by Tom Wolfe
Cox … That face up there!—it’s Cox … Deke wasn’t here and wasn’t going to be here. But Cox!—Cox, whom he hardly knew, was his sole redeemer now. Cox was a Navy man in the second helicopter. Gus knew that face. Cox wasn’t a stupid bastard. Cox had picked up Al Shepard! Cox had picked up the goddamned chimpanzee! Cox knew how to get people out of here! … Cox! … He could see Cox leaning out of the helicopter lowering the horse collar. There was a hell of a roar everywhere from the two helicopters. But Cox! Cox and his helicopter were just suspended there. They weren’t coming any closer, and Gus’s head kept going under. The wash from the helicopter propellers was driving him back. The closer his redeemer came in the helicopter, the farther he was driven back. The sharks—they can smell panic! And he was sheer panic, 160 pounds of it, plus a hundred pounds of death dimes! Lost at last at 2,800 fathoms in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean! But helicopters can drive off sharks with their prop wash! Cox would rout the sharks and save him—but Cox got no closer, even though the horse collar was now touching the water. He was still about ninety feet away, across the billows. Now he could see it, now he couldn’t. The swells kept washing over him. But it was the only thing left. He swam for it. He couldn’t get his legs to come up. So he fought toward the horse collar with his arms. He had no strength left. Everything pulled him down. He couldn’t get enough breath. There was nothing but furious noise … blazing water … The water kept getting in his mouth. He would never make it. But the horse collar! Cox was up there! There was the horse collar. It was in front of him. He grabbed it and hung on. He was supposed to sit in it as if he were sitting on a swing. The hell with that. He flopped through the hole like a dead flounder landing on the fish-market scales. He hung on with his arms. He felt as if he weighed a ton. The suit was full of water. And it had already dawned on him: I lost the capsule.
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 th
at 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.
“I was lying there—and it just blew” … oh, that was rich. And then the brethren sat back and waited for the Mercury astronaut to get his, the way any one of them would have gotten his, had a comparable fuckup occurred at Edwards.
And … nothing happened.
From first to last the publicity that came out of NASA, out of the White House, from wherever, told of what a severe disappointment it had been to brave little Gus to lose the capsule through a malfunction after so successful a flight. Little Gus he became. The sympathy that welled up was terrific. Only five feet six with a round face. It was amazing that so much courage could be packed into sixty-six inches. And we almost lost him through drowning.
The True Brothers were incredulous … the Mercury astronauts had an official immunity to three-fourths of the things by which test pilots were ordinarily judged. They were by now ablaze with the superstitious aura of the single-combat warrior. They were the heroes of Kennedy’s political comeback, the updated new frontier whose symbol was a voyage to the moon. To announce that the second one, Gus Grissom, had prayed to the Lord: “Please, dear God, don’t let me fuck up”—but that his prayer had not been answered, and the Lord let him screw the pooch—well, this was an interpretation of that event that was to be avoided at all cost. NASA was no more anxious to have to call Grissom on the carpet than Kennedy was. NASA had just been handed a carte blanche for a moon project. Just six months before, the organization had been in live danger of losing the space program altogether. So nothing about this flight was going to be called a failure. It was possible to argue that Grissom’s flight had been a great success … There had just been a small problem immediately afterward. As for public opinion, the loss of the capsule didn’t really matter very much. The fact that the engineers needed the capsule to study the effects of heat and stress and to retrieve various types of automatically recorded data—this certainly created no national gloom. Get the man up and bring him down alive; that, not engineering, was at the heart of the single combat. So the possibility that Gus might have blundered was never brought up again. Far from having a tarnished record, he was a hero. He had endured and overcome so much. He was back solidly in the rotation for whatever great flights might come up in the future … as if by magic.
In the days after the flight Gus looked gloomier and gruffer than ever. He could manage an official smile when he had to and an official hero’s wave, but the black cloud would not pass. Betty Grissom looked the same way after she and the two boys, Mark and Scott, joined Gus in Florida for the celebration. Some celebration … It was as if the event had been poisoned by the gus-grim little secret. Betty also had the sneaking suspicion that everyone was saying, just out of earshot: “Gus blew it.” But her displeasure was a bit more subtle than Gus’s. They … NASA, the White House, the Air Force, the other fellows, Gus himself … were not keeping their side of the compact! Nobody could have looked at Betty at that time … this pretty, shy, ever-silent, ever-proper Honorable Mrs. Astronaut … and guessed at her anger.
They were violating the Military Wife’s Compact!
By now Betty knew what to expect from Gus personally; which is to say, she seldom saw him. In one 365-day period he had been with her a total of sixty days. About six months before, Betty had had to go into the hospital near Langley for exploratory surgery. There was a good chance that she would require a hysterectomy.
Betty had a real siege in the hospital. She was there for twenty-one days. She was there for so long she had to get some of her relatives to fly in from Indiana to look after the boys. Gus managed to make it to see her in the hospital exactly once and he didn’t quite make it through the entire visiting hour. He got a call right there in the hospital asking him to return to the base, and he left.
Betty seldom speculated, even to herself, on what Gus did during the 80 percent of the year that he was not with her. She had worked that out in her mind. The compact took care of it. If Gus was occasionally the Complete Fighter Jock Away from Home, that did not violate the compact … And now it was time for the other part of the compact to take effect. It was her time to be the Honorable Mrs. Captain Second American in Space. They owed her every bit of it.
Louise Shepard, over in Virginia Beach, hadn’t known what was going to happen when Al went up, and so her place was invaded by reporters and sightseers. They practically tore the yard to pieces just by milling around and tramping through the shrubbery to press their noses up against the window. Gus was not having any of that. Gus saw to it that the local police were out patrolling in front of the house early in the morning, before dawn. Betty was inside the house in front of the TV set with Rene Carpenter, Jo Schirra, Marge Slayton, the children. Outside slavered the Animal. There were a lot of reporters on the sidewalk and back in the driveway of the house next door, but the palace guard kept them all under control. Betty actually felt pretty good. It was the Danger Wake business again. She was the hostess and star of the drama. She almost missed the final countdown. She was in the kitchen turning off the flame under some soft-boiled eggs for somebody.
After the flight all sorts of neighbors and NASA people at Langley came rushing in, congratulating her and bringing more food and making a fuss over her. But Betty knew enough about flight tests to know that the loss of the capsule could have some grim results. A call came in from Gus on Grand Bahama Island. There were a lot of people still in the house, but she had to ask the question, anyway.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, did you …”
“I did not do anything wrong,” he said very slowly. You could almost see the black gus gruff look over the telephone. “That hatch just blew.”
“I’m glad.”
She started telling him about all the people who were telephoning congratulations.
“That’s good,” said Gus. “Say, by the way, the motel lost two pairs of my slacks in the laundry, and I need shirts. Will you bring me some when you come down to the Cape?”
The laundry? He wanted her to remember to bring the laundry.
Betty and the boys arrived at the Cape on one of those blinding hot July days that made all of Cocoa Beach feel like a fried concrete parking lot. They were led out to a runway at Patrick Air Force Base along with a lot of NASA and military dignitaries to meet Gus’s plane as it came in from Grand Bahama Island. There was a big canopy set up nearby. Under the canopy there would be a press conference. Betty stood out there on the slab with James Webb and some other NASA brass, and she slowly began to realize that … they were reneging!
This was going to be it!—a reception out on this brain-frying slab! There was going to be no trip to the White House. Webb—not John Kennedy—was going to give Gus the
Distinguished Service Medal … under a dreadful Low Rent tent here on the slab. There was going to be no parade in Washington, no ticker-tape parade in New York—not even a parade in Mitchell, Indiana. That … Betty would have loved. To come back to Mitchell and parade down Main Street … But Gus would be getting nothing, just a medal from James E. Webb. They couldn’t do this to her!—they were reneging.
But they did, and it was even worse than she feared. The plane comes in, taxis up to the ramp, a big cheer goes up, Gus steps out—and some NASA functionaries take her and the children by the elbows and thrust them forward at Gus like religious objects … Behold, the Wife, the Children … and Gus can hardly even look at Betty as someone he knows. She’s merely the ceremonial Solid Backing on the Home Front trundled forward on the concrete slab. Gus mutters hello, hugs the two boys, and they trundle the Wife and the Children back, and then Gus is marched over to the canopy, where they have the press conference. The reporters keep harping on the blown hatch and the lost capsule. The dismal bastards—they haven’t gotten the message yet. They haven’t picked up the proper moral tone. But being part of the great colonial animal, the Victorian Gent, they would get it all straight in a few days and never mention the damnable hatch again … But for now they gave the event another shot of the poisonous secret … Was that what was responsible for this wretched, shabby, mean little ceremony? Gus struggled with the questions and sweated under the canopy. He kept saying, “I was just lying there minding my own business when the hatch blew. It just blew.” Betty could see he was getting angrier and angrier, gruffer and grimmer and darker about the eyes. He hated talking to reporters, as it was. Her heart went out. They were making him squirm. And this was the Big Parade! This was what she got out of the compact after all this! It was a travesty. She was … the Honorable Mrs. Squirming Hatch Blower!
