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The Right Stuff is the best, the funniest, and the most vivid book ever written about America’s manned space program.

‘Tom Wolfe at his very best… Learned, cheeky, risky, touching, tough, compassionate, nostalgic, worshipful, jingoistic – The Right Stuff is superb’ New York Times Book Review

‘What is it’ asks Wolfe, ‘that makes a man willing to sit on top of an enormous Roman Candle… and wait for someone to light the fuse?’ Arrogance? Stupidity? Bravery? Courage? Or, simply, that quality we call ‘the right stuff’?

A monument to the men who battled to beat the Russians into space, The Right Stuff is a voyage into the mythology of American heroics, and a dizzying dive into the sweat, fear, beauty and danger of being on the white-hot edge of history in the making.

About the Author

Tom Wolfe was the author of more than a dozen books, among them The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, I Am Charlotte Simmons, and Back to Blood. He received the National Book Foundation’s 2010 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He died in 2018.

Introduction

ON FEBRUARY 18, 2016, I woke up in my crew quarters on the International Space Station for the 328th day of a year-long mission, the longest ever flown by a NASA astronaut. After breakfast and a conference call with the ground, I got into my work schedule for the day: conducting a physics experiment, taking a sample of my own blood for a NASA study, performing some routine maintenance on life-support equipment, and answering questions for an elementary school in Arizona via live video uplink. When I finally had a few free moments to myself, I opened up a laptop and typed out an email. I spent longer writing that email, and proofread it more carefully, than anything I had written in a long time.

I had decided to reach out to the author of a book that had meant a lot to me, something I had never done before. I was writing to Tom Wolfe, and I wanted to tell him that the reason I was spending a year in space, the reason I had flown three earlier missions to space and had flown high-performance aircraft in the Navy prior to that, was all because I had come across The Right Stuff as an eighteen-year-old college freshman.

In 1982 I was on my way to flunking out of school, with no particular ambition but to party with my friends. I was in line at the campus store one day when the cover of The Right Stuff caught my eye – I picked up the book while I waited for the line to move forward, and by the time I reached the cash register I was so engrossed I paid for the book and took it back to my dorm. By the next day, I had finished it and had found my life’s ambition: I was going to fly military jets off an aircraft carrier, become a test pilot, and maybe even become an astronaut. I had known these pursuits existed before, of course, but Tom Wolfe’s prose brought them to life in a way that spoke to me as nothing else had before. As a terrible student with severe attention problems, I was a poor candidate to achieve any of these goals. But I had achieved them, and I wanted to thank Tom Wolfe for the part he had played in my life.

Dear Commander Kelly,

Santa Barranza! I can’t believe it! The Right Stuff itself has made it into Space! And now I have photographic evidence to prove it!

Most exciting of all is your account of the part it played in your rise to where you are today … which is to say, on top of the world. I choose to believe all of it. At last I can point with extravagant pride at what I have done for the USA.

Mainly, I must thank you for going to the trouble – considering all you have on your hands – of writing this earthling way down below. Sometime when you’ve returned, I would love to talk to you about your adventures.

Meantime, keep ’em orbiting!

Tom Wolfe

I was excited to have received a response, but more than that I was excited that it was written in classic Tom Wolfe style. There could be no mistaking who had written this.

Tom and I arranged to talk on the phone a few days later. (The crew of the space station can call people on Earth using voice-over-internet software, but they can’t call us back.) Once I got through to him and explained the strange voice lag that makes it sound as though an awkward pause follows each line, we talked for over an hour as the space station completed two-thirds of an orbit around the Earth. I told him about my journey to the space station on a Russian Soyuz rocket, a collaboration that would have been unthinkable during the time of the events in The Right Stuff. He asked what I had been doing that day, what kinds of foods I could eat, and how often I got to talk to my family.

When it was my turn to ask questions, I asked Tom how he writes his books. He started to explain that he gives himself a quota of words per hour he tries to meet on a writing day, and that he uses an outline to give him a sense of structure and direction.

‘I actually meant – how do you write?’ I said. ‘Like, physically. Do you use a laptop?’

When I turned the subject to The Right Stuff, I asked him about the title. It’s hard to think of another book title that has become so widely used – not only when we talk about astronauts but when we talk about almost anything. Everyone knows what it means, even if they’ve never read the book or seen the film and, as an astronaut, for the last twenty years I have been subjected to countless questions, jokes, and jibes about whether or not I’ve got it.

‘The title didn’t come until well into the writing process,’ Tom told me. He had been working on the book for years and had started to fear it would never be done. One day he was talking with a friend who worked in law enforcement, and Tom mentioned that he’d always had a great deal of respect for police officers, those who knowingly risk their lives to help others.

‘You know what?’ Tom’s friend said. ‘It takes guts to be a police officer, but you know who’s really got to have courage? Test pilots. Those guys have really got the right stuff.’

Tom said that he knew the moment he heard that phrase that he had found the title for his book. Not long after, his wife suggested that – though his original plan had been to write about Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo – he had done enough by telling the story of Mercury. He had documented America’s first steps off our planet in a unique way no one had ever seen before. And he’d found his title. He submitted the manuscript to his publisher not long after, and the book was published in 1979. It’s never been out of print since.

‘Whenever I tell people how inspired I was by The Right Stuff,’ I said, ‘they always assume that I was inspired by the idea of space travel. But the truth is, I was captivated by your descriptions of the test pilots, before any of them were chosen as astronauts. The idea that their job was to get into an experimental airplane and struggle to stay alive just by their wits – I wanted to do that.’

The book begins with a test pilot getting smashed to bits when his airplane malfunctions; a few pages later, another dies when a catapult on an aircraft carrier malfunctions: ‘his ship just dribbled off the end of the deck, with its engine roaring vainly, and fell sixty feet into the ocean and sank like a brick.’ A pilot ‘rolled in like a corkscrew from 800 feet up and crashed’; another passes out from hypoxia when his oxygen system fails; another lets his airspeed fall too low before extending his flaps and loses control of the airplane. Tom was right to sound incredulous: this part of the book was not exactly an advertisement for flight test. A career Navy pilot faced a 23-percent likelihood of dying from an accident – and this statistic did not include deaths in combat, since those could not be classified as ‘accidental’.

All this was meant to create a sense of the kind of courage these men had to possess in order to simply do their jobs every day. Before Tom’s readers could understand the concept of ‘the right stuff,’ they had to understand the risks those pilots faced (and still face). But, I tried to explain to Tom, as a college freshman I saw something in those opening pages that spoke to me. I told Tom that seeing the risk of death brought to life on the page affected me the way nothing else had before. If I could risk my life in the same way, relying on my wits to bring me back down onto the runway in one piece, that would be something. Risking my life would give my life a meaning it hadn’t seemed to have before.

I followed the paths of the characters in the book as closely as I could – joined the Navy, became a Naval aviator, qualified to fly jets off an aircraft carrier, was accepted into the Navy test pilot school at Patuxent River, where The Right Stuff begins. I flew experimental aircraft and tested their flying abilities. Unlike many of the characters in the first pages of Tom’s book, I’d come back alive every time. Only after having survived all that did I apply to NASA as an astronaut; then I flew another experimental craft, the space shuttle.

I didn’t entirely understand, when I was a kid reading The Right Stuff for the first time, that in a sense Tom had invented the idea of the astronaut by writing about the Mercury Seven. He taught us how to read their identical crew cuts and enormous wristwatches, their rakish smiles and indomitable swagger, their ‘Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving,’ their endless pool parties at Cape Canaveral, racing their Corvettes along A1A testing their luck and believing themselves (incorrectly) to be ‘equally gifted in the control of all forms of locomotion.’ By the time I became an astronaut myself, the culture had changed – the astronaut corps was more diverse and less debauched, but some of the swagger remained.

As we wrapped up our conversation, Tom suggested that I should think about writing a book about my experiences. I didn’t tell Tom I wasn’t sure whether I would be able to write a book – despite all I had done earlier in my life to overcome my attention problems, I still had trouble concentrating on reading and writing for long periods of time. Despite the extraordinary nature of the mission I was on, writing a book still seemed like an unattainable journey.

On March 1, 2016, I struggled into a pressure suit, strapped into a Russian Soyuz spacecraft with two cosmonaut crewmates, and detached from the station to return to Earth. We slowed through supersonic speeds as we were slammed into our seats, hot plasma streaking past the windows. When we landed with a smack on the hard ground in the plains of Kazakhstan, I knew I had made it back in one piece.

I’d asked my partner, Amiko, to send me a bag with a few things to meet me in Kazakhstan – some clothes, my phone, a few essentials. Among the other items, I’d asked her to send me my copy of The Right Stuff. I knew I’d want to look at it after surviving the perils of re-entry and after finishing my fourth – and what was likely to be my last – trip into space.

Once settled on the airplane that would bring me halfway around the world back to Houston, I flipped open the familiar cover and opened to a place a few pages in. ‘Even out in the middle of the swamp, in this rot-bog of pine trunks, scum slicks, dead dodder vines, and mosquito eggs, even out in this great overripe sump, the smell of “burned beyond recognition” obliterated everything else.’

I flipped about a third of the way into the book. ‘No matter what time it was, it was beer-call time, as they said in the Air Force, and [the pilots] would get in their cars and go barreling into Cocoa Beach for the endless, seamless party. And what lively cries and laughter would be rising up on all sides as the silvery moon reflected drunkenly on the chlorine blue of the motel pools! And what animated revelers were to be found!’

Another chunk of pages. ‘The passion that now animated NASA spread out even into the surrounding community of Cocoa Beach. The grisliest down-home alligator-poaching crackers manning the gasoline pumps on Route A1A would say to the tourists, as the No-Knock flowed, “Well, that Atlas vehicle’s given us more fits than a June bug on a porch bulb, but we got real confidence in that Redstone, and I think we’re gonna make it.” Everyone who felt the spirit of NASA at that time wanted to be part of it.’

What stood out to me now was the strangeness and vigor of the voice. Some writing is meant to be read aloud, but these sentences didn’t have to be read aloud to be verbal. I could feel those consonants on my teeth without even speaking them. All this time I’d been thinking I’d been inspired by the glimpse Tom had offered me into flight test and spaceflight and the people who dedicated their lives to those pursuits. But maybe, more than anything else, I’d been inspired by the way he wrote about them. I’d seen the details he saw and wondered at the characters he created, and it was the voice of Tom Wolfe that I had responded to as much as anything else. Maybe if he’d written a book of non-fiction about a hospital, I would be a surgeon by now. But I was an astronaut, feeling the crush of gravity for the first time in a year, and looking forward to hugging my family.

A few months later, I met Tom for lunch at the Carlyle Hotel in New York. He was easy to spot in his iconic white suit (I’ve learned since that this trademark started not as a fashion statement but as a solution to the fact that as a young journalist he couldn’t afford to buy both a summer suit and winter suit). Now in his eighties, Tom looked older than he did in his rakish author photo, but no less vigorous. He had none of the frailty I might have expected from someone his age. He was bright, energetic, quick-witted, and sharp as a tack.

By that time, I had started working on writing about my experiences, pulling together the journal I had kept during the year in space and digging into my memories from childhood, adolescence, college, young adulthood – all the formative moments of my life, including the day I first came across The Right Stuff. Over soup at the Carlyle, I told Tom about what it was like to meet the remaining Mercury astronauts I’d first read about in his book. Wally Schirra was a still a joker with a broad smile and a daredevil’s twinkle in his eye. Tom had described John Glenn as ‘a balding and slightly tougher version of the cutest-looking freckle-faced country boy you ever saw,’ and in his seventies, preparing to go into space again, he was still that charming and handsome, taking the time to talk with my daughter when she visited me at work.

I tried to describe to Tom what it was like to meet these people who had been so vivid to me as characters in his book. In The Right Stuff, these young men saw no limits before them and felt no fear. By the time I got to meet them and shake their hands, they were all old retired astronauts, white- or gray-haired or bald, with pale spots on their skin where pre-cancerous growths had been removed. They all still had a sharpness and a youthful vigor that belied their years, but they were no longer the thrill jockeys they had once been.

Of course, Tom was not immune to time either. Tom’s passing, on May 14 2018, was a huge loss to the worlds of journalism and literature, but his work, and his inimitable voice, remain.

Like the Mercury astronauts he brought to life on the page, Tom’s contribution and influence can never be replicated. They offer his readers another way of seeing the world we thought we already knew. Whether his characters were breaking the sound barrier in The Right Stuff, or risking it all on Wall Street in The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom documented the extremes of human courage and frailty and, in his own courageous, hyperbolic style, became one America’s own heroes.

I finished the book Tom first encouraged me to think about writing back in our space-to-ground phone call. I called it Endurance, and it was published in October 2017. A few months later, I received an email from a woman whose grandson was serving time in jail. She wanted me to know that her grandson had read and enjoyed both The Right Stuff and my book. ‘Time weighs heavily in a jail,’ she wrote. She told me her grandson could relate to my descriptions of living without fresh air, freedom, or the touch of my family, since as an inmate he is living under the same conditions. ‘We are hopeful this experience will be a turnaround for him,’ she wrote. ‘I think your writing will be influential in his life, much as Tom Wolfe inspired you. Thank you for writing Endurance.’

Now that I had struggled to wrestle my own sentences to the ground, trying to find the right word to convey an accurate meaning as well as a feeling, a tone, and a rhythm that needs to flow into the next sentence, and the next – I was starting to understand the complexity of what Tom had achieved in his book. And I now understand just a bit what it felt like to Tom to get that first email I sent him from the space station. When I received his response, that email with all the colons and exclamation points, I assumed it was partly out of politeness that he was showing such enthusiasm for having heard from me. But receiving this woman’s email about her grandson has meant the world to me – it’s made every late night and early morning I spent working on my book worthwhile.

Now I am a retired astronaut myself, just as the Mercury astronauts were when I met them in the nineteen-nineties. I spend my time traveling and telling people about my time in space. I want young people to be inspired to do their best and push beyond what they believe to be their limitations – I want the things I’ve learned to help someone else. I’m grateful that I came along at the right time to get to fly the missions I did. But most of all, I’m grateful that I had a great work of literature – and a great guide and friend, in Tom – to show me the way.

Foreword

THIS BOOK GREW out of some ordinary curiosity. What is it, i wondered, that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan, or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse? I decided on the simplest approach possible. I would ask a few astronauts and find out. So I asked a few in December of 1972 when they gathered at Cape Canaveral to watch the last mission to the moon, Apollo 17. I discovered quickly enough that none of them, no matter how talkative otherwise, was about to answer the question or even linger for more than a few seconds on the subject at the heart of it, which is to say, courage.

But I did sense that the answer was not to be found in any set of traits specific to the task of flying into space. The great majority of the astronauts who had flown the rockets had come from the ranks of test pilots. All but a few had been military test pilots, and even those few, such as Neil Armstrong, had been trained in the military. And it was this that led me to a rich and fabulous terrain that, in a literary sense, had remained as dark as the far side of the moon for more than half a century: military flying and the modern American officer corps.

Immediately following the First World War a certain fashion set in among writers in Europe and soon spread to their obedient colonial counterparts in the United States. War was looked upon as inherently monstrous, and those who waged it—namely, military officers—were looked upon as brutes and philistines. The tone was set by some brilliant novels; among them, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Journey to the End of the Night, and The Good Soldier Schweik. 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. The old-fashioned tale of prowess and heroism was relegated to second- and third-rate forms of literature, ghost-written autobiographies and stories in pulp magazines on the order of Argosy and Bluebook.

Even as late as the 1930s the favorite war stories in the pulps concerned World War I pilots. One of the few scientific treatises ever written on the subject of bravery is The Anatomy of Courage by Charles Moran, who served as a doctor in the trenches for the British in World War I (and who was better known later as Lord Moran, personal physician to Winston Churchill). Writing in the 1920s, Moran predicted that in the wars of the future adventurous young men who sought glory in war would tend to seek it as pilots. In the twentieth century, he said, they would regard the military pilot as the quintessence of manly daring that the cavalryman had been in the nineteenth.

Serious treatment of the drama and psychology of this new pursuit, flying high-performance aircraft in battle, was left to the occasional pilot who could write, the most notable of them being Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The literary world remained oblivious. Nevertheless, young men did exactly what Moran predicted. They became military officers so that they could fly, and they flew against astonishingly deadly odds. As late as 1970, I was to discover in an article by a military doctor in a medical journal, a career Navy pilot faced a 23 percent likelihood of dying in an accident. This did not even include deaths in combat, which at that time, with the war in Vietnam in progress, were catastrophically high for Navy pilots. The Right Stuffbecame the story of why men were willing—willing?—delighted!—to take on such odds in this, an era literary people had long since characterized as the age of the anti-hero. Such was the psychological mystery that animated me in the writing of this book. And if there were those readers who were not interested in the exploration of space per se but who were interested in The Right Stuff nonetheless, perhaps it might have been because the mystery caught their imagination, as well as mine.

Since this book was first published in 1979 I have enjoyed corresponding with many pilots and with many widows of pilots. Not all have written to pat me on the back, but almost all seemed grateful that someone had tried—and it had to be an outsider—to put into words certain matters that the very code of the pilot rules off-limits in conversation. These … matters … add up to one of the most extraordinary and most secret dramas of the twentieth century.

The Angels

WITHIN FIVE MINUTES, or ten minutes, no more than that, three of the others had called her on the telephone to ask her if she had heard that something had happened out there.

“Jane, this is Alice. Listen, I just got a call from Betty, and she said she heard something’s happened out there. Have you heard anything?” That was the way they phrased it, call after call. She picked up the telephone and began relaying this same message to some of the others.

“Connie, this is Jane Conrad. Alice just called me, and she says something’s happened …”

Something was part of the official Wife Lingo for tiptoeing blindfolded around the subject. Being barely twenty-one years old and new around here, Jane Conrad knew very little about this particular subject, since nobody ever talked about it. But the day was young! And what a setting she had for her imminent enlightenment! And what a picture she herself presented! Jane was tall and slender and had rich brown hair and high cheekbones and wide brown eyes. She looked a little like the actress Jean Simmons. Her father was a rancher in southwestern Texas. She had gone East to college, to Bryn Mawr, and had met her husband, Pete, at a debutante’s party at the Gulph Mills Club in Philadelphia, when he was a senior at Princeton. Pete was a short, wiry, blond boy who joked around a lot. At any moment his face was likely to break into a wild grin revealing the gap between his front teeth. The Hickory Kid sort, he was; a Hickory Kid on the deb circuit, however. He had an air of energy, self-confidence, ambition, joie de vivre. Jane and Pete were married two days after he graduated from Princeton. Last year Jane gave birth to their first child, Peter. And today, here in Florida, in Jacksonville, in the peaceful year 1955, the sun shines through the pines outside, and the very air takes on the sparkle of the ocean. The ocean and a great mica-white beach are less than a mile away. Anyone driving by will see Jane’s little house gleaming like a dream house in the pines. It is a brick house, but Jane and Pete painted the bricks white, so that it gleams in the sun against a great green screen of pine trees with a thousand little places where the sun peeks through. They painted the shutters black, which makes the white walls look even more brilliant. The house has only eleven hundred square feet of floor space, but Jane and Pete designed it themselves and that more than makes up for the size. A friend of theirs was the builder and gave them every possible break, so that it cost only eleven thousand dollars. Outside, the sun shines, and inside, the fever rises by the minute as five, ten, fifteen, and, finally, nearly all twenty of the wives join the circuit, trying to find out what has happened, which, in fact, means: to whose husband.

After thirty minutes on such a circuit—this is not an unusual morning around here—a wife begins to feel that the telephone is no longer located on a table or on the kitchen wall. It is exploding in her solar plexus. Yet it would be far worse right now to hear the front doorbell. The protocol is strict on that point, although written down nowhere. No woman is supposed to deliver the final news, and certainly not on the telephone. The matter mustn’t be bungled!—that’s the idea. No, a man should bring the news when the time comes, a man with some official or moral authority, a clergyman or a comrade of the newly deceased. Furthermore, he should bring the bad news in person. He should turn up at the front door and ring the bell and be standing there like a pillar of coolness and competence, bearing the bad news on ice, like a fish. Therefore, all the telephone calls from the wives were the frantic and portentous beating of the wings of the death angels, as it were. When the final news came there would be a ring at the front door—a wife in this situation finds herself staring at the front door as if she no longer owns it or controls it—and outside the door would be a man … come to inform her that unfortunately something has happened out there, and her husband’s body now lies incinerated in the swamps or the pines or the palmetto grass, “burned beyond recognition, which anyone who had been around an air base for very long (fortunately Jane had not) realized was quite an artful euphemism to describe a human body that now looked like an enormous fowl that has burned up in a stove, burned a blackish brown all over, greasy and blistered, fried, in a word, with not only the entire face and all the hair and the ears burned off, not to mention all the clothing, but also the hands and feet, with what remains of the arms and legs bent at the knees and elbows and burned into absolutely rigid angles, burned a greasy blackish brown like the bursting body itself, so that this husband, father, officer, gentleman, this ornamentum of some mother’s eye, His Majesty the Baby of just twenty-odd years back, has been reduced to a charred hulk with wings and shanks sticking out of it.

My own husband—how could this be what they were talking about? Jane had heard the young men, Pete among them, talk about other young men who had “bought it” or “augered in” or “crunched”, but it had never been anyone they knew, no one in the squadron. And in any event, the way they talked about it, with such breezy, slangy terminology, was the same way they talked about sports. It was as if they were saying, “He was thrown out stealing second base.” And that was all! Not one word, not in print, not in conversation—not in this amputated language!—about an incinerated corpse from which a young man’s spirit has vanished in an instant, from which all smiles, gestures, moods, worries, laughter, wiles, shrugs, tenderness, and loving looks—you, my love!—have disappeared like a sigh, while the terror consumes a cottage in the woods, and a young woman, sizzling with the fever, awaits her confirmation as the new widow of the day.

The next series of calls greatly increased the possibility that it was Pete to whom something had happened. There were only twenty men in the squadron, and soon nine or ten had been accounted for … by the fluttering reports of the death angels. Knowing that the word was out that an accident had occurred, husbands who could get to a telephone were calling home to say it didn’t happen to me. This news, of course, was immediately fed to the fever. Jane’s telephone would ring once more, and one of the wives would be saying :

“Nancy just got a call from Jack. He’s at the squadron and he says something’s happened, but he doesn’t know what. He said he saw Frank D—take off about ten minutes ago with Greg in back, so they’re all right. What have you heard?”

But Jane has heard nothing except that other husbands, and not hers, are safe and accounted for. And thus, on a sunny day in Florida, outside of the Jacksonville Naval Air Station, in a little white cottage, a veritable dream house, another beautiful young woman was about to be apprised of the quid pro quo of her husband’s line of work, of the trade-off, as one might say, the subparagraphs of a contract written in no visible form. Just as surely as if she had the entire roster in front of her, Jane now realized that only two men in the squadron were unaccounted for. One was a pilot named Bud Jennings; the other was Pete. She picked up the telephone and did something that was much frowned on in a time of emergency. She called the squadron office. The duty officer answered.

“I want to speak to Lieutenant Conrad,” said Jane. “This is Mrs. Conrad.”

“I’m sorry,” the duty officer said—and then his voice cracked. “I’m sorry … I …” He couldn’t find the words! He was about to cry! “I’m—that’s—I mean … he can’t come to the phone!”

“I’m sorry—it’s impossible—” The duty officer could hardly get the words out because he was so busy gulping back sobs. Sobs! “He can’t come to the phone.”

“I’m sorry—” More sighs, wheezes, snuffling gasps. “I can’t tell you that. I—I have to hang up now!”

And the duty officer’s voice disappeared in a great surf of emotion and he hung up.

The world froze, congealed, in that moment. Jane could no longer calculate the interval before the front doorbell would ring and some competent long-faced figure would appear, some Friend of Widows and Orphans, who would inform her, officially, that Pete was dead.

Even out in the middle of the swamp, in this rot-bog of pine trunks, scum slicks, dead dodder vines, and mosquito eggs, even out in this great overripe sump, the smell of “burned beyond recognition” obliterated everything else. When airplane fuel exploded, it created a heat so intense that everything but the hardest metals not only burned—everything of rubber, plastic, celluloid, wood, leather, cloth, flesh, gristle, calcium, horn, hair, blood, and protoplasm—it not only burned, it gave up the ghost in the form of every stricken putrid gas known to chemistry. One could smell the horror. It came in through the nostrils and burned the rhinal cavities raw and penetrated the liver and permeated the bowels like a black gas until there was nothing in the universe, inside or out, except the stench of the char. As the helicopter came down between the pine trees and settled onto the bogs, the smell hit Pete Conrad even before the hatch was completely open, and they were not even close enough to see the wreckage yet. The rest of the way Conrad and the crewmen had to travel on foot. After a few steps the water was up to their knees, and then it was up to their armpits, and they kept wading through the water and the scum and the vines and the pine trunks, but it was nothing compared to the smell. Conrad, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant junior grade, happened to be on duty as squadron safety officer that day and was supposed to make the on-site investigation of the crash. The fact was, however, that this squadron was the first duty assignment of his career, and he had never been at a crash site before and had never smelled any such revolting stench or seen anything like what awaited him.

When Conrad finally reached the plane, which was an SNJ, he found the fuselage burned and blistered and dug into the swamp with one wing sheared off and the cockpit canopy smashed. In the front seat was all that was left of his friend Bud Jennings. Bud Jennings, an amiable fellow, a promising young fighter pilot, was now a horrible roasted hulk—with no head. His head was completely gone, apparently torn off the spinal column like a pineapple off a stalk, except that it was nowhere to be found.

Conrad stood there soaking wet in the swamp bog, wondering what the hell to do. It was a struggle to move twenty feet in this freaking muck. Every time he looked up, he was looking into a delirium of limbs, vines, dappled shadows, and a chopped-up white light that came through the treetops—the ubiquitous screen of trees with a thousand little places where the sun peeked through. Nevertheless, he started wading back out into the muck and the scum, and the others followed. He kept looking up. Gradually he could make it out. Up in the treetops there was a pattern of broken limbs where the SNJ had come crashing through. It was like a tunnel through the treetops. Conrad and the others began splashing through the swamp, following the strange path ninety or a hundred feet above them. It took a sharp turn. That must have been where the wing broke off. The trail veered to one side and started downward. They kept looking up and wading through the muck. Then they stopped. There was a great green sap wound up there in the middle of a tree trunk. It was odd. Near the huge gash was … tree disease … some sort of brownish lumpy sac up in the branches, such as you see in trees infested by bagworms, and there were yellowish curds on the branches around it, as if the disease had caused the sap to ooze out and fester and congeal—except that it couldn’t be sap because it was streaked with blood. In the next instant—Conrad didn’t have to say a word. Each man could see it all. The lumpy sac was the cloth liner of a flight helmet, with the earphones attached to it. The curds were Bud Jennings’s brains. The tree trunk had smashed through the cockpit canopy of the SNJ and knocked Bud Jennings’s head to pieces like a melon.

In keeping with the protocol, the squadron commander was not going to release Bud Jennings’s name until his widow, Loretta, had been located and a competent male death messenger had been dispatched to tell her. But Loretta Jennings was not at home and could not be found. Hence, a delay—and more than enough time for the other wives, the death angels, to burn with panic over the telephone lines. All the pilots were accounted for except the two who were in the woods, Bud Jennings and Pete Conrad. One chance in two, aceydeucy, one finger-two finger, and this was not an unusual day around here.

Loretta Jennings had been out at a shopping center. When she returned home, a certain figure was waiting outside, a man, a solemn Friend of Widows and Orphans, and it was Loretta Jennings who lost the game of odd and even, aceydeucey, and it was Loretta whose child (she was pregnant with a second) would have no father. It was this young woman who went through all the final horrors that Jane Conrad had imagined—assumed!—would be hers to endure forever. Yet this grim stroke of fortune brought Jane little relief.

On the day of Bud Jennings’s funeral, Pete went into the back of the closet and brought out his bridge coat, per regulations. This was the most stylish item in the Navy officer’s wardrobe. Pete had never had occasion to wear his before. It was a double-breasted coat made of navy-blue melton cloth and came down almost to the ankles. It must have weighed ten pounds. It had a double row of gold buttons down the front and loops for shoulder boards, big beautiful belly-cut collar and lapels, deep turnbacks on the sleeves, a tailored waist, and a center vent in back that ran from the waistline to the bottom of the coat. Never would Pete, or for that matter many other American males in the mid-twentieth century, have an article of clothing quite so impressive and aristocratic as that bridge coat. At the funeral the nineteen little Indians who were left—Navy boys!—lined up manfully in their bridge coats. They looked so young. Their pink, lineless faces with their absolutely clear, lean jawlines popped up bravely, correctly, out of the enormous belly-cut collars of the bridge coats. They sang an old Navy hymn, which slipped into a strange and lugubrious minor key here and there, and included a stanza added especially for aviators. It ended with: “O hear us when we lift our prayer for those in peril in the air.”

Three months later another member of the squadron crashed and was burned beyond recognition and Pete hauled out the bridge coat again and Jane saw eighteen little Indians bravely going through the motions at the funeral. Not long after that, Pete was transferred from Jacksonville to the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland. Pete and Jane had barely settled in there when they got word that another member of the Jacksonville squadron, a close friend of theirs, someone they had had over to dinner many times, had died trying to take off from the deck of a carrier in a routine practice session a few miles out in the Atlantic. The catapult that propelled aircraft off the deck lost pressure, and his ship just dribbled off the end of the deck, with its engine roaring vainly, and fell sixty feet into the ocean and sank like a brick, and he vanished, just like that.

Pete had been transferred to Patuxent River, which was known in Navy vernacular as Pax River, to enter the Navy’s new test-pilot school. This was considered a major step up in the career of a young Navy aviator. Now that the Korean War was over and there was no combat flying, all the hot young pilots aimed for flight test. In the military they always said “flight test” and not “test flying.” Jet aircraft had been in use for barely ten years at the time, and the Navy was testing new jet fighters continually. Pax River was the Navy’s prime test center.

Jane liked the house they bought at Pax River. She didn’t like it as much as the little house in Jacksonville, but then she and Pete hadn’t designed this one. They lived in a community called North Town Creek, six miles from the base. North Town Creek, like the base, was on a scrub-pine peninsula that stuck out into Chesapeake Bay. They were tucked in amid the pine trees. (Once more!) All around were rhododendron bushes. Pete’s classwork and his flying duties were very demanding. Everyone in his flight test class, Group 20, talked about how difficult it was—and obviously loved it, because in Navy flying this was the big league. The young men in Group 20 and their wives were Pete’s and Jane’s entire social world. They associated with no one else. They constantly invited each other to dinner during the week; there was a Group party at someone’s house practically every weekend; and they would go off on outings to fish or waterski in Chesapeake Bay. In a way they could not have associated with anyone else, at least not easily, because the boys could talk only about one thing: their flying. One of the phrases that kept running through the conversation was “pushing the outside of the envelope.” The “envelope” was a flight-test term referring to the limits of a particular aircraft’s performance, how tight a turn it could make at such-and-such a speed, and so on. “Pushing the outside,” probing the outer limits, of the envelope seemed to be the great challenge and satisfaction of flight test. At first “pushing the outside of the envelope” was not a particularly terrifying phrase to hear. It sounded once more as if the boys were just talking about sports.

Then one sunny day a member of the Group, one of the happy lads they always had dinner with and drank with and went waterskiing with, was coming in for a landing at the base in an A3J fighter plane. He came in too low before lowering his flaps, and the ship stalled out, and he crashed and was burned beyond recognition. And they brought out the bridge coats and sang about those in peril in the air and put the bridge coats away, and the Indians who were left talked about the accident after dinner one night. They shook their heads and said it was a damned shame, but he should have known better than to wait so long before lowering the flaps.

Barely a week had gone by before another member of the Group was coming in for a landing in the same type of aircraft, the A3J, trying to make a ninety-degree landing, which involves a sharp turn, and something went wrong with the controls, and he ended up with one rear stabilizer wing up and the other one down, and his ship rolled in like a corkscrew from 8oo feet up and crashed, and he was burned beyond recognition. And the bridge coats came out and they sang about those in peril in the air and then they put the bridge coats away and after dinner one night they mentioned that the departed had been a good man but was inexperienced, and when the malfunction in the controls put him in that bad corner, he didn’t know how to get out of it.

Every wife wanted to cry out: “Well, my God! The machine broke! What makes any of you think you would have come out of it any better!” Yet intuitively Jane and the rest of them knew it wasn’t right even to suggest that. Pete never indicated for a moment that he thought any such thing could possibly happen to him. It seemed not only wrong but dangerous to challenge a young pilot’s confidence by posing the question. And that, too, was part of the unofficial protocol for the Officer’s Wife. From now on every time Pete was late coming in from the flight line, she would worry. She began to wonder if—no! assume!—he had found his way into one of those corners they all talked about so spiritedly, one of those little dead ends that so enlivened conversation around here.

Not long after that, another good friend of theirs went up in an F-4, the Navy’s newest and hottest fighter plane, known as the Phantom. He reached twenty thousand feet and then nosed over and dove straight into Chesapeake Bay. It turned out that a hose connection was missing in his oxygen system and he had suffered hypoxia and passed out at the high altitude. And the bridge coats came out and they lifted a prayer about those in peril in the air and the bridge coats were put away and the little Indians were incredulous. How could anybody fail to check his hose connections? And how could anybody be in such poor condition as to pass out that quickly from hypoxia?

A couple of days later Jane was standing at the window of her house in North Town Creek. She saw some smoke rise above the pines from over in the direction of the flight line. Just that, a column of smoke; no explosion or sirens or any other sound. She went to another room, so as not to have to think about it but there was no explanation for the smoke. She went back to the window. In the yard of a house across the street she saw a group of people … standing there and looking at her house, as if trying to decide what to do. Jane looked away—but she couldn’t keep from looking out again. She caught a glimpse of a certain figure coming up the walkway toward her front door. She knew exactly who it was. She had had nightmares like this. And yet this was no dream. She was wide awake and alert. Never more alert in her entire life! Frozen, completely defeated by the sight, she simply waited for the bell to ring. She waited, but there was not a sound. Finally she could stand it no more. In real life, unlike her dream life, Jane was both too self-possessed and too polite to scream through the door: “Go away! So she opened it. There was no one there, no one at all. There was no group of people on the lawn across the way and no one to be seen for a hundred yards in any direction along the lawns and leafy rhododendron roads of North Town Creek.

Then began a cycle in which she had both the nightmares and the hallucinations, continually. Anything could touch off an hallucination: a ball of smoke, a telephone ring that stopped before she could answer it, the sound of a siren, even the sound of trucks starting up (crash trucks!). Then she would glance out the window, and a certain figure would be coming up the walk, and she would wait for the bell. The only difference between the dreams and the hallucinations was that the scene of the dreams was always the little white house in Jacksonville. In both cases, the feeling that this time it has happened was quite real.

The star pilot in the class behind Pete’s, a young man who was the main rival of their good friend Al Bean, went up in a fighter to do some power-dive tests. One of the most demanding disciplines in flight test was to accustom yourself to making precise readings from the control panel in the same moment that you were pushing the outside of the envelope. This young man put his ship into the test dive and was still reading out the figures, with diligence and precision and great discipline, when he augered straight into the oyster flats and was burned beyond recognition. And the bridge coats came out and they sang about those in peril in the air and the bridge coats were put away, and the little Indians remarked that the departed was a swell guy and a brilliant student of flying; a little too much of a student, in fact; he hadn’t bothered to look out the window at the real world soon enough. Beano—Al Bean—wasn’t quite so brilliant; on the other hand, he was stlll here.

Like many other wives in Group 20 Jane wanted to talk about the whole situation, the incredible series of fatal accidents, with her husband and the other member of the Group, to find out how they were taking it. But somehow the unwritten protocol forbade discussions of this subject, which was the fear of death. Nor could Jane or any of the rest of them talk, really have a talk, with anyone around the base. You could talk to another wife about being worried. But what good did it do? Who wasn’t worried? You were likely to get a look that said: “Why dwell on it?” Jane might have gotten away with divulging the matter of the nightmares. But hallucinations? There was no room in Navy life for any such anomalous tendency as that.

By now the bad string had reached ten in all, and almost all of the dead had been close friends of Pete and Jane, young men who had been in their house many times, young men who had sat across from Jane and chattered like the rest of them about the grand adventure of military flying. And the survivors still sat around as beforeeven in the midst of this bad string!bring

Contents

About the Book

About the Author

Introduction

Foreword

1

The Angels