Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

In a department store in Hawaii a first-rate finished monkeypod coffee table cost about $150. A modest sum, one might say; but if your base pay was only $7,200 a year, that meant you had only forty-eight such sums to last you for an entire year. And Scott and Rene had four children! But unfinished slabs of this amazing wood with its flaming yellow grain were available for as little as nine dollars. If you were willing to spend twenty-four hours sanding, rubbing, oiling, and polishing them, and another ten or twenty constructing legs or frames, you could save $140. Fortunately, Rene had a good sense of design and was even able to use the monkeypod with finesse—a rare accomplishment in the Monkeypod Life.

Both Scott and Rene had been brought up in Boulder, Colorado. Scott was top drawer by Boulder social standards, such as they were. He was descended from the first white settlers in the state. His mother's father, Victor Noxon, owned and edited a newspaper, the Boulder Miner-Journal , Scott's parents had separated when he was only three, and his mother contracted tuberculosis and was confined to a sanitarium for long stretches, so that Scott lived in Victor Noxon's house and was, as it turned out, raised by him. Rene met Scott at the University of Colorado and dropped out in her sophomore year to marry him. They spent practically that entire first year on the ski slopes. They were an extraordinarily good-looking couple, both blond, trim, athletic, high-spirited, outgoing, the sort of couple you seldom actually saw outside the Lucky Strike ads. Many wives of fighter pilots would end up looking on helplessly as their husbands grew more and more distant, a fact they would acknowledge in what were meant as lighthearted remarks, such as: "I'm only his mistress—he's married to an airplane." Often she would be overstating their intimacy; the actual mistress would be someone she didn't know about. Scott, on the contrary, was completely devoted to Rene and their two sons and two daughters. Many nights, during the testing for Project Mercury, Scott wrote Rene long letters, some of them ten or fifteen pages, rather than run up more telephone bills. He kept trying to reassure her that he wasn't getting involved in anything reckless. One night he wrote: "Most of all, don't worry. You know what is uppermost in my mind and that I wouldn't needlessly jeopardize what we have together." He was determined, he said, to live long enough "to make love to you as a grandmother."

All along, his feelings on this score had been so profound that he had done an extraordinary thing eight years before. After finishing his basic flight training at Pensacola and his advanced training at Corpus Christi, he had voluntarily chosen to fly multi-engine PBY-4 patrol planes rather than fighter planes. He didn't even like PBY-4s. He could barely stand to fly them. Who could? They were big slow awkward trucks. Yet he had stepped down off the great ziggurat pyramid here at the first major plateau. If the subject ever came up, he would say: "I did it out of allegiance to my family," meaning that patrol planes didn't leave as many widows behind. The Korean War was just beginning, and Scott ended up flying P2V patrol planes up and down the Pacific mainland. Naturally this was completely outside the big league for Navy pilots in the war. Any truly righteous aviator wanted to be assigned, on loan, to an Air Force fighter squadron for aerial combat over North Korea. But reconnaissance had its own hazards and trials, and Scott was considered extremely proficient at it; so much so that after the war he was brought to Patuxent River and trained as a test pilot.

Nevertheless, Scott had forsaken the righteous competition. Of his own accord! Out of allegiance to his family! Perhaps it had to do with his memories of how his own family had been disrupted during his early childhood. Well, that was something for psychiatrists to speculate about, and no doubt they were doing so. In his first psychiatric interview at Wright-Patterson, Scott himself had opened the session. He asked the first question. He said to the man: "How many children do you have? I have four."

Scott was surprised when he found himself among the thirty-two finalists in the competition for astronaut. He had bowed out of the big-league competition long ago. He had only two hundred hours of flying time in jets; and most of that he had accumulated in the course of flight test training. The other candidates all seemed to have fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred. Yet here he was. Not only that, as the days had gone by, first at Lovelace and now at Wright-Pat, his prospects had begun to look promising. It was amazing.

One thing Scott had going for him was his superb physical condition, although at the outset he would have never believed that sheer physical condition could be of any vital importance. He had been a gymnast at the University of Colorado and had terrific shoulders with the deltoid muscles bulging out in high relief, a thick strong neck, an absolutely lean and perfectly formed chest, like a South Sea pearl diver's—and, in fact, he had done a great deal of scuba diving—and his torso tapered down like Captain America's in the comic strip. Others complained the whole time, but the tests at Lovelace and Wright-Patterson didn't bother Scott in the slightest. Each one was a moment of triumph for him.

One night Scott called, and Rene could tell that he was exceptionally pleased over how things were going. It seemed that there was a test of lung capacity. The candidate sat at a table and blew into a tube. The tube led into an instrument with a column of mercury. The idea was to see how long you could hold the column of mercury up to a designated level with the pressure of your breath. The record, they were informed, was ninety-one seconds. Scott—as he excitedly told Rene that night—knew from years of undersea swimming that after your lungs feel completely out of air and every signal in your central nervous system predicts disaster if you hold your breath an instant longer, you actually have a substantial reserve supply of oxygen in your system. It is the buildup of carbon dioxide in the lungs, not the absolute depletion of oxygen, that signals the emergency. Scott forced himself to hold his breath, through all the early signals, while he counted slowly to one hundred, with the idea of surpassing the mark of ninety-one seconds. He counted very slowly, as it turned out, and held the column of mercury up for 171 seconds, almost doubling the record.

Another candidate in Scott's group also broke the old record by holding the mercury up 150 seconds. He was a Marine pilot named John Glenn. Scott had known Glenn slightly when both were at Pax River during Scott's flight test training. Glenn had set a cross-country speed record, Los Angeles to New York, of three hours and twenty-three minutes in an F8U fighter plane in July 1957. The two of them had hit it off immediately at Wright-Pat, partly, perhaps, because they appeared to be the two pacesetters in the testing. Scott had broken five records in all, and Glenn was usually his runner-up. One day they overheard one of the doctors saying to another: "Let's call Washington and tell them about these two guys."

Dr. Gladys J. Loring and the others were astounded by Scott's performance, and not merely by such matters as his lung capacity, either; for many of the tests were not physical tests in the ordinary sense but, rather, tests of perseverance and one's willingness to push oneself beyond the usual limits of human endurance.

Scott Carpenter did not mind the note-taking of Dr. Gladys J. Loring in the slightest. Scribble away! Scott was in his element.

Conrad was back home in North Town Creek, back at Pax River, when the letter from NASA arrived. He knew he had not played it very smoothly during the testing. He had compared notes with Wally Schirra, and it turned out that when Wally's group had gone through Lovelace, they had been just as ticked off at the way the place was run as Conrad and his group had been. Wally had even led his own little rebellion when they wanted their goddamned stool samples. One afternoon they had told Wally and the boys to avoid all highly seasoned food that evening, because they wanted to take stool samples the next day. So the whole group headed off to the Mexican section of Albuquerque, and they had picked out the rankest-looking restaurant they could find and fired up their innards with every red-mad dish they had ever heard of and hosed it down with plenty of good cheap rank Mexican beer. The jalapeno peppers had even gotten into the act! One of the boys had discovered a bowl of jalapeno pepper sauce on the table, a fiery reddish-brown concoction, and had poured it into a Dixie cup and presented it to the lab technicians as if he had a ferocious case of diarrhea—and had laughed his head off when the first sultry cloud of jalapeno aroma nearly wiped them out. But that was as far as he went—the lab technician level. He let the good General Schwichtenberg remain reserved and serene. That was the way Wally himself would have done it. He always knew where the outside of the envelope was, even when it came to pranks.