by Scott Kelly
Meanwhile, I applied to transfer to two schools: Rutgers University and the State University of New York Maritime College. Both were close by and both offered me the possibility of becoming a commissioned officer in the Navy.
SUNY Maritime is a small military-oriented school in the Bronx, established to train ships’ officers in the maritime industry. It was the first maritime college in the country, built on Fort Schuyler (named for General Philip Schuyler, Alexander Hamilton’s father-in-law). The fort was designed to defend Manhattan from naval attack in the aftermath of the War of 1812. I didn’t know any of this when I applied there—it was just one of very few options that seemed open to me. When the school made me an offer of admission, I immediately accepted. I had just barely made the cutoff for the minimum GPA.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d been rejected by Rutgers. When the letter came in the mail, my parents had opened it, then thrown it away without telling me. They couldn’t bear to disappoint me. They kept this secret for years, until long after I’d been selected as an astronaut.
I made my way to Fort Schuyler in the summer of 1983. I knew I would start the year with a two-week indoctrination program, but I had only a hazy idea based on movies of what this would be like: getting my head shaved, upperclassmen shouting in my face, forced marches, having to clean things like shoes and belt buckles over and over. As it turned out, all of these ideas were entirely accurate.
—
THE SUNY MARITIME CAMPUS was surprisingly beautiful, on a spit of land between the Long Island Sound and the East River, under the Throgs Neck Bridge. Sprawling and well kept, the campus centered on the stately structure of the old fort, with newer buildings around the perimeter. On move-in day, I had only a footlocker full of clothes, a boom box, and cassette tapes of Journey, Bruce Springsteen, the Grateful Dead, and Supertramp. I found my room, a beige cube crammed with two single beds, two desks, and two dressers. My roommate was already there, unpacking. He introduced himself as Bob Kelman (the college did everything alphabetically, so Kelly and Kelman would room together and line up together for everything). Bob was—and still is—a friendly and outgoing person with a wry smile and a cutting sense of humor. We talked a bit as we unpacked, getting to know each other.
“So what are you going to do when you get out of here?” Bob asked.
“I’m going to be an astronaut,” I said without a trace of a smile, looking him dead in the eye. I was trying to get used to taking the idea seriously myself. Bob narrowed his eyes and looked me up and down.
“Oh, yeah?” Bob asked.
“Yep,” I responded, deadpan.
He nodded thoughtfully. “Well, I’m going to be an Indian chief.”
He laughed pretty hard at his own joke. At the time I thought he was being sort of a jerk, but once we became good friends this story of his reaction always made us laugh, especially once I actually became an astronaut.
As we unpacked our things, Bob and I talked about the indoctrination period about to begin and what exactly that would be like. I made a joke about getting our heads shaved.
“What?” Bob froze, a pile of books in his hand. “They’re not going to shave our heads. You’re joking, right?”
I told him I was pretty sure it was true. “It’s like a military indoctrination. Don’t they always shave your head in the military?”
Bob thought about it for a moment, then dismissed it. “Nah,” he said. “They would have told us. I mean, we would have had to sign something.”
—
THE NEXT MORNING, Bob and I were awakened at five in the morning by upperclassmen beating on pots and pans and garbage can lids and screaming in our faces. We had five minutes to go from a dead sleep to dressed in our PT gear, beds made, standing in the hall at attention. That morning, and every morning to follow, started with an hour of running and calisthenics. It was already hot and sticky even before dawn, and once the sun came up the heat was brutal.
Those first days, we memorized quotations and phrases connected to the school’s history. The first one we learned was the Sallyport Saying, which was inscribed over an archway in the old fort: “But men and officers must obey, no matter at what cost to their feelings, for obedience to orders, instant and unhesitating, is not only the life-blood of armies but the security of states; and the doctrine, that under any conditions whatever deliberate disobedience can be justified is treason to the commonwealth—Stonewall Jackson.” (Basically, “Obey orders.” If Jackson had been more succinct, my indoctrination would have been a lot easier.) I preferred a shorter, more compelling quotation: “The sea is selective, slow at recognition of effort and aptitude, but fast at sinking the unfit.” I still remember those quotations to this day.
That first morning, we were marched to another building, where we were taken into a small room one by one. Because we did everything in alphabetical order, I got to watch Bob’s reaction while I sat in the chair and had my head shaved. I didn’t mind about my hair, but I can still remember the look on Bob’s face, an expression of abject horror. I laughed so much that the guy with the clippers had to yell at me to hold still. A few minutes later, Bob’s black curls were on the floor along with mine.
The military discipline came pretty easily for me. I think I had been craving that kind of structure, and it was almost a relief to be told what to do and how to do it. Many of my classmates questioned the logic and fairness of every aspect of our training, tried to cut corners, and whined and complained. But I had started to figure out that I needed a clear challenge in order to apply myself. Schoolwork was still hard for me, but following directions gave me stability. I embraced it.
At the end of the indoctrination period, we had a ceremony to mark the achievement. My parents came, dressed in their Sunday best, as did my paternal grandparents. As we marched by in formation, I saw all of them in the stands looking proudly at me. I was surprised by how much it meant to me to have them there, to have given them something to be proud of. But I was also aware of how far I still had to go.
When the school year started in earnest, I was taking six classes. I was nearly starting over as a freshman because the curriculum for the program here was so different from the random handful of arts and sciences classes I’d taken in Maryland. I was taking calculus, physics, electrical engineering, seamanship, and military history. The curriculum was challenging even for my classmates who had excelled in high school, and I felt good about the fact that I was keeping my head above water.
When Labor Day weekend approached, I got a call from one of my high school buddies inviting me to a party at their frat house at Rutgers. I said I’d be there.
I called my brother. “Let’s go down to Rutgers and hang out with Pete Mathern at Sigma Pi,” I said.
“I can’t,” Mark said right away. “I have a test coming up.”
I spent a few minutes trying to talk him into it before he interrupted.
“Don’t you have some sort of test coming up, too? You’ve been in classes for a few weeks now.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “My first calculus exam is at the end of next week. But I’ll study for it after I get back. I’ll have Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday…” In my mind, I was already on the side of the Cross Bronx Expressway with my duffel slung over my shoulder, thumb stuck out.
“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” Mark asked. “You’re in school. You need to absolutely ace this exam, and everything else, if you want to get caught up. You need to spend this entire weekend at your desk, doing every problem in every chapter this exam is going to cover.”
“Seriously?” I asked. “The entire long weekend?” This sounded insane to me.
“All weekend,” he said. “And the whole coming week, too.”
There was a weird silence while I took this in. I didn’t appreciate being yelled at by my twin brother. It was tempting to tell myself he was just being a jerk and that I should ignore him. I came so close to deciding not to listen; the memory still unsettles me, like a me
mory of teetering on the edge of a cliff. As much as I wanted to go to the party, I knew somewhere in my mind that he was right and that he was offering me something important by being as blunt as he was. Mark had also started out as a distracted, indifferent high school student. But he had decided to pull himself together long before I did and had succeeded. I’d never asked him how he’d done it, but now he was trying to offer me the lesson of his experience. I reluctantly decided to listen.
I stayed in all weekend—hard as it was for me—and worked every problem in every chapter, just as he had suggested, until I could do them all. When I took the exam that Friday, I felt for the first time in my life as though I understood every question and thought I had answered them more or less correctly. It was a strange feeling. When we got our exams back the next week, there was a circled red 100 at the top of mine. I stared at it for the longest time, trying to reinforce to myself the sequence of events that had played out. I had earned a perfect score on a test for the first time in my life, and a math test to boot. This was how people got good grades. It was like a door had opened.
From that point on, I enjoyed the challenge of school. I knew how to work hard and enjoyed seeing it pay off. It almost became a game I played with myself: let’s see how well I can do at this. In a strange way, it was easier for me to get an A+ than it would have been to get a B. Shooting for a lower grade was like aiming an arrow at a smaller target. “Just okay” is like threading a needle; “the best I can possibly do” is a much broader set of goalposts. I decided to try to know everything. Then I would always get an A.
That phone call with Mark was almost as pivotal a moment in my life as reading The Right Stuff. The book had given me a vision of who I wanted to be; my brother’s advice showed me how to get there.
Soon after classes got started, I had gone into the ROTC office and said I wanted to join the unit. I learned that I could participate in their courses and training, but I couldn’t apply for a scholarship until after I had at least one semester’s worth of grades. So I trained with the other cadets, doing drills and weekend exercises and taking classes on leadership, weapons systems, and military etiquette. On top of all that, all Maritime students had to study to be licensed with the U.S. Coast Guard, which was a requirement to become a merchant mariner. (I did wind up getting my U.S. Coast Guard license and have kept it current to this day.) We learned celestial and terrestrial navigation, seamanship, meteorology for mariners, and nautical “rules of the road.” After my first semester with a nearly 4.0 GPA, I was offered a Navy ROTC scholarship in exchange for at least five years of military service—longer if I went to flight school. I was pleased to be that much closer to my ultimate goal, and of course my parents were pleased that the rest of my tuition would be paid for.
At the end of the school year, we spent a few weeks preparing our training ship for our first cruise. The Empire State V, the former USNS Barrett, was a retired troop transport ship that we were learning to operate—we each had assigned tasks on the ship. When we finally started moving, I was standing watch on the bow, and the gray East River opened out before us as we crept away from the dock and headed into the fog of the Long Island Sound. I kept peering out intently into the thick soup as if the ship and every life on board depended on me: it had been drilled into me that the bow watch was not just the eyes of the ship but also the ears—I was listening for other ships and ready to call up to the bridge if I saw or heard anything that might pose a threat. As the engine room came up to speed, the distinct smell of the boiler oil tinged the air. I stood watch past City Island, past New Haven, and on to Montauk. Later, as we rounded the point to head east out into the North Atlantic Ocean, I took a deep breath of the ocean air. We were at sea. I felt like I was finally getting somewhere. I had the sense this was the stepping-off point for what would be many exciting adventures of discovery. I wouldn’t be mistaken.
—
I STILL COULDN’T quite believe we were sailing to Europe. If you’d told me, a little more than a year earlier, that this was how I would spend my nineteenth summer, I wouldn’t have believed you. The accommodations aboard the ship were dark, dingy, and poorly ventilated. When I headed up to the mess deck for meals, I often came across people throwing up into the large trash cans that lined the room. At night, people moaned in their bunks from nausea. I seemed to be immune to seasickness, and I hoped the vestibular fortitude would carry over into flight and eventually into weightlessness.
We worked on a three-day cycle: maintain the ship one day, stand watch one day, and attend classes one day. The best watch to draw was helm, as we would actually get to have a hand on the wheel steering the ship. Bow watch meant just looking out over the water trying to identify other ships. Stern watch meant looking out for someone falling overboard, which no one ever did. Class days we’d pile into small rooms filled with high school desks for academic instruction. Some of this was interesting—navigation, meteorology, and emergency procedures like firefighting or search and rescue. It wasn’t my intention to become a ship’s officer, but it seemed like a good backup career, so I paid attention and did as well as I could. At night we honed our celestial navigation skills, learning to fix the position of the ship using a sextant to measure the angle between the horizon and a particular star or planet. There was complicated math involved and it was tricky to learn, but it was necessary for sailing (and, I would learn later, for spaceflight too).
The first port we pulled in to was Majorca, Spain. (Beautiful beaches.) Then came Hamburg. (The only souvenir I have is a complete and permanent aversion to apple schnapps.) Next, we stopped at Southampton, England, and took a train into London. (I was shocked by how awful the food was for such a large cosmopolitan city.)
On the cruise back to home port, I felt I was getting the hang of the duties on board and the classroom material we were studying. We came back to Maritime stronger, more resilient, more competent than when we’d left. We’d learned to work together in difficult circumstances, responded to the unexpected, and survived. I’d understood that the point of the cruise had been to teach us seamanship, leadership, and teamwork, but it still surprised me how much I had learned. I stepped off the Empire State V a different person than when I’d stepped on.
—
AS SOON as I finished that first cruise, I got on a plane to Long Beach, California, to do ROTC training on a Navy ship cruising to Hawaii. I was with midshipmen from other colleges, including the Naval Academy, who were doing all of this for the first time. Though I was only a few months ahead of them in experience, it seemed like much more.
This was my first real exposure to the Navy. Freshman ROTC and naval academy midshipmen were expected to do the work of enlisted sailors, so when I became an officer leading enlisted men, I would know what their responsibilities were like. I lived in crowded berthing again, with about twenty guys in bunks stacked three high. It was good practice for living in small spaces in the future. Just as on the Empire State V, we did a lot of manual labor on the ship, which some guys resented. But I wasn’t bothered by it and was happy to be on a ship, making progress toward a career in the Navy.
—
MY SECOND CRUISE on the Empire State V, the summer between my sophomore and junior years, offered me better work assignments and more authority. Our first night in port in Alicante, Spain, my classmates and I threw a party in our room. Drinking was not allowed on the ship, but as long as we didn’t cause any problems we hoped not to get in any trouble. Within a few hours we were pretty lit. I finished off a bottle of vodka, the last of the alcohol we had on board, and I thought I should mark the occasion by throwing the bottle against the bulkhead to smash it. But instead of breaking, the bottle bounced off the wall and struck one of my classmates on the back of the head. She was nearly knocked out, and we probably should have sought medical attention for her, but instead we thought it was hysterical, including her.
Intent on continuing our party, we came up with a great plan: we decided to get a Jacob�
�s ladder (a hanging ladder made of heavy rope and wood planks) and throw it over the back of the ship. Then we could climb down, swim to the dock, and sneak off to a nearby bar. We dispatched a couple of people to the forward part of the ship to find the ladder and haul it back. When they reached the rest of us, waiting for them at the stern of the ship, they were dragging the ladder, which weighed nearly a hundred pounds. As we were putting it into place, I got into an argument with a classmate about which of us would go down the ladder first. We were yelling and screaming, neither of us backing down, and nearly came to blows. I finally convinced him of my superior qualifications for the job and triumphantly climbed over the railing to test how securely the ladder was fastened. In fact, it wasn’t tied down at all. I fell, along with one hundred pounds of rope and wood, thirty feet into the dark water below. I remember hitting the hard, cold water as if hitting a sheet of pavement and reflecting with surprise that I had remained conscious. I quickly sank, pulled down by the heavy ladder, which I was now tangled in. It took a huge effort to swim back up to the surface. I was able to struggle over to the engineering side port, used for loading supplies while the ship was docked, and some of the engineering cadets were already there waiting to pull me back in. I was completely limp from the shock of hitting the water so hard, as well as from the vodka, but eventually a classmate pulled me in through the access door. I made it back to the aft part of the ship undetected, and our superiors never learned of our adventures. I surely would have been expelled if they had, and that would have cost me the one chance I had managed to create for myself.
5
April 3, 2015
Dreamed I was working in a Soviet-era car refurbishment plant with Soviet soldiers, wearing their olive-green full-length wool coats and their Russian hats. The plant took old crappy Soviet cars and cleaned them up, maybe for resale and maybe for some other nefarious purpose. I wasn’t sure. I was responsible for cleaning the engines with a big steamer. Each time I sprayed, engine oil splattered all over the room, and I worried that I was somehow doing it wrong. I wondered how the room would be cleaned.