The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin.

In his first eight missions, at the age of twenty, Yeager shot down two German fighters. On his ninth he was shot down over German-occupied French territory, suffering flak wounds; he bailed out, was picked up by the French underground, which smuggled him across the Pyrenees into Spain disguised as a peasant.

On October 12, 1944, Yeager took on and shot down five German fighter planes in succession.

By the end of the war he had thirteen and a half kills. He was twenty-two years old.

At the end of the war the Army had discovered that the Germans not only had the world’s first jet fighter but also a rocket plane that had gone 596 miles an hour in tests.

The speed of sound, Mach 1, was known (thanks to the work of the physicist Ernst Mach) to vary at different altitudes, temperatures, and wind speeds. On a calm 60-degree day at sea level it was about 760 miles an hour, while at 40,000 feet, where the temperature would be at least sixty below, it was about 660 miles an hour.

They were young, lovely, juicy, frisky—and there were so many of them, at all hours, every day of the week! And they were not prostitutes, despite the accusations made later. They were just … well, just young juicy girls in their twenties with terrific young conformations and sweet cupcakes and loamy loins.

The panic reached far beyond the relatively sane concern for tactical weaponry, however. Sputnik I took on a magical dimension—among highly placed persons especially, judging by opinion surveys.

Within the federal government and throughout the education bureaucracies rose a cry for a complete overhauling of American education in order to catch up with the new generation, the new dawn, of socialist scientists, out of which had come geniuses like the Chief Designer (Builder of the Integral!) and his assistants.

They put each man in a small, pitch-black, windowless, soundproofed room—a “sensory deprivation chamber”—and locked the door, again without telling him how long he would have to stay there. It turned out to be three hours.

There were fourteen different signals that the candidate was supposed to respond to in different ways by pressing buttons or throwing switches; but the lights began lighting up so fast no human being could possibly keep up with them. This appeared to be not only a test of reaction times but of perseverance or ability to cope with frustration.

They regarded the military psychiatrist as the modern and unusually bat-brained version of the chaplain.

Glenn had set a cross-country speed record, Los Angeles to New York, of three hours and twenty-three minutes in an F8U fighter plane in July 1957.

Sentiments that one scarcely gives a second thought to in one’s private life are nevertheless insisted upon in all public utterances.

In single combat the mightiest soldier of one army would fight the mightiest soldier of the other army as a substitute for a pitched battle between the entire forces.

The ability to launch Sputniks dramatized the ability to launch nuclear warheads on ICBMs. But in these neo-superstitious times it came to dramatize much more than that. It dramatized the entire technological and intellectual capability of the two nations and the strength of the national wills and spirits.

America seemed to be full of businessmen like Cole who exercised considerable power and were strong leaders but who had never exercised power and leadership in its primal form: manly courage in the face of physical danger. When they met someone who had it, they wanted to establish a relationship with that righteous stuff.

And Glenn could see that after eight, ten, twelve hours of lying cooped up in the procedures trainer out in Hangar S, most of his brethren were ready to provide the magic. No matter what time it was, it was beer-call time, as they said in the Air Force, and they would get in their cars and go barreling into Cocoa Beach for the endless, seamless party.

As at Pancho’s, the most marvelous lively young cookies were materializing also, and they were just there, waiting beside the motel pools, when one arrived, young juicy girls with stand-up jugs and full-sprung thighs and conformations so taut and silky that the very sight of them practically pulled a man into the delta of priapic delirium.

He was not to be trifled with. In his eyes burned four centuries of Dissenting Protestant fervor, nailed down by two million laps that his legs had pounded around the BOQ driveway.

Joe Walker would say he got out of it each time through “the J.C. maneuver.” He’d say: “In the J.C. maneuver you take your hands off the controls and put the mother in the lap of a super-na-tu-ral power.”

Life magazine was writing about how Deke Slayton had once been in an inverted spin in an F–105. No picnic, to be sure, and yet the rocket pilots looked at inverted spins as their friends on the way out of supersonic instability.

Five hundred VIPs had come all the way to Florida, to this goddamned Low Rent sandspit, where bugs you couldn’t even see invaded your motel room and bit your ankles until they ran red onto the acrylic shag carpet—all the way to this rock-beach boondock they had come, to see the fires of Armageddon and hear the earth shake with the thunder—and instead they get this … this pop … and a cork pops out of a bottle of Spumante.

At 136,500 feet the air was so thin, White had no aerodynamic control at all. It was absolutely silent up there. He could see for hundreds of miles, from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

was seventeen degrees in Washington and a wind was blowing on Capitol Hill and Kennedy was bareheaded and wore no overcoat.

In the peer vote he was the prig who had risen at the seance like John Calvin himself and told them all to keep their pants zipped and their wicks dry. He was the Eddie Attaboy who had gotten up every morning at dawn and done all that ostentatious running and tried to make the rest of them look bad. He was the Harry Hairshirt who lived like an Early Christian martyr in the BOQ. He was the Willie Workadaddy who drove around in a broken-down Prinz, like a lonely beacon of restraint and self-sacrifice in a squall of car crazies.

Just twenty days before the first scheduled Mercury flight he sent a five-ton Sputnik called Vostok I into orbit around the earth with a man aboard, the first cosmonaut, a twenty-seven-year-old test pilot named Yuri Gagarin.

Back in October 1957, just four months before the United States was supposed to launch the world’s first artificial earth satellite, the Chief Designer had launched Sputnik I. In January 1959, just two months before NASA was scheduled to put the first artificial satellite into orbit around the sun, the Chief Designer launched Mechta I and did just that. But this one, Vostok I, in April 1961, had been his pièce de resistance.

The business of manly honor cut through everything at last, and even the President would become merely another awed male in the presence of the right stuff.

All the poisonous snakes known to North America were in residence there: rattlers, copperheads, cottonmouths, and corals. No, there was no best time to be introduced to Houston, Texas, but July 4 was the worst.

and the arrival of the astronauts as about the biggest thing in Houston history. Neiman-Marcus and all the other hightone stores, the great banks and museums and other grand institutions, all the class, all the Culture, were in Dallas. By Houston lights Dallas was Paris, once you set your watch to Central Standard, and Houston was nothing but oil and hard grabbers.

Dwight was going to be “the first Negro astronaut,” and he was being invited to make public appearances. He was being set up for a fall, because the chances of NASA accepting him as an astronaut appeared remote in any event.

When the seven Mercury astronauts had been chosen in 1959, the fact that they were all white and all Protestant seemed to be interpreted as wholly benign evidence of their Small-Town American virtues. But by now, four years later, Kennedy, who had been supported by a coalition of minority groups in the 1960 election, had begun to raise the question of race as a matter of public policy in many areas.

Yeager hadn’t tried to break a record in the skies over Edwards since December 1953, ten years ago, when he had set a new speed mark of Mach 2.4 in the X–IA and had come down the far side of the arc in the most horrendous bout with high-speed instability any man had ever survived.

Somebody’s running toward him … It’s a kid, a guy in his twenties … He’s come from the highway … He comes up close and his mouth falls open and he gives Yeager a look of stone horror … “Are you all right!” The look on the kid’s face! Christalmighty! “I was in my car! I saw you coming down!” “Listen,” says Yeager. The pain in his finger is terrific. “Listen … you got a knife?” The kid digs into his pocket and pulls out a penknife. Yeager starts cutting the glove off his left hand.

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

Yeager was returned to flight status and resumed his duties at ARPS. In time he would go on to fly more than a hundred missions in Southeast Asia in B–57 tactical bombers. No one ever broke the Russian mark with the NF-104 or even tried to. Up above 100,000 feet the plane’s envelope was goddamned full of holes. And Yeager never again sought to set a record in the sky over the high desert.

In mid-June 1963 the Chief Designer (still the anonymous genius!) put Vostok 5 into orbit with Cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky aboard, and two days later he sent the first woman into space, Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, aboard Vostok 6, and they remained in orbit for three days, flying within three miles of each other at one point and landing on Soviet soil on the same day—and not even then did the old sense of warlike urgency revive in the Congress.

They would continue to be honored, and men would continue to be awed by their courage; but the day when an astronaut could parade up Broadway while traffic policemen wept in the intersections was no more. Never again would an astronaut be perceived as a protector of the people, risking his life to do battle in the heavens. Not even the first American to walk on the moon would ever know the outpouring of a people’s most primal emotions that Shepard, Cooper, and, above all, Glenn had known.

It would have been still more impossible for his confreres to realize that the day might come when Americans would hear their names and say, “Oh, yes—now, which one was he?”