly his helicopter more than three minutes from base. His situation reminded him of Henry Fonda’s in the movie “Mr. Roberts.” Just like the character in the movie, Fred could see the action in Vietnam passing him by, and this frustrated him.

  Gregory was born to a middle class black family in Washington, D.C. which for generations had fought, and beaten, bigotry of their time. His great- grandfather had been a member of Howard University’s first graduating class. His grandfather had been a successful carpet layer and union organizer.

  His father had graduated from both Case Institute (now Case Western Reserve University) and M.I.T. as an electrical engineer, but could not get work in his profession because of his skin color. Instead, he became a teacher, rising quickly through the Washington, D.C. school system to become its assistant school superintendent for vocational education.

  When Fred was thirteen and about to enter the senior year of junior high school in Washington, the Supreme Court made its ruling against segregation in Brown vs. Board of Education. Though the nearest junior high school was only a short walk from his home, Fred had been attending a segregated black school halfway across the District.

  The Washington school administration decided that they would desegregate all classes except for the seniors in junior high and high school. They assumed that it made less sense for kids about to graduate to change schools.

  Fred’s father thought it absurd for his son to have to travel so far each day, especially with a school so close to his home. Many of Fred’s friends were white children who lived in the same neighborhood and attended the nearby school. Francis Gregory made the proper arrangements, and when school opened in the fall of 1954, Fred Gregory became the only black student in the ninth grade of John Philip Sousa Jr. High School.

  For the first few hours, Fred was also the only student in the ninth grade of John Philip Sousa Jr. High School. He and his home room teacher sat together in class and stared out the window at the rest of the school’s students, gathered on the grass of adjacent Fort Dupont Park to protest segregation’s end.

  It was a silly protest. Fred was simply doing what all the kids there did -- attend his local neighborhood school. Since he was friends with many of those young demonstrators, the protest carried little steam. By lunchtime the kids were back in class, and without much additional fanfare the school quickly accepted integration.

  To Fred and his family, such events were merely small hurdles on the way to success. They had always taken the attitude that the only obstacles you faced in life were obstacles you put there yourself. They had faith in American concepts of freedom and peaceful dissent, and despite facing the worst forms of racism, had seen their hard work pay off through four generations.

  In many ways, Fred Gregory was very similar to the Apollo astronauts. Like Borman and Lovell, Fred Gregory had been interested in airplanes and flying since childhood. Like Lovell, Gregory had to attend a military academy (in his case the Air Force Academy in Colorado) in order to learn how to fly. And like Borman and Anders, he had a strong desire to serve his country.

  Unlike the astronauts, however, the space program did not appeal to him. “I really didn’t have a whole lot of interest in getting in a blunt body capsule,” Gregory remembers. He wanted to fly planes, and “the thing didn’t look like an airplane.”

  In 1965, however, he was stuck in Oklahoma, hardly doing any flying and watching the war in Vietnam unfold without him. He badly wanted to go overseas, and after making repeated requests for transfer, Fred finally got his wish in the spring of 1966.

  Six months later he was holding that helicopter steady while his knees shook like crazy. In the back of the helicopter the two parachute jumpers (or P.J.s) had lowered what they called a “forest penetrator” down to the stranded scout.

  The penetrator was an elaborate harness which a soldier unfolded, assembled, and climbed into so that he could be safely hauled into the helicopter. Carefully-worded English instructions were attached so that anyone could figure out how to use it.

  Unfortunately, the scout was not an American, and couldn’t read English. Unaware that he was supposed to unfold the device, he just grabbed it and held on, expecting the rescue crew to haul him up.

  This wouldn’t work. They signaled for the scout to let go of the penetrator and pulled it back into the helicopter. One of the P.J.s opened it up and climbed on. The second slowly lowered his partner through the dense undergrowth and, acting as Fred’s eyes, commanded, “A foot to the right . . . a little more . . . hold it . . . hold it . . .” as he yelled over the roar of the rotor blades and gunfire. The Vietcong were closing in.


  The cable reached the ground. The scout, with directions from the P.J., climbed onto the harness seat, and both he and the P.J. hung on as they were raised back up to the safety of the helicopter. As the soldiers were hauled to safety, Fred’s co-pilot tapped him on the shoulder and pointed at Fred’s twitching knees.

  They both started laughing. “It was really funny,” Fred remembers. “I had absolutely no control over them.” Though he was holding the helicopter rock steady, his knees were jumping about like popcorn in a popper.

  Without waiting a second, and with his knees still shaking, Fred calmly pulled the chopper up and out of fire, heading north to the safety of the American airbase at Danang.

  BERLIN

  On December 19th, 1965, one day after Frank Borman and Jim Lovell returned to earth, West Berliners began lining up at the Berlin Wall. For the third year in a row, the East German government had agreed to allow limited visitation rights to any West Berliner with relatives in East Berlin. Beginning on this day and continuing for the next two weeks, West Berliners were allowed to make one or two visits to the Soviet Zone. Over 350,000 permits had been approved, and almost a million passes issued.

  Hours before dawn and the opening of the gates, hundreds had arrived with their passes, carrying suitcases, shopping bags and boxes filled with gifts for their relatives in the East. One man brought a six-foot aluminum bathtub to give to his parents. On the East Berlin side anxious crowds formed as well. In all, over 60,000 West Berliners visited East Berlin on this first day, with 70,000 going on the next.

  Dean Heinrich Grüber and his wife and daughter found themselves barred by the guards, however. Though the Grübers had passes, and merely wished to visit their son in East Germany, the guards denied them entry. Grüber was a prominent Evangelical church leader, and it was decided that his presence in East Berlin “was undesirable in view of the present political situation.”130