Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

As soon as Cox and his co-pilot pulled Grissom up into the helicopter, they could see that he was in a bad way. He looked funny. He was gasping for breath and he was shaking. His eyes kept darting around. He found what he was looking for: a Mae West, a life preserver. He grabbed it and started trying to strap it on. He was having a hell of a time with it because he was shaking so. His arms would fly one way and the straps would fly the other. The engines made a terrific noise. They were heading back to the carrier. Grissom was still struggling with the straps. He obviously thought they were going to crash at any moment. He thought he was going to drown. He gasped. He battled the Mae West all the way back to the carrier. What the hell had happened to the man? First he had blown the hatch before the lead helicopter could hook on and then he had floundered around out in the ocean and now he was preparing to abandon ship in a goddamned helicopter on a perfectly calm sunny morning out near Bermuda.

Once they got over the carrier Randolph , Grissom calmed down a bit. The same sort of awed faces that had welcomed Alan Shepard were craning up at the helicopter. But Grissom hardly noticed them. His head was in a very dark cloud.

When he went below deck, he was still shaking. He kept saying, "I didn't do anything. The damned thing just blew."

Within an hour they had started the preliminary debriefing, and Grissom kept saying, "I didn't do anything, I was just lying there—and it just blew."

A couple of hours later, at the formal debriefing on Grand Bahama Island, Grissom was much calmer, although he looked exhausted and drawn. He was grim. He was a very unhappy man. His pulse was still up to 90.

Normally, at rest, it was 68 or 69. He kept saying, "I didn't touch it, I was just lying there—and it blew."

According to Gus, here was what happened. Once he knew the helicopters were nearby, he felt secure in the capsule and therefore asked for five minutes to finish getting unhooked and record his switch positions. While the capsule was still descending under the parachute, he had opened his face plate and disconnected the visor seal hose. Once the capsule was in the water, he disconnected the oxygen hose to his helmet, unfastened the helmet from the pressure suit, undid his chest strap, lap belt, shoulder harness, and knee straps, disconnected the wire leading to the biomedical sensors, and rolled the rubber neck dam up around his neck. His pressure suit was still attached to the capsule by the oxygen inlet hose, which he needed for cooling the suit, and his helmet still had its radio wiring leads hooked up; but all he had to do was take the helmet off and he would be free of the wires. Then—all in keeping with the checklist—he removed the emergency knife that was clamped onto the hatch and put it in the survival kit, which was a canvas bag about two feet long containing an inflatable life raft, shark repellant, a desalinization rig, food, a signal light, and so on. Before leaving the capsule via the hatch, as Gus recounted it, he had one more chore to perform. He was supposed to take out a chart and a grease pencil and mark the positions of all the switches on the instrument panel. Since he still had on his pressure-suit gloves, making it hard to grip the grease pencil, this took him three or four minutes. Then he armed the explosive hatch by removing the cover from the detonator, which was a button about three inches in diameter, and removed the safety pin, which was like the safety catch on a revolver. Once the cover and pin were removed, five pounds of pressure on the detonator button would blow the bolts and propel the hatch out into the water. Now he radioed Lewis in the helicopter to come in and hook on. He unhooked the oxygen hose to his pressure suit and settled back on the seat and waited for Lewis to tell him he had hooked on to the capsule. Once he got the word from Lewis, he would blow the hatch. While he was lying there, he said, he started wondering if there were some way he could retrieve the knife from the survival kit before he blew the hatch and left the capsule. He figured it would make a terrific souvenir. This thought was running idly through his mind, he said, when he heard a dull thud. He knew immediately that it was the hatch blowing. In the next instant he was looking straight out the hatchway at the brilliant blue sky over the ocean, and water was pouring in. There was not even time to grapple for the survival kit. He took his helmet off and grabbed the right side of the instrument panel and thrust his head through the hatchway and wriggled out.

"I had the cap off and the safety pin out," Gus said, "but I don't think that I hit the button. The capsule was rocking around a little, but there weren't any loose items in the capsule, so I don't see how I could have hit it, but possibly I did."

As the day wore on, and the formal debriefing got underway, Gus discounted even the possibility that he had hit the button. "I was lying there, flat on my back—and it just blew."

Nobody was about to accuse Gus of anything, but the engineers kept rolling their eyes at each other. The explosive hatch was new to the Mercury capsule, but explosive hatches had been in use on jet fighters since the early 1950's. When a pilot pulled his cinch ring and ejected, the hatch blew and a TNT charge rocketed the pilot and his seat-parachute rig through the opening. The pilot and anyone who might be riding backseat routinely armed their hatches and the TNT charges out on the runway before takeoff. This was the equivalent of Gus's removing the detonator cover and the safety pin.

Of course, any apparatus rigged up with explosive charges had the potential of exploding at the wrong time. Later on, NASA put a hatch assembly through every test the engineers could dream up to try to make the hatch blow without hitting the detonator button. They subjected it to trial by water, trial by heat; they shook it, pounded it, dropped it on concrete from a height of one hundred feet—and it never just blew .

There were many conjectures uttered very quietly, very privately.

And at Edwards… the True Brothers… well, my God, as you can imagine, they were… laughing ! Naturally they couldn't say anything. But now—surely!—it was so obvious! Grissom had just screwed the pooch!

In flight test, if you did something that stupid, if you destroyed a major prototype through some lame-brain mistake such as hitting the wrong button—you were through! You'd be lucky to end up in Flight Engineering. Oh, it was obvious to everybody at Edwards that Grissom had just fucked it , screwed the pooch, that was all. It was doubtful that he had hit the detonator on purpose, because even if he were feeling a little panicky in the water (you have to be afraid to panic, old buddy), he wasn't likely to ask for trouble by blowing the hatch before the helicopter hooked on and was overhead with the horse collar. But if a man is beginning to panic, logic goes first. Maybe the poor bastard just wanted out, and—bango!—he punched the button. But what about the business of the knife? He said he wanted to take the knife as a souvenir. So he may have been trying to fish the knife out of the survival kit. The capsule is rocking in the swells… he bangs into the detonator—that's all it would have taken. Oh, there was no question that he had hit the damn button some way. The only thing they liked about his entire performance was the way he said, "I was lying there—and it just blew," and the way he stuck to it. There, Gus old boy, you showed the instincts of the true fighter jock! Oh, you learned many of the lessons well! After you've done some forbidden hassling and your ship flames out and you have to eject and your F-100 goes kaboom ! on the desert floor… naturally you come back to base and say: "I don't know what happened, sir—it just flamed out on me!" I was minding my own business! The demons did it! And go easy on the details. A broad stroke of vagueness—that's the ticket.