The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

The only proper protagonist for a tale of war was an enlisted man, and he was to be presented not as a hero but as Everyman, as much a victim of war as any civilian. Any officer above the rank of second lieutenant was to be presented as a martinet or a fool, if not an outright villain, no matter whom he fought for.

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.

no single factor ever killed a pilot; there was always a chain of mistakes.

Khrushchev was right about one thing: when it came time to hang the capitalist West, an American businessman would sell him the rope.

It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.

“What made them so exciting,” he wrote, “was not that they said anything new but that they said all the old things with such fierce convictions … They spoke of ‘duty’ and ‘faith’ and ‘country’ like Walt Whitman’s pioneers

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.

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.

“For while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last.

But if a man is beginning to panic, logic goes first.

They had their differences, but on something like this the seven would stand together like an army … Webb was beginning to see something he had never quite figured out before. The astronauts were not his men. They were in a category new to American life. They were single-combat warriors. If anything, he was their man.

The seven Mercury astronauts could have been designated Single-Combat General, a category with the honors and privileges of five-star general but with none of the duties and obligations of command.

A military officer’s wife rose in rank with her husband and immediately took on all the honors and perquisites pertaining thereto, and only a fool or the sort of simple-minded jerk who was assigned to give orientation lectures to wives could fail to comprehend this.

“I, for one, don’t want to go to bed by the light of a Communist moon.”