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The Right Stuff
The Right Stuff
The Right Stuff
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The Right Stuff

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

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Tom Wolfe at his very best" (The New York Times Book Review), The Right Stuff is the basis for the 1983 Oscar Award-winning film of the same name and the 8-part Disney+ TV mini-series.

From "America's nerviest journalist" (Newsweek)--a breath-taking epic, a magnificent adventure story, and an investigation into the true heroism and courage of the first Americans to conquer space. "

Millions of words have poured forth about man's trip to the moon, but until now few people have had a sense of the most engrossing side of the adventure; namely, what went on in the minds of the astronauts themselves - in space, on the moon, and even during certain odysseys on earth. It is this, the inner life of the astronauts, that Tom Wolfe describes with his almost uncanny empathetic powers, that made The Right Stuff a classic.

Editor's Note

The space race…

More about getting to space than exploring space, Tom Wolfe’s book focuses on stories from the pilots and their wives, and includes stories of the test pilots who paved the way for the Mercury Seven to get to space.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 4, 2008
ISBN9781429961325
The Right Stuff
Author

Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe (1930–2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of contemporary classics like The Right Stuff and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, as well as the novels The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. As a reporter, he wrote articles for The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, and New York Magazine, and is credited with coining the term, “The Me Decade.” Among his many honors, Tom was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lived in New York City.

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Rating: 4.35 out of 5 stars
4.5/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This classic work of Gonzo journalism about the adventures of the great macho test pilots who became America's first astronauts flies directly in the face of the racist, sexist, white-male-hating mentality of the pseudo-elitist snobs infected with what Elon Musk calls "the woke virus". Every kid in America should read this book in school.

    2 people found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Truly a classic.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Read after watching the movie recently with my youngest son. Remember from long ago, it seemed strange to make such a big deal about near earth orbits versus the state of the space program in the 80s...I think the book stands up well, and works much better than the movie. Finally was able to obtain a Folio Society copy, very happy with it.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wolfe lit the candle and I sat back and read. Thrilling read!

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The story of the first seven American astronauts, compared and contrasted with the life of Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier. But this is far more than just a biography of names, dates and places. Wolfe delved deep into what it meant to be a Test Pilot in the years after the Second World War; how these men thought, and talked, and lived (and sometimes died). He also brings the whole story of the pilots' families into focus; what it meant to be married to a test pilot and how it affected the wives, especially in times when male and female roles were far more stratified than they are now. If this book had been written in the 1930s or 1940s, it would have been science fiction; but it goes far beyond any goshwow pulp melodrama.All this is reflected back on the way these pilots were lauded by politicians, businessmen, the media and the American public. This adds a further dimension to the book, making it into a social history of the 1950s and 60s seen through the prism of the space programme.Wolfe develops his theory that the top pilots had a particular mindset, the "Right Stuff" of the title. If you have to ask what the "Right Stuff" is, especially by the time you've read this book, then you are irretrievably blind to it, and you certainly don't possess it yourself. Wolfe identifies it, using the language of the time, as comprising in part of "manly virtues", though this phrase is italicised so often that I could not help but think that his tongue was firmly stuck in his cheek when he wrote it.The 1983 film captures the book extremely well, though there is so much more in the book that the film couldn't pin down. For example, Glenn's wife Annie was (sympathetically) portrayed in the film as a somewhat shy and retiring character on account of her stammer; the film's depiction of her husband's tender relationship with her is a key part of its character portrait of John Glenn. But the book makes the point that Annie Glenn was neither shy nor retiring, coming as she did from "good pioneer stock", quite capable of holding her own in life and only quailing before a media onslaught that would roll over most people.The book also returns often to the Air Force manned X-15 spaceplane project and its planned successors. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, whilst American administrations focussed on rocketry, the achievements of the X-15 pilots, in flying to the edge of space and beyond were broadly ignored. Yet the X-15 programme would eventually produce the first man to walk on the Moon, Neil Armstrong.I can only fault the book on one error of fact; when talking about the Soviet Vostok vessels, Wolfe translates the Russian word 'Korabl' as 'Cosmic', when in fact it means 'ship'. Quite what the NASA astronauts would have thought, when they were pressing for changes to the Mercury capsule and the mission profiles to give them much more of the role of pilots rather than just payload, to know that the Russians were referring to their rocket as a "ship" from the outset will most likely remain lost.The writing is resolutely Sixties, both in phrase and usage; but it is a fine piece of writing nonetheless and thoroughly deserves the accolades it received at the time of publication.(Having said that, I'm sad to say that my copy, a film tie-in Bantam A-format paperback printed in the UK in 1983, is probably one of the nastiest books I've handled in recent years. Pulpy paper, a cover that displays edge and corner wear as soon as I picked it up, and excessively narrow margins and big blocks of text made worse by the displacement of the text towards the bottom of the page, resulting in almost no bottom margin, made the actual reading of this book an unpleasant experience. Fortunately, the content more than made up for this.)
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Wolfe is hyperbolic, repetitive, and extremely full of himself. I couldn't stand the thought of another 250 pages of his smug assertions of the superhuman cockiness of the pilots with none of the real explanations of why astronauts were being trained the way they were.

    Give me a book that talks more about the planes and rockets, that doesn't have a weird anti-science bent, that isn't so biased against Grissom.

    And if you ever want to relive your nostalgia for the sexism and paternalism of the 1960s, this is your book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book, The Right Stuff, chronicles the diverging research of high-altitude rocket planes and spaceflight from the early 1950s through Project Mercury, contrasting the Mercury Seven astronauts with test pilots at Edwards AFB and Naval Air Station Patuxent River, with Chuck Yeager standing out as exemplifying the “right stuff” even though he was not chosen for the space program. Wolfe writes in a somewhat conversational style, working to capture the mentality of test pilots of that era and how it defined what it meant to be a pilot for generations to come, much as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and others did for pilots of the early twentieth century. Wolfe further evokes the heady emotion of the days of Mercury, when the immediacy of the Cold War turned the Space Race into a battlefront of sorts and the astronauts into Single Combat Warriors to whom the public paid homage. However, Wolfe points out that the test pilots at Edwards were skeptical of the space program, particularly as those running it initially conceived of the pilot as little more than a passenger in a capsule. Meanwhile, the test pilots in the high desert were flying rocket planes to altitudes that required the same skills as a spacecraft, such as control of attitude jets since the air was too thin – or nonexistent – for the plane’s control surfaces to work as the plane had crossed the boundary into space. Despite these achievements, the astronauts captured the public’s imagination and eventually succeeded in using their public positions to regain some of their status as pilots, though the heady days of Mercury did not last into the Gemini and Apollo programs, where spaceflight became more routine as astronauts were longer regaled as Single Combat Warriors.The style and success of Wolfe’s book ensured its adaptation and Hollywood has done so twice, first in Philip Kaufman’s 1983 film and again in the 2020 television series from National Geographic. This Vintage Classics copy is a nice paperback edition with a great pop-art cover and an introduction from Astronaut Scott Kelly that helps to capture of the legacy of The Right Stuff. Something appears to have gone wrong during the formatting process, however, as there are several typographical errors throughout the book (extraneous letters jumbled in the middle of words, words divided by a hyphen as if they were meant to be split between two lines, and multiple instances of the number 1 in place of an “l” or an “I”). These occur often enough to be noticeable, but thankfully Wolfe’s narrative is engrossing and makes up for it.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Like most of his early non-fiction this classic is over-the-top, but a great read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I first read this book about 25 years ago, and the movie is one of my favorites. I’m pretty sure I loaned it out and when I was unable to locate it, I reordered a copy. While I am certainly well familiar with the history, and many of the characters, the detail of many test flights and space launches was outstanding.I have read that Wolfe has been criticized for his coverage of Gus Grissom’s mission, in which the hatch on his capsule mysteriously “just blew” while being recovered after an ocean splash down, resulting in loss of the capsule. Wolfe certainly paints a less than flattering picture of Grissom’s actions and composure, but appeared to me to be largely “fact based”. In any event, I find this book to be a fascinating account of the early years of the space program and cannot recommend it highly enough.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This story easily entered my Top 5 books within the first 2 chapters. It only grew from there. Wolfe's style, pacing, and his narrative voice demonstrate an extraordinary gift of storytelling surpassing many past and present peers. That narrator voice is pretty unique in writing - conversational and familiar, sharp and analytical, a bit of the South in it...Wolfe was not afraid to let his own opinions show (which I guess was the critical component of "New Journalism") but he doesn't attempt to pass opinions as facts aka John Reed, et al. You know it's a person telling it as they see it with the resulting knowledge that you know where they're coming from. Additionally, when he's relating how a witness perceived an event, it is still in the narrative voice, rather than adopting the voice of the person who used it. In many ways, this could have been a disastrous approach, but it works. You feel this is a guy telling you a story.There was hilarity on most pages, even in the morbid statistics. I loved the portions on the chimps. You really felt for Ham and Enos and the tortures they endured. The worse the picture became, the more Wolfe ratcheted up the wide-eyed, can-you-believe-this-crap comedy.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Digital audiobook performed by Dennis QuaidIn 1957 a Russian rocket launched an unmanned satellite – Sputnik – into space. Clearly this was an escalation of the Cold War and the US would not stand still for it. No. We were going to put a man into space by 1960. But how? And who?This is the story of the first seven Mercury Astronauts and how they came to be chosen – evaluated to ensure they had The Right Stuff to succeed in this vital mission. I remember so clearly that day in school as a child when a television set was rolled into our classroom so we could watch, first, Alan Shepard being launched into space. And later, John Glenn, the first man to orbit the earth. I think I’ve had this book on my tbr since it came out in 1979, and have no idea why I never picked it up before. Wolfe does a great job of giving us the background of those first seven astronauts – warts and all. I was fascinated by the extensive testing they underwent to evaluate their fitness for this work. And I think Wolfe did a great job of explaining the differences in their personalities that resulted in success, or missteps. The narrative is also packed with some pretty exciting scenes that had me completely spellbound. The scene where Yaeger nearly burns to death is particularly harrowing.Dennis Quaid does a fine job of narrating the audiobook. He exudes the “macho” quality of these uber macho men. He is in turns incredulous, irritated, arrogant, or defiant. I felt almost as if I were hearing these Mercury astronauts tell their own stories.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    You might have seen the film based on this book, which I loved, but I think I loved the book--a very different creature--even more. I should say up front I'm a big fan of space exploration, the kind of person who has read a bookshelf worth of stuff by and about astronauts, flight controllers, the engineers and builders of space craft. So you might say I was predisposed to like a book on the seven Mercury astronauts--the first Americans to go into space. On the other hand, as someone who has read voraciously on this subject, it also means a lot that I'd put this particular book at the top of the class. Tom Wolfe is not just a great journalist, but a fine novelist (Bonfire of the Vanities) and it shows in this. The book has a literary style, and uses techniques that in lesser hands might cause me to think "pretentious hack." Paragraphs that go on forever, staccato sentences interspersed with long, long run on sentences, repeated phrases such as "ziggurat," and yes, "the Right Stuff." There's even passages, especially one at the end about Chuck Yeager, that use the stream of consciousness technique. These are the sorts of things that in reviews often bring out rants from me, but here works. For one, it's a very readable style--in fact a blast to read. He conveyed scientific and technical niceties and did so lucidly but never tediously. There's a rhythm to his prose, it's conversational in tone, not what I'd call folksy exactly, but breezy, at times gossipy and with plenty of humor. Here's a paragraph that encapsulates a lot of Wolfe's subject and style:As to just what this ineffable quality was... well, it obviously involved bravery. But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life. The idea seemed to be that any fool could do that, if that was all that was required, just as any fool could throw away his life in the process. No, the idea here (in the all-enclosing fraternity) seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment—and then go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite—and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God. Nor was there a test to show whether or not a pilot had this righteous quality. There was, instead, a seemingly infinite series of tests. A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramid made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every food of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even—ultimately, God willing, one day—that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.

    3 people found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wolfe's history of the mystique of aviation in the early days of supersonic flight and the entry of the U.S. into the space race via the Mercury program, is fascinating reading. Never sappy and often cynical, the honest drama still shines through.

    Wolfe paints test pilots like the inimitable Chuck Yeager, and the Mercury 7 astronauts, with a clear and unromanticized reality, yet manages to effectively discuss the Single Combat theory and apply it to these 20th century gladiators, while taking frequent healthy swipes at the reality of career military men and the women whose status rises and falls in lockstep with their husbands' achievements.

    "Must" reading for anyone interested in the early days of NASA and the state of military aviation in the mid-20th century.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The Right Stuff is a non-fiction account of the origin of the United States space program and the space race against the Soviet Union. It starts in the 1940s and goes up through the Mercury project. This book is chock-full of detailed information about airplanes and spacecraft. A lot of it went over my head – I found myself drifting off when listening to those parts. However, I was still able to grasp the timeline of events and the broad strokes of what was happening. I was hoping there would be more about the personal lives about the various astronauts, especially the stars like John Glenn and Alan Shepard.The Right Stuff is narrated by Dennis Quaid. His tone is very man’s man – perfect for the way this book is written. However, he needs to work on his accents! Luckily, he didn’t need to use one very often.I think this book would appeal to techies who are looking for detailed information about the rise of the space program up through our first orbital launch. Unfortunately, that person is not me.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Italicized exclamation points must remind Tom Wolfe of rockets! Anyway, it can’t be possible that any writer adores exclamation points and italics more than he does. The astronauts had not just the right stuff, but the right stuff! Later, we notice, the “right stuff” evolves into the “righteous stuff.” Right on.I understand his excitement, though. A little before I was old enough to follow news reports, the future of the space program was looking dismal because “Our rockets all blow up.” We used to watch film of these failed rockets in our elementary school classes. It seemed miraculous that men made it into space.Wolfe is good at portraying the psychology of the test pilots and fighter pilots who helped make the miracle happen: “he would be up there at the apex of the entire pyramid if he survived it. And if he didn’t? That would be even more difficult to explain: the evil odds were essential to the enterprise.” Wolfe also peppers the story with the kind of urgent details that classroom presentations in the early 1960s were not about to share. As an example, for the second Mercury mission the flight’s duration combined with the time for countdown was enough that the astronaut likely would need to void himself before exiting the capsule. The high-tech solution, we’re informed, was to collect urine in a condom attached to a panty girdle.Remarkably, Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard, John Glenn, and Gus Grissom didn’t feel weightlessness when they reached altitudes at which the effects of weightlessness occur. Hell, I sometimes feel weightless here on Earth’s surface. Guess that’s part of what made them astronauts.And in case you need a reminder why the 1960s and 70s environmental legislation and enforcement came to be, listen to this description of Houston from back then: “There were bays, canals, lakes, lagoons, bayous everywhere, all of them so greasy and toxic that if you trailed your hand in the water off the back of your rowboat you would lose a knuckle. The fisherman used to like to tell weekenders: ‘Don’t smoke out there or you’ll set the bay on fire.’”A fun book. Funner it’d be with fewer “!’s” in it.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I loved the honesty of this book...you felt you really had an insight into their lives...the transition from the early life to the latter as astronauts was really something...how different was each person!
    A really fascinating read, having lived at that time myself, with a real interest in the cosmos.
    Those test pilots etc were/ are another breed! ....real bravery and the ability (as with Formula 1 drivers), to make split second life and death decisions!
    What about those amazing wives that stuck with it ...no divorces!

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Right Stuff was published in 1979, or only about 20 years from the events it describes. We are now about 35 years from the book so it's beginning to age and it's possible to consider how time has treated it. My assessment is it's a classic of the first order that will be read for generations, and has influenced the whole space book genre. Wolfe captures not only the Mercury Project and test pilots, but American culture ca. 1955-1962. It's worth noting Wolfe has a PhD from Yale in "American Studies" (1951), he is a professionally trained observer of culture. Not that it's academic, Wolfe is smart and entertaining southern raconteur. It does seem a little dated because of a subtle Freudian perspective now out of style; however even that gives it a greater historical fidelity, and underscores how good a storyteller Freud was.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is the story of America's first astronauts. The original seven men chosen to go into space. It starts out explaining what it was like to be a fighter pilot in the late 50 and discussed Yeager breaking the sound barrier and how the way he carried himself influenced other pilots. He had the right stuff. And to be a great pilot, you had to have the right stuff. Part of that included some level of contempt for death. Because you had a 23% chance of dying as a fighter pilot in some sort of accident. So the right stuff get a lot of comment from the author as he goes thru his history. It becomes the theme of the book.

    The seven were all drawn from the pilot community. Most of them were fighter pilots. Sheppard was the first American in space. Grissom was next and John Glenn was the first American to orbit the planet. The Russians were beating us each time we were planning on doing something in space. Americans were more than concerned, they were frightened. The Russians were flying over our country in space and we couldn't do anything about it much less repeat the feat. What was there to stop them from dropping an atom bomb on their way over our cities?

    The positive patriotic reaction to Glenn's space flight was dramatic. New York City gave him a parade, in the winter, where the streets were packed with cheering crying people. They were so proud of him and the national achievement that crowds of people were cheering with tears streaming down their faces! Even the policemen on their horses directing traffic were crying. I've never seen anything like that personally and wonder what it would take for Americans to feel that kind of passionate pride again?

    A decent history though you can tell there are some bias on the part of the author (Wasn't a fan of Grissom) and he has his way of viewing things. This book goes thru the end of Project Mercury. The original seven pilots went on to do other great things but this book doesn't follow them past project Mercury. The second group begin their time at the end of the book.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Author Tom Wolfe has done something that I did not expect when I started reading "The Right Stuff", his book about the first astronauts and the Mercury program. He did not just write a history of the early days of the race to space, pre-NASA, nor did he just write an expose of the personal details of those involved in that program. No, Tom Wolfe wrote a factual and funny commentary on test pilots, the military, government bureaucracy, and the news media. It's entertaining, informative, amusing, and interesting: I was never bored, nor did my focus wane over the course of almost 400 pages. Highly recommended.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Details the inklings and eventual advent of the space program from breaking the sound barrier to Project Mercury to the decision to land a man on the moon, all told in Wolfe's... delightful style. Structured around the military test pilots who daily risked their lives pushing the boundaries of human achievement - oozing the right stuff. Hooray for the Cold War? I could be pretty easily convinced that without it, there wouldn't be a space program.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A good piece of journalism about the space program in the USA. I like his level of research, and the narrator is less intrusive than the Norman Mailer book.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent telling of the pilots who broke speed records and the early astronaut program. Mr. Wolfe puts a human face to the space program and dishes some dirt while letting us know what was occurring in those days. Easy, fascinating read.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Highly engrossing, often thrilling, and always enlightening. I'm just sorry I waited so long to read it.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book concentrates on the first astronauts, including John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, and the other five. The account of the actual flights is exciting but some of the pages between flights I found less enthralling. At the end there is vivid account of Chuck Yeager's piloting of an experimental plane from which he had to eject, sustaing severe injuries. The book was published in 1979, but does not cover the moon landing --it ends with the Mrercury project. Readabble but not as gripping at times as I hoped.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Re-read for the n-th time. I like Tom Wolfe - his mannerisms grate at times, but the sheer exuberance of his writing carries you over the gaps, and he has an ear for a phrase. He keeps himself well out of this book, unlike some of his other writing (Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby), so it's not really HST-gonzo journalism, but it comes close at times. What I really admire about him is his ability to dive into a topic and write about it as an expert (Michael Lewis can do this too, but I don't think HST could do this except for subjects that he could immediately identify with on some level, such as Hell's Angels or Richard Nixon).Some of what Wolfe writes about the Mercury project doesn't tally with some of the other sources I've read, but I think it probably comes closer to capturing the spirit of the twentieth century Single-Combat Warrior corps than any technical history. If you've only seen the movie, read the book – it's better.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Hyperkinetic and, thanks to Tom Wolfe's MANIC SCREAMING NARRATIVE VOICE, a little obnoxious and purple and overcooked, but still a punchy, (mostly) irreverent myth-deflater. SIDENOTE: You gotta wonder, though, about the accuracy of THE RIGHT STUFF. Because all the events seem shoehorned so neatly into Wolfe's novelistic, New-Journalism narrative arc, the material can feel a bit suspect. Not the facts, per se, but the emotions that Wolfe stamps onto his reticent astronauts and their families. Wolfe's hyper-charged prose also works to sort of undermine his validity,and he never seems to reach the narratorial reliability of, say, David Foster Wallace - who also noodles around with stylistics and EXCLAMATION POINTS, but in a way that's a little less Maniac-In-A-Fireworks-Store.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    What I really enjoyed about Tom Wolfe's book chronicling the life and times of early test pilots and astronauts were the stories about the people involved. I also found Wolfe's entire premise -- that the early astronauts were looked down upon by test pilots as lacking that mythical "right stuff" quality. The nation's embrace of the early astronauts was therefore surprising as the line between pilot and test subject became increasingly blurred.What I didn't like is Wolfe's writing style -- there are too many amazing declarations!, too much attention to minutia that doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things and too much glossing over some of the bigger details that would have really mattered. This book was okay, but I enjoyed Michael Collins' "Carrying the Fire" far more than Wolfe's book when it comes to astronaut tales.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of my favorite books. Wolfe's history of the early space program is a book not to be missed. You'll be hooked from the first page. Then follow it up with the movie which is almost as good!

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Right Stuff is one of my all-time favorite movies, and after watching it dozens of times I finally read the book. As books tend to be, it was a lot more in-depth exploring the history of space flight from the test pilots attempting to break the sound barrier in the 1940's through the end of the Mercury program in the 1960's. Full of stories, facts, and connections this book is also written in an engaging style. A must of anyone interested in the space program or 20th-Century History.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I thoroughly enjoyed the first two books I read by Tom Wolfe, A Man In Full & Bonfire of the Vanities. I really enjoy the sweeping backgrounds that Wolfe unfolds his views of what is right and wrong in American life. I had this in mind going into reading this book, a book in which I’ve seen the movie adaptation for at least 25 times, if not more, and as I put the book down, finished, I felt maybe a trifle disappointed.The mid fifties through the early sixties ushered in the golden era of the jet age and this is the background which the book is set against. Wolfe contrasts NASA’s Project Mercury against the Air Force’s X-1 project and how the first seven NASA astronauts are viewed through the eyes of the public and their counterpart pilots. How we, as Americans viewed these seven as our protectors against the Russian space program. A space program, that by putting the first satellite along with the first man and woman into orbit, sent shivers through the American population that we would be going to bed under a communist moon and there would be fleets of Russian cosmonauts hurling nuclear bombs onto American soil from miles above, out of reach. I really enjoyed Wolfe’s detailed accounts of John Glenn’s and Scott Carpenter’s 3 orbits as well as Gordon Cooper’s 34 hours in space. I really felt like I was in the capsule hearing the noises of the cockpit and experiencing the forces applied to their bodies as they hurtled through space. One unexpected outcome is not feeling as scared of early space travel. Seriously, that is some way old technology that was throwing these astronauts up 130 miles above the ground at speed in-excess of 5k mph. But, I don’t see myself wanting to sign up for the next Space Shuttle flight.One thing for sure, I don’t think I ever want to see the word ziggurat again!

    1 person found this helpful

Book preview

The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe

I.

The Angels

Within five minutes, or ten minutes, no more than that, three of the others had called her on the telephone to ask her if she had heard that something had happened out there.

Jane, this is Alice. Listen, I just got a call from Betty, and she said she heard something’s happened out there. Have you heard anything? That was the way they phrased it, call after call. She picked up the telephone and began relaying this same message to some of the others.

Connie, this is Jane Conrad. Alice just called me, and she says something’s happened …

Something was part of the official Wife Lingo for tiptoeing blindfolded around the subject. Being barely twenty-one years old and new around here, Jane Conrad knew very little about this particular subject, since nobody ever talked about it. But the day was young! And what a setting she had for her imminent enlightenment! And what a picture she herself presented! Jane was tall and slender and had rich brown hair and high cheekbones and wide brown eyes. She looked a little like the actress Jean Simmons. Her father was a rancher in southwestern Texas. She had gone East to college, to Bryn Mawr, and had met her husband, Pete, at a debutante’s party at the Gulph Mills Club in Philadelphia, when he was a senior at Princeton. Pete was a short, wiry, blond boy who joked around a lot. At any moment his face was likely to break into a wild grin revealing the gap between his front teeth. The Hickory Kid sort, he was; a Hickory Kid on the deb circuit, however. He had an air of energy, self-confidence, ambition, joie de vivre. Jane and Pete were married two days after he graduated from Princeton. Last year Jane gave birth to their first child, Peter. And today, here in Florida, in Jacksonville, in the peaceful year 1955, the sun shines through the pines outside, and the very air takes on the sparkle of the ocean. The ocean and a great mica-white beach are less than a mile away. Anyone driving by will see Jane’s little house gleaming like a dream house in the pines. It is a brick house, but Jane and Pete painted the bricks white, so that it gleams in the sun against a great green screen of pine trees with a thousand little places where the sun peeks through. They painted the shutters black, which makes the white walls look even more brilliant. The house has only eleven hundred square feet of floor space, but Jane and Pete designed it themselves and that more than makes up for the size. A friend of theirs was the builder and gave them every possible break, so that it cost only eleven thousand dollars. Outside, the sun shines, and inside, the fever rises by the minute as five, ten, fifteen, and, finally, nearly all twenty of the wives join the circuit, trying to find out what has happened, which, in fact, means: to whose husband.

After thirty minutes on such a circuit—this is not an unusual morning around here—a wife begins to feel that the telephone is no longer located on a table or on the kitchen wall. It is exploding in her solar plexus. Yet it would be far worse right now to hear the front doorbell. The protocol is strict on that point, although written down nowhere. No woman is supposed to deliver the final news, and certainly not on the telephone. The matter mustn’t be bungled!—that’s the idea. No, a man should bring the news when the time comes, a man with some official or moral authority, a clergyman or a comrade of the newly deceased. Furthermore, he should bring the bad news in person. He should turn up at the front door and ring the bell and be standing there like a pillar of coolness and competence, bearing the bad news on ice, like a fish. Therefore, all the telephone calls from the wives were the frantic and portentous beating of the wings of the death angels, as it were. When the final news came, there would be a ring at the front door—a wife in this situation finds herself staring at the front door as if she no longer owns it or controls it—and outside the door would be a man … come to inform her that unfortunately something has happened out there, and her husband’s body now lies incinerated in the swamps or the pines or the palmetto grass, burned beyond recognition, which anyone who had been around an air base for very long (fortunately Jane had not) realized was quite an artful euphemism to describe a human body that now looked like an enormous fowl that has burned up in a stove, burned a blackish brown all over, greasy and blistered, fried, in a word, with not only the entire face and all the hair and the ears burned off, not to mention all the clothing, but also the hands and feet, with what remains of the arms and legs bent at the knees and elbows and burned into absolutely rigid angles, burned a greasy blackish brown like the bursting body itself, so that this husband, father, officer, gentleman, this ornamentum of some mother’s eye, His Majesty the Baby of just twenty-odd years back, has been reduced to a charred hulk with wings and shanks sticking out of it.

My own husband—how could this be what they were talking about? Jane had heard the young men, Pete among them, talk about other young men who had bought it or augered in or crunched, but it had never been anyone they knew, no one in the squadron. And in any event, the way they talked about it, with such breezy, slangy terminology, was the same way they talked about sports. It was as if they were saying, He was thrown out stealing second base. And that was all! Not one word, not in print, not in conversation—not in this amputated language! —about an incinerated corpse from which a young man’s spirit has vanished in an instant, from which all smiles, gestures, moods, worries, laughter, wiles, shrugs, tenderness, and loving looks—you, my love!—have disappeared like a sigh, while the terror consumes a cottage in the woods, and a young woman, sizzling with the fever, awaits her confirmation as the new widow of the day.

The next series of calls greatly increased the possibility that it was Pete to whom something had happened. There were only twenty men in the squadron, and soon nine or ten had been accounted for … by the fluttering reports of the death angels. Knowing that the word was out that an accident had occurred, husbands who could get to a telephone were calling home to say it didn’t happen to me. This news, of course, was immediately fed to the fever. Jane’s telephone would ring once more, and one of the wives would be saying:

Nancy just got a call from Jack. He’s at the squadron and he says something’s happened, but he doesn’t know what. He said he saw Frank D— e9781429961325_i0002.jpg take off about ten minutes ago with Greg in back, so they’re all right. What have you heard?

But Jane has heard nothing except that other husbands, and not hers, are safe and accounted for. And thus, on a sunny day in Florida, outside of the Jacksonville Naval Air Station, in a little white cottage, a veritable dream house, another beautiful young woman was about to be apprised of the quid pro quo of her husband’s line of work, of the trade-off, as one might say, the subparagraphs of a contract written in no visible form. Just as surely as if she had the entire roster in front of her, Jane now realized that only two men in the squadron were unaccounted for. One was a pilot named Bud Jennings; the other was Pete. She picked up the telephone and did something that was much frowned on in a time of emergency. She called the squadron office. The duty officer answered.

I want to speak to Lieutenant Conrad, said Jane. This is Mrs. Conrad.

I’m sorry, the duty officer said—and then his voice cracked. I’m sorry … I … He couldn’t find the words! He was about to cry! I’m—that’s—I mean … he can’t come to the phone!

He can’t come to the phone!

It’s very important! said Jane.

I’m sorry—it’s impossible— The duty officer could hardly get the words out because he was so busy gulping back sobs. Sobs! He can’t come to the phone.

Why not? Where is he?

I’m sorry— More sighs, wheezes, snuffling gasps. I can’t tell you that. I—I have to hang up now!

And the duty officer’s voice disappeared in a great surf of emotion and he hung up.

The duty officer! The very sound of her voice was more than he could take!

The world froze, congealed, in that moment. Jane could no longer calculate the interval before the front doorbell would ring and some competent long-faced figure would appear, some Friend of Widows and Orphans, who would inform her, officially, that Pete was dead.

Even out in the middle of the swamp, in this rot-bog of pine trunks, scum slicks, dead dodder vines, and mosquito eggs, even out in this great overripe sump, the smell of burned beyond recognition obliterated everything else. When airplane fuel exploded, it created a heat so intense that everything but the hardest metals not only burned—everything of rubber, plastic, celluloid, wood, leather, cloth, flesh, gristle, calcium, horn, hair, blood, and protoplasm—it not only burned, it gave up the ghost in the form of every stricken putrid gas known to chemistry. One could smell the horror. It came in through the nostrils and burned the rhinal cavities raw and penetrated the liver and permeated the bowels like a black gas until there was nothing in the universe, inside or out, except the stench of the char. As the helicopter came down between the pine trees and settled onto the bogs, the smell hit Pete Conrad even before the hatch was completely open, and they were not even close enough to see the wreckage yet. The rest of the way Conrad and the crewmen had to travel on foot. After a few steps the water was up to their knees, and then it was up to their armpits, and they kept wading through the water and the scum and the vines and the pine trunks, but it was nothing compared to the smell. Conrad, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant junior grade, happened to be on duty as squadron safety officer that day and was supposed to make the on-site investigation of the crash. The fact was, however, that this squadron was the first duty assignment of his career, and he had never been at a crash site before and had never smelled any such revolting stench or seen anything like what awaited him.

When Conrad finally reached the plane, which was an SNJ, he found the fuselage burned and blistered and dug into the swamp with one wing sheared off and the cockpit canopy smashed. In the front seat was all that was left of his friend Bud Jennings. Bud Jennings, an amiable fellow, a promising young fighter pilot, was now a horrible roasted hulk—with no head. His head was completely gone, apparently torn off the spinal column like a pineapple off a stalk, except that it was nowhere to be found.

Conrad stood there soaking wet in the swamp bog, wondering what the hell to do. It was a struggle to move twenty feet in this freaking muck. Every time he looked up, he was looking into a delirium of limbs, vines, dappled shadows, and a chopped-up white light that came through the tree-tops—the ubiquitous screen of trees with a thousand little places where the sun peeked through. Nevertheless, he started wading back out into the muck and the scum, and the others followed. He kept looking up. Gradually he could make it out. Up in the treetops there was a pattern of broken limbs where the SNJ had come crashing through. It was like a tunnel through the treetops. Conrad and the others began splashing through the swamp, following the strange path ninety or a hundred feet above them. It took a sharp turn. That must have been where the wing broke off. The trail veered to one side and started downward. They kept looking up and wading through the muck. Then they stopped. There was a great green sap wound up there in the middle of a tree trunk. It was odd. Near the huge gash was … tree disease … some sort of brownish lumpy sac up in the branches, such as you see in trees infested by bagworms, and there were yellowish curds on the branches around it, as if the disease had caused the sap to ooze out and fester and congeal—except that it couldn’t be sap because it was streaked with blood. In the next instant—Conrad didn’t have to say a word. Each man could see it all. The lumpy sack was the cloth liner of a flight helmet, with the earphones attached to it. The curds were Bud Jennings’s brains. The tree trunk had smashed through the cockpit canopy of the SNJ and knocked Bud Jennings’s head to pieces like a melon.

In keeping with the protocol, the squadron commander was not going to release Bud Jennings’s name until his widow, Loretta, had been located and a competent male death messenger had been dispatched to tell her. But Loretta Jennings was not at home and could not be found. Hence, a delay—and more than enough time for the other wives, the death angels, to burn with panic over the telephone lines. All the pilots were accounted for except the two who were in the woods, Bud Jennings and Pete Conrad. One chance in two, acey-deucey, one finger-two finger, and this was not an unusual day around here.

Loretta Jennings had been out at a shopping center. When she returned home, a certain figure was waiting outside, a man, a solemn Friend of Widows and Orphans, and it was Loretta Jennings who lost the game of odd and even, acey-deucey, and it was Loretta whose child (she was pregnant with a second) would have no father. It was this young woman who went through all the final horrors that Jane Conrad had imagined—assumed!—would be hers to endure forever. Yet this grim stroke of fortune brought Jane little relief.

On the day of Bud Jennings’s funeral, Pete went into the back of the closet and brought out his bridge coat, per regulations. This was the most stylish item in the Navy officer’s wardrobe. Pete had never had occasion to wear his before. It was a double-breasted coat made of navy-blue melton cloth and came down almost to the ankles. It must have weighed ten pounds. It had a double row of gold buttons down the front and loops for shoulder boards, big beautiful belly-cut collar and lapels, deep turnbacks on the sleeves, a tailored waist, and a center vent in back that ran from the waistline to the bottom of the coat. Never would Pete, or for that matter many other American males in the mid-twentieth century, have an article of clothing quite so impressive and aristocratic as that bridge coat. At the funeral the nineteen little Indians who were left—Navy boys!—lined up manfully in their bridge coats. They looked so young. Their pink, lineless faces with their absolutely clear, lean jawlines popped up bravely, correctly, out of the enormous belly-cut collars of the bridge coats. They sang an old Navy hymn, which slipped into a strange and lugubrious minor key here and there, and included a stanza added especially for aviators. It ended with: O hear us when we lift our prayer for those in peril in the air.

Three months later another member of the squadron crashed and was burned beyond recognition and Pete hauled out the bridge coat again and Jane saw eighteen little Indians bravely going through the motions at the funeral. Not long after that, Pete was transferred from Jacksonville to the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland. Pete and Jane had barely settled in there when they got word that another member of the Jacksonville squadron, a close friend of theirs, someone they had had over to dinner many times, had died trying to take off from the deck of a carrier in a routine practice session a few miles out in the Atlantic. The catapult that propelled aircraft off the deck lost pressure, and his ship just dribbled off the end of the deck, with its engine roaring vainly, and fell sixty feet into the ocean and sank like a brick, and he vanished, just like that.

Pete had been transferred to Patuxent River, which was known in Navy vernacular as Pax River, to enter the Navy’s new test-pilot school. This was considered a major step up in the career of a young Navy aviator. Now that the Korean War was over and there was no combat flying, all the hot young pilots aimed for flight test. In the military they always said flight test and not test flying. Jet aircraft had been in use for barely ten years at the time, and the Navy was testing new jet fighters continually. Pax River was the Navy’s prime test center.

Jane liked the house they bought at Pax River. She didn’t like it as much as the little house in Jacksonville, but then she and Pete hadn’t designed this one. They lived in a community called North Town Creek, six miles from the base. North Town Creek, like the base, was on a scrub-pine peninsula that stuck out into Chesapeake Bay. They were tucked in amid the pine trees. (Once more!) All around were rhododendron bushes. Pete’s classwork and his flying duties were very demanding. Everyone in his flight test class, Group 20, talked about how difficult it was—and obviously loved it, because in Navy flying this was the big league. The young men in Group 20 and their wives were Pete’s and Jane’s entire social world. They associated with no one else. They constantly invited each other to dinner during the week; there was a Group party at someone’s house practically every weekend; and they would go off on outings to fish or waterski in Chesapeake Bay. In a way they could not have associated with anyone else, at least not easily, because the boys could talk only about one thing: their flying. One of the phrases that kept running through the conversation was pushing the outside of the envelope. The envelope was a flight-test term referring to the limits of a particular aircraft’s performance, how tight a turn it could make at such-and-such a speed, and so on. Pushing the outside, probing the outer limits, of the envelope seemed to be the great challenge and satisfaction of flight test. At first pushing the outside of the envelope was not a particularly terrifying phrase to hear. It sounded once more as if the boys were just talking about sports.

Then one sunny day a member of the Group, one of the happy lads they always had dinner with and drank with and went waterskiing with, was coming in for a landing at the base in an A3J attack plane. He let his airspeed fall too low before he extended his flaps, and the ship stalled out, and he crashed and was burned beyond recognition. And they brought out the bridge coats and sang about those in peril in the air and put the bridge coats away, and the Indians who were left talked about the accident after dinner one night. They shook their heads and said it was a damned shame, but he should have known better than to wait so long before lowering the flaps.

Barely a week had gone by before another member of the Group was coming in for a landing in the same type of aircraft, the A3J, making a ninety-degree turn to his final approach, and something went wrong with the controls, and he ended up with one rear stabilizer wing up and the other one down, and his ship rolled in like a corkscrew from 800 feet up and crashed, and he was burned beyond recognition. And the bridge coats came out and they sang about those in peril in the air and then they put the bridge coats away and after dinner one night they mentioned that the departed had been a good man but was inexperienced, and when the malfunction in the controls put him in that bad corner, he didn’t know how to get out of it.

Every wife wanted to cry out: "Well, my God! The machine broke! What makes any of you think you would have come out of it any better!" Yet intuitively Jane and the rest of them knew it wasn’t right even to suggest that. Pete never indicated for a moment that he thought any such thing could possibly happen to him. It seemed not only wrong but dangerous to challenge a young pilot’s confidence by posing the question. And that, too, was part of the unofficial protocol for the Officer’s Wife. From now on every time Pete was late coming in from the flight line, she would worry. She began to wonder if—no! assume!—he had found his way into one of those corners they all talked about so spiritedly, one of those little dead ends that so enlivened conversation around here.

Not long after that, another good friend of theirs went up in an F-4, the Navy’s newest and hottest fighter plane, known as the Phantom. He reached twenty thousand feet and then nosed over and dove straight into Chesapeake Bay. It turned out that a hose connection was missing in his oxygen system and he had suffered hypoxia and passed out at the high altitude. And the bridge coats came out and they lifted a prayer about those in peril in the air and the bridge coats were put away and the little Indians were incredulous. How could anybody fail to check his hose connections? And how could anybody be in such poor condition as to pass out that quickly from hypoxia?

A couple of days later Jane was standing at the window of her house in North Town Creek. She saw some smoke rise above the pines from over in the direction of the flight line. Just that, a column of smoke; no explosion or sirens or any other sound. She went to another room, so as not to have to think about it but there was no explanation for the smoke. She went back to the window. In the yard of a house across the street she saw a group of people … standing there and looking at her house, as if trying to decide what to do. Jane looked away—but she couldn’t keep from looking out again. She caught a glimpse of a certain figure coming up the walkway toward her front door. She knew exactly who it was. She had had nightmares like this. And yet this was no dream. She was wide awake and alert. Never more alert in her entire life! Frozen, completely defeated by the sight, she simply waited for the bell to ring. She waited, but there was not a sound. Finally she could stand it no more. In real life, unlike her dream life, Jane was both too self-possessed and too polite to scream through the door: Go away! So she opened it. There was no one there, no one at all. There was no group of people on the lawn across the way and no one to be seen for a hundred yards in any direction along the lawns and leafy rhododendron roads of North Town Creek.

Then began a cycle in which she had both the nightmares and the hallucinations, continually. Anything could touch off an hallucination: a ball of smoke, a telephone ring that stopped before she could answer it, the sound of a siren, even the sound of trucks starting up (crash trucks!). Then she would glance out the window, and a certain figure would be coming up the walk, and she would wait for the bell. The only difference between the dreams and the hallucinations was that the scene of the dreams was always the little white house in Jacksonville. In both cases, the feeling that this time it has happened was quite real.

The star pilot in the class behind Pete’s, a young man who was the main rival of their good friend Al Bean, went up in a fighter to do some power-dive tests. One of the most demanding disciplines in flight test was to accustom yourself to making precise readings from the control panel in the same moment that you were pushing the outside of the envelope. This young man put his ship into the test dive and was still reading out the figures, with diligence and precision and great discipline, when he augered straight into the oyster flats and was burned beyond recognition. And the bridge coats came out and they sang about those in peril in the air and the bridge coats were put away, and the little Indians remarked that the departed was a swell guy and a brilliant student of flying; a little too much of a student, in fact; he hadn’t bothered to look out the window at the real world soon enough. Beano—Al Bean—wasn’t quite so brilliant; on the other hand, he was still here.

Like many other wives in Group 20 Jane wanted to talk about the whole situation, the incredible series of fatal accidents, with her husband and the other members of the Group, to find out how they were taking it. But somehow the unwritten protocol forbade discussions of this subject, which was the fear of death. Nor could Jane or any of the rest of them talk, really have a talk, with anyone around the base. You could talk to another wife about being worried. But what good did it do? Who wasn’t worried? You were likely to get a look that said: "Why dwell on it?" Jane might have gotten away with divulging the matter of the nightmares. But hallucinations? There was no room in Navy life for any such anomalous tendency as that.

By now the bad string had reached ten in all, and almost all of the dead had been close friends of Pete and Jane, young men who had been in their house many times, young men who had sat across from Jane and chattered like the rest of them about the grand adventure of military flying. And the survivors still sat around as before—with the same inexplicable exhilaration! Jane kept watching Pete for some sign that his spirit was cracking, but she saw none. He talked a mile a minute, kidded and joked, laughed with his Hickory Kid cackle. He always had. He still enjoyed the company of members of the group like Wally Schirra and Jim Lovell. Many young pilots were taciturn and cut loose with the strange fervor of this business only in the air. But Pete and Wally and Jim were not reticent; not in any situation. They loved to kid around. Pete called Jim Lovell Shaky, because it was the last thing a pilot would want to be called. Wally Schirra was outgoing to the point of hearty; he loved practical jokes and dreadful puns, and so on. The three of them—even in the midst of this bad string!—would love to get on a subject such as accident-prone Mitch Johnson. Accident-prone Mitch Johnson, it seemed, was a Navy pilot whose life was in the hands of two angels, one of them bad and the other one good. The bad angel would put him into accidents that would have annihilated any ordinary pilot, and the good angel would bring him out of them without a scratch. Just the other day—this was the sort of story Jane would hear them tell—Mitch Johnson was coming in to land on a carrier. But he came in short, missed the flight deck, and crashed into the fantail, below the deck. There was a tremendous explosion, and the rear half of the plane fell into the water in flames. Everyone on the flight deck said, Poor Johnson. The good angel was off duty. They were still debating how to remove the debris and his mortal remains when a phone rang on the bridge. A somewhat dopey voice said, This is Johnson. Say, listen, I’m down here in the supply hold and the hatch is locked and I can’t find the lights and I can’t see a goddamned thing and I tripped over a cable and I think I hurt my leg. The officer on the bridge slammed the phone down, then vowed to find out what morbid sonofabitch could pull a phone prank at a time like this. Then the phone rang again, and the man with the dopey voice managed to establish the fact that he was, indeed, Mitch Johnson. The good angel had not left his side. When he smashed into the fantail, he hit some empty ammunition drums, and they cushioned the impact, leaving him groggy but not seriously hurt. The fuselage had blown to pieces; so he just stepped out onto the fantail and opened a hatch that led into the supply hold. It was pitch black in there, and there were cables all across the floor, holding down spare aircraft engines. Accident-prone Mitch Johnson kept tripping over these cables until he found a telephone. Sure enough, the one injury he had was a bruised shin from tripping over a cable. The man was accident-prone! Pete and Wally and Jim absolutely cracked up over stories like this. It was amazing. Great sports yarns! Nothing more than that.

A few days later Jane was out shopping at the Pax River commissary on Saunders Road, near the main gate to the base. She heard the sirens go off at the field, and then she heard the engines of the crash trucks start up. This time Jane was determined to keep calm. Every instinct made her want to rush home, but she forced herself to stay in the commissary and continue shopping. For thirty minutes she went through the motions of completing her shopping list. Then she drove home to North Town Creek. As she reached the house, she saw a figure going up the sidewalk. It was a man. Even from the back there was no question as to who he was. He had on a black suit, and there was a white band around his neck. It was her minister, from the Episcopal Church. She stared, and this vision did not come and go. The figure kept on walking up the front walk. She was not asleep now, and she was not inside her house glancing out the front window. She was outside in her car in front of her house. She was not dreaming, and she was not hallucinating, and the figure kept walking up toward her front door.

The commotion at the field was over one of the most extraordinary things that even veteran pilots had ever seen at Pax River. And they had all seen it, because practically the entire flight line had gathered out on the field for it, as if it had been an air show.

Conrad’s friend Ted Whelan had taken a fighter up, and on takeoff there had been a structural failure that caused a hydraulic leak. A red warning light showed up on Whelan’s panel, and he had a talk with the ground. It was obvious that the leak would cripple the controls before he could get the ship back down to the field for a landing. He would have to bail out; the only question was where and when, and so they had a talk about that. They decided that he should jump at 8,100 feet at such-and-such a speed, directly over the field. The plane would crash into the Chesapeake Bay, and he would float down to the field. Just as coolly as anyone could have asked for it, Ted Whelan lined the ship up to come across the field at 8,100 feet precisely and he punched out; ejected.

Down on the field they all had their faces turned up to the sky. They saw Whelan pop out of the cockpit. With his Martin-Baker seat-parachute rig strapped on, he looked like a little black geometric lump a mile and a half up in the blue. They watched him as he started dropping. Everyone waited for the parachute to open. They waited a few more seconds, and then they waited some more. The little shape was getting bigger and bigger and picking up tremendous speed. Then there came an unspeakable instant at which everyone on the field who knew anything about parachute jumps knew what was going to happen. Yet even for them it was an unearthly feeling, for no one had ever seen any such thing happen so close up, from start to finish, from what amounted to a grandstand seat. Now the shape was going so fast and coming so close it began to play tricks on the eyes. It seemed to stretch out. It became much bigger and hurtled toward them at a terrific speed, until they couldn’t make out its actual outlines at all. Finally there was just a streaking black blur before their eyes, followed by what seemed like an explosion. Except that it was not an explosion; it was the tremendous crack of Ted Whelan, his helmet, his pressure suit, and his seat-parachute rig smashing into the center of the runway, precisely on target, right in front of the crowd; an absolute bull’s-eye. Ted Whelan had no doubt been alive until the instant of impact. He had had about thirty seconds to watch the Pax River base and the peninsula and Baltimore County and continental America and the entire comprehensible world rise up to smash him. When they lifted his body up off the concrete, it was like a sack of fertilizer.

Pete took out the bridge coat again and he and Jane and all the little Indians went to the funeral for Ted Whelan. That it hadn’t been Pete was not solace enough for Jane. That the preacher had not, in fact, come to her front door as the Solemn Friend of Widows and Orphans, but merely for a church call … had not brought peace and relief. That Pete still didn’t show the slightest indication of thinking that any unkind fate awaited him no longer lent her even a moment’s courage. The next dream and the next hallucination, and the next and the next, merely seemed more real. For she now knew. She now knew the subject and the essence of this enterprise, even though not a word of it had passed anybody’s lips. She even knew why Pete—the Princeton boy she met at a deb party at the Gulph Mills Club!—would never quit, never withdraw from this grim business, unless in a coffin. And God knew, and she knew, there was a coffin waiting for each little Indian.

Seven years later, when a reporter and a photographer from Life magazine actually stood near her in her living room and watched her face, while outside, on the lawn, a crowd of television crewmen and newspaper reporters waited for a word, an indication, anything—perhaps a glimpse through a part in a curtain!—waited for some sign of what she felt—when one and all asked with their ravenous eyes and, occasionally, in so many words: How do you feel? and Are you scared?—America wants to know!—it made Jane want to laugh, but in fact she couldn’t even manage a smile.

"Why ask now?" she wanted to say. But they wouldn’t have had the faintest notion of what she was talking about.

II.

The Right Stuff

What an extraordinary grim stretch that had been … and yet thereafter Pete and Jane would keep running into pilots from other Navy bases, from the Air Force, from the Marines, who had been through their own extraordinary grim stretches. There was an Air Force pilot named Mike Collins, a nephew of former Army Chief of Staff J. Lawton Collins. Mike Collins had undergone eleven weeks of combat training at Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas, and in that eleven weeks twenty-two of his fellow trainees had died in accidents, which was an extraordinary rate of two per week. Then there was a test pilot, Bill Bridgeman. In 1952, when Bridgeman was flying at Edwards Air Force Base, sixty-two Air Force pilots died in the course of thirty-six weeks of training, an extraordinary rate of 1.7 per week. Those figures were for fighter-pilot trainees only; they did not include the test pilots, Bridgeman’s own confreres, who were dying quite regularly enough.

Extraordinary, to be sure; except that every veteran of flying small high-performance jets seemed to have experienced these bad strings.

In time, the Navy would compile statistics showing that for a career Navy pilot, i.e., one who intended to keep flying for twenty years as Conrad did, there was a 23 percent probability that he would die in an aircraft accident. This did not even include combat deaths, since the military did not classify death in combat as accidental. Furthermore, there was a better than even chance, a 56 percent probability, to be exact, that at some point a career Navy pilot would have to eject from his aircraft and attempt to come down by parachute. In the era of jet fighters, ejection meant being exploded out of the cockpit by a nitroglycerine charge, like a human cannonball. The ejection itself was so hazardous—men lost knees, arms, and their lives on the rim of the cockpit or had the skin torn off their faces when they hit the wall of air outside—that many pilots chose to wrestle their aircraft to the ground rather than try it … and died that way instead.

The statistics were not secret, but neither were they widely known, having been eased into print rather obliquely in a medical journal. No pilot, and certainly no pilot’s wife, had any need of the statistics in order to know the truth, however. The funerals took care of that in the most dramatic way possible. Sometimes, when the young wife of a fighter pilot would have a little reunion with the girls she went to school with, an odd fact would dawn on her: they have not been going to funerals. And then Jane Conrad would look at Pete … Princeton, Class of 1953 … Pete had already worn his great dark sepulchral bridge coat more than most boys of the Class of ’53 had worn their tuxedos. How many of those happy young men had buried more than a dozen friends, comrades, and co-workers? (Lost through violent death in the execution of everyday duties.) At the time, the 1950’s, students from Princeton took great pride in going into what they considered highly competitive, aggressive pursuits, jobs on Wall Street, on Madison Avenue, and at magazines such as Time and Newsweek. There was much fashionably brutish talk of what dog-eat-dog and cutthroat competition they found there; but in the rare instances when one of these young men died on the job, it was likely to be from choking on a chunk of Chateaubriand, while otherwise blissfully boiled, in an expense-account restaurant in Manhattan. How many would have gone to work, or stayed at work, on cutthroat Madison Avenue if there had been a 23 percent chance, nearly one chance in four, of dying from it? Gentlemen, we’re having this little problem with chronic violent death

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