The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

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.

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.

No, herein the world was divided into those who had it and those who did not. This quality, this it, was never named, however, nor was it talked about in any way.

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 to 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.

The military did not have very merciful instincts. Rather than packing up these poor souls and sending them home, the Navy, like the Air Force and the Marines, would try to make use of them in some other role, such as flight controller. So the washout has to keep taking classes with the rest of his group, even though he can no longer touch an airplane. He sits there in the classes staring at sheets of paper with cataracts of sheer human mortification over his eyes while the rest steal looks at him … this man reduced to an ant, this untouchable, this poor sonofabitch. And

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

The figures were averages, and averages applied to those with average stuff.

A Navy pilot (in legend, at any rate) began shouting, “I’ve got a MiG at zero! A MiG at zero!”—meaning that it had maneuvered in behind him and was locked in on his tail. An irritated voice cut in and said, “Shut up and die like an aviator.” One had to be a Navy pilot to appreciate the final nuance. A good Navy pilot was a real aviator; in the Air Force they merely had pilots and not precisely the proper stuff.

That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, “they had to pipe in daylight.” In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down, from the upper reaches of the Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.

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. In Spain he was jailed briefly, then released, whereupon he made it back to England and returned to combat during the Allied invasion of France. On October 12, 1944, Yeager took on and shot down five German fighter planes in succession. On November 6, flying a propeller-driven P–51 Mustang, he shot down one of the new jet fighters the Germans had developed, the Messerschmitt–262, and damaged two more, and on November 20 he shot down four FW–190s.

Gus was one of those young men, quite common in the United States, actually, who would fight you down to the last unbroken bone over an insult to the gray little town they came from or the grim little church they fidgeted in all those years—while at the same time, in some hidden corner of the soul, they prostrated themselves daily in thanksgiving to the things that had gotten them the hell out of there.

Somehow he and Betty managed to get by through all this. He gruffed a lot of Hoosier gus gruffisms at her and she gruffed some back at him. They didn’t get in many fights. Most weekends he could manage it, he would fly cross-country, piling up flight time.

In the Army one was continually around people who spoke Army Creole, a language in which there were about ten nouns, five verbs, and one adjective, or participle, or whatever it was called. There always seemed to be a couple of good buddies from Valdosta or Oilville or some place sitting around saying: “I tol’im iffie tried to fuck me over, I was gonna kick’is fuckin’ ass, iddnat right?” “Fuckin’ A.” “Soey kep’on fuckin’ me over and I kicked ‘is fuckin’ ass in fo’im, iddnat right?” “Fuckin’ A.” “An’ so now they tellin’ me they gon’ th’ow my fuckin’ ass inna fuckin’ stoc-kade! You know what? They some kinda fuckin’ me over!” “Fuckin’ A well tol’, Bubba.”

The atmosphere was casual at Cocoa Beach, but Gus and Deke knew how to squeeze casual until it screamed for mercy.

The boys’ response, however, had not been resignation or anything close to it. No, the engineers now looked on, eyebrows arched, as the guinea pigs set about … altering the experiment.

Voas was neither a flight instructor nor an aeronautical engineer but an industrial psychologist who had been chosen precisely because the training of astronauts was regarded not as a form of pilot training but as a form of psychological adaptation. Voas was no older than they and ranked below them even in the regular military; so one of the boys’ first moves was to see that Voas, as training officer, functioned more like a trainer on a sports team and, in any case, not like the coach. They began telling him what their training schedule was going to be. Voas became a coordinator and spokesman for the astronauts in matters of training.

Yeager had been the first rocket pilot to go through this particular hole in the supersonic envelope, and it was during the flight in the X–IA in which he set a speed record of Mach 2.42. He was battered unconscious and fell seven miles before hitting the denser atmosphere at 25,000 feet and coming to and managing to put the ship into a spin. That was good; a mere spin he knew how to get out of, and he survived.

Yeager had always figured it was useless to try to punch out of a rocket plane. Crossfield called it “committing suicide to keep from getting killed.”

When he talked about it, 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.” And, in fact, that was the only choice you had.

Ziegler’s X–2 exploded while still attached to the mother ship, a B–29, killing Skip and a B–29 crewman. The same thing had very nearly happened to Pete Everest in the X–1D—and to Walker himself in the X–IA. Walker was strapped into the X–IA, under the bomb bay of a B–29, at 35,000 feet, seventy seconds from launch, when a fuel tank exploded in the rear of the rocket plane. Walker got out, climbed back up into the B–29, passed out from lack of oxygen, was revived by a “walkaround” oxygen bottle, went back down into the burning X–IA, and tried to jettison the rest of the fuel so as to prevent both ships, the X–IA and the B–29, from burning up. The rocket plane was finally dropped, like a bomb, over the desert. Walker received the Distinguished Service Medal for his trip back into the burning ship.

Wainwright noticed that John not only wasn’t reacting to what he said, he wasn’t reacting to what Kennedy said, either. He was a thousand miles away, as the saying goes, and not particularly happy to be there.

Eight hundred pounds of water had seeped in. For the ordinary prudent human being it would have been two hours of freaking terror. They brought the capsule to a recovery ship, the Donner, and opened it and brought out the ape’s cubicle and opened the hatch. The ape was lying there with his arms crossed. They offered him an apple and he took it and ate it with considerable deliberation, as if gloriously bored.

“All right, I’m cooler than you are. Why don’t you fix your little problem … and light this candle.”

In thirty seconds the rocket would ignite right underneath his back. In those last moments his entire life did not pass before his eyes. He did not have a poignant vision of his mother or his wife or his children. No, he thought about abort procedures and the checklist and about not fucking up.

“A-Okay.” In fact, this was a Shorty Powers paraphrase borrowed from NASA engineers who used to say it during radio transmission tests because the sharper sound of A cut through the static better than O. Nevertheless, “A-Okay”

“It’s dragging in the mud and it won’t come up”—and since this doesn’t get a rise out of her, he says it again: “It’s dragging in the mud and it won’t come up,” and she just clamps a burglar-proof look of aloofness across her face—and all this was bound to make you smile, because here you were, listening to the merry midnight small talk of the hardiest hardtack crackers of the most Low Rent stretch of the Cape, and just twelve hours ago you were leaning across a table in the White House, straining to catch the tiny shiny pearls of tinytalk from the most famous small talker in the world—and somehow you belonged and thrived in both worlds.

“It looked like your attitude held pretty well,” said Schirra. “Did you have to back it up at all?” “Oh, yes, quite a bit. Yeah, I had a lot of trouble with it.” “Good enough for government work from down here,” said

Somehow, extraordinary as it was, it was … right! The way it should be! The unutterable aura of the right stuff had been brought onto the terrain where things were happening! Perhaps that was what New York existed for, to celebrate those who had it, whatever it was, and there was nothing like the right stuff, for all responded to it, and all wanted to be near it and to feel the sizzle and to blink in the light.

A bone-splitting chill hits them. They shudder and shake their heads. They are down inside some vast underground parking lot. The place is air-conditioned Houston-style, which is to say, within an inch of your life.

By now, three months after his flight, John had ascended to a status that only a biblical scholar could fully appreciate.

It could get cold as hell here on Olympus.

No one could deny it … no brethren, old or new, could fail to see it … when the evil wind was up, Ol’ Gordo had shown the world the pure and righteous stuff.