The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

So Yeager did a very un-Yeager-like thing. He yelled into the microphone! He yelled: “Look, my dedicated young scientist—follow me down!” The change in tone—Yeager yelling!—penetrated the man’s impacted hypoxic skull. My God! The fabled Yeager! He’s yelling—Yeager’s yelling!—to me for help! Jesus H. Christ! And he started following him down. Yeager knew that if he could get the man down to 12,000 feet, the oxygen content of the air would bring him around, which it did. Hey! What happened? After he landed, he realized he had been no more than a minute or two from passing out and punching a hole in the desert. As he got out of the cockpit, an F–86 flew overhead and did a slow roll sixty feet off the deck and then disappeared across Rogers Lake. That was Yeager’s signature. Yeager was flying chase one day for Bill Bridgeman, the prime pilot for one of the greatest rocket planes, the Douglas Skyrocket, when the ship went into a flat spin followed by a violent tumble. Bridgeman fought his way out of it and regained stability, only to have his windows ice up. This was another common danger in rocket flights. He was out of fuel, so that he was now faced with the task of landing the ship both deadstick and blind. At this point Yeager drew alongside in his F–86 and became his eyes. He told Bridgeman every move to make every foot of the way down … as if he knew that ol’ Skyrocket like the back of his hand … and this was jes a little ol’ fishin’ trip on the Mud River … and there was ...