The Right Stuff - Avalon Library

1 The Right StuffTom WolfeContentsForewordThe AngelsThe Right StuffYeagerThe Lab RatIn Single CombatOn the BalconyThe CapeThe ThronesThe VoteRighteous PrayerThe Unscrewable PoochThe TearsThe Operational StuffThe ClubThe High DesertEpilogueAuthor's NoteForewordThis book originated with some ordinary, curiosity. What isit, I wondered, that makes a man willing to sit up on top ofan enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas,Titan, or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light thefuse? I decided on the simplest approach possible. I wouldask a few astronauts and find out. So I asked a few inDecember of 1972 when they gathered at Cape Canaveralto watch the last mission to the moon, Apollo 17.

2 Idiscovered quickly enough that none of them, no matterhow talkative otherwise, was about to answer the questionor even linger for more than a few seconds on the subject atthe heart of it, which is to say, I did sense that the answer was not to be found in anyset of traits specific to the task of flying into space. Thegreat majority of the astronauts who had flown the rocketshad come from the ranks of test pilots. All but a few hadbeen military test pilots, and even those few, such as NeilArmstrong, had been trained in the military. And it was thisthat led me to a rich and fabulous terrain that, in a literarysense, had remained as dark as the far side of the moonfor more than half a century: military flying and the modernAmerican officer following the First World War a certain fashionset in among writers in Europe and soon spread to theirobedient colonial counterparts in the United States.

3 Warwas looked upon as inherently monstrous, and those whowaged it namely, military officers were looked upon asbrutes and philistines. The tone was set by some brilliantnovels; among them, All Quiet on the Western Front, TheJourney to the End of the Night and The Good SoldierSchweik. The only proper protagonist for a tale of war wasan enlisted man, and he was to be presented not as a herobut as Everyman, as much a victim of war as any officer above the rank of second lieutenant was to bepresented as a martinet or a fool, if not an outright villain, nomatter whom he fought for. The old-fashioned tale ofprowess and heroism was relegated to second- and third-rate forms of literature, ghost-written autobiographies andstories in pulp magazines in the order of Argosy as late as the 1930s the favorite war stories in thepulps concerned World War I pilots.

4 One of the fewscientific treatises ever written on the subject of bravery isThe Anatomy of Courage by Charles Moran, who servedas a doctor in the trenches for the British in World War I(and who was better known later as Lord Moran, personalphysician to Winston Churchill). Writing in the 1920s, Moranpredicted that in the wars of the future adventurous youngmen who sought glory in war would tend to seek it as the twentieth century, he said, they would regard themilitary pilot as the quintessence of manly daring that thecavalryman had been in the treatment of the drama and psychology of this newpursuit, flying high-performance aircraft in battle, was left tothe occasional pilot who could write, the most notable ofthem being Antoine de Saint-Exup ry.

5 The literary worldremained oblivious. Nevertheless, young men did exactlywhat Moran predicted. They became military officers sothat they could fly, and then flew against astonishinglydeadly odds. As late as 1970,I was to discover in an articleby a military doctor in a medical journal a career Navy pilotfaced a 23 percent likelihood of dying in an accident. Thisdid not even include deaths in combat, which at that time,with the war in Vietnam in progress, were catastrophicallyhigh for Navy pilots. The Right Stuff became the story ofwhy men were willing willing? delighted! to take onsuch odds in this, an era literary people had long sincecharacterized as the age of the anti-hero.

6 Such was thepsychological mystery that animated me in the writing ofthis book. And if there were those readers who were notinterested in the exploration of space per se but who wereinterested in The Right Stuff nonetheless, perhaps it mighthave been because the mystery caught their imagination, this book was first published in 1979 I have enjoyedcorresponding with many pilots and many widows of all have written to pat me on the back, but almost allseemed grateful that someone had tried and it had to bean outsider to put into words matters that the very code ofthe pilot rules off-limits in conversation. These up to one of the most extraordinary and most secretdramas of the twentieth 19831 - The AngelsWithin five minutes, or ten minutes, no more than that, threeof the others had called her on the telephone to ask her ifshe had heard that something had happened out there.

7 "Jane, this is Alice. Listen, I just got a call from Betty, andshe said she heard something's happened out there. Haveyou heard anything?" That was the way they phrased it, callafter call. She picked up the telephone and began relayingthis same message to some of the others."Connie, this is Jane Conrad. Alice just called me, and shesays something's "Something was part of the official Wife Lingo for tiptoeingblindfolded around the subject. Being barely twenty-oneyears old and new around here, Jane Conrad knew verylittle about this particular subject, since nobody ever talkedabout it. But the day was young! And what a setting she hadfor her imminent enlightenment!

8 And what a picture sheherself presented! Jane was tall and slender and had richbrown hair and high cheekbones and wide brown looked a little like the actress Jean Simmons. Herfather was a rancher in southwestern Texas. She had goneEast to college, to Bryn Mawr, and had met her husband,Pete, at a debutante's party at the Gulph Mills Club inPhiladelphia, when he was a senior at Princeton. Pete wasa short, wiry, blond boy who joked around a lot. At anymoment his face was likely to break into a wild grinrevealing the gap between his front teeth. The Hickory Kidsort, he was; a Hickory Kid on the deb circuit, however.

9 Hehad an air of energy, self-confidence, ambition, joie devivre. Jane and Pete were married two days after hegraduated from Princeton. Last year Jane gave birth totheir first child, Peter. And today, here in Florida, inJacksonville, in the peaceful year 1955, the sun shinesthrough the pines outside, and the very air takes on thesparkle of the ocean. The ocean and a great mica-whitebeach are less than a mile away. Anyone driving by will seeJane's little house gleaming like a dream house in thepines. It is a brick house, but Jane and Pete painted thebricks white, so that it gleams in the sun against a greatgreen screen of pine trees with a thousand little placeswhere the sun peeks through.

10 They painted the shuttersblack, which makes the white walls look even more house has only eleven hundred square feet of floorspace, but Jane and Pete designed it themselves and thatmore than makes up for the size. A friend of theirs was thebuilder and gave them every possible break, so that it costonly eleven thousand dollars. Outside, the sun shines, andinside, the fever rises by the minute as five, ten, fifteen, and,finally, nearly all twenty of the wives join the circuit, trying tofind out what has happened, which, in fact, means: towhose thirty minutes on such a circuit this is not an unusualmorning around here a wife begins to feel that thetelephone is no longer located on a table or on the kitchenwall.