The Last Man on the Moon Read online

  In the class two years behind me was a sixteen-year-old giant who dominated the football field and could throw a pass sixty yards on the fly. Ray Nitzchke would earn football fame as a linebacker with the Green Bay Packers. And a few years ahead of me, one of Dee’s classmates was a pretty girl named Carol Laria, who would become the talented singer and actress known as Carol Lawrence.

  The Korean War started as I became a high school senior, and had an immediate impact. Dee, who had just earned her teacher’s degree, married Jim Riley, a close friend who grew up only two doors down from us in Bellwood, and Jim soon shipped out to Korea. Dee moved back into our room for the duration.

  The idea that I might become a foot soldier in Korea hardly entered my mind because I had other plans. I wasn’t going to dodge Korea, but if I went, it would be as a naval aviator. To carve a route to flying and to respond to my father’s demand that I pursue higher education, I applied at the start of my senior year in high school for a Naval ROTC scholarship.

  I passed with a high score and signed up for the NROTC program at Purdue University, a full-ride scholarship plus spending money, three summer cruises and graduation in four years as an ensign in the regular Navy. The Navy, however, said the Purdue slots had already been filled, and offered me the same deal at the University of Illinois. My father wouldn’t hear of it because he felt Illinois wasn’t a top engineering school.

  The Navy then offered a partial scholarship at Purdue, a program with a pittance of financial help and a commission in the naval reserve. I didn’t want it, because I knew my entire family would have to work hard to pay for me to attend Purdue as an out-of-state student. But at Dad’s insistence, I reluctantly agreed, knowing that not only would I get a degree, but I could still get a commission in the Navy, albeit in the reserves, and maybe somehow could spin that into my dream of flying.

  In June of 1952, I graduated from Proviso High ranked fourteenth in a class of 762. Without studying much, I managed to win bronze, silver, and gold scholarship awards and membership in the National Honor Society. I was off to Purdue, which would be the doorway to my dream of flying airplanes from the decks of carriers, although I had never laid eyes on an aircraft carrier, nor had I ever been in a plane.

  4

  Wings of Gold

  AMERICA WAS BECOMING A nation on wheels, and I was part of that mechanical revolution. I sold my Model A, inherited the old Chevrolet, and headed for Purdue, in West Lafayette, Indiana, 150 miles down U.S. Highway 52. I took to university life, and my first real taste of personal responsibility, like a fish to water.

  Money was tight and I felt an obligation to my family to help pay for my education. I lived in a dormitory during my freshman year with an old football buddy, and for the first time was not sharing a room with my sister. To offset the costs, I worked in the dining hall and won a small academic scholarship, for the NROTC payments would not begin until I was a junior.

  In my second semester, I pledged the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, and the “Fijis” provided structure and a sense of community, giving me a center, a home. I moved into the Fiji house in my sophomore year and my roomie was Bill Smith, a sandy-haired guy who had played football for Proviso rival New Trier High School. There were seven men for each woman on campus, because girls weren’t attracted to Purdue’s primary fields of engineering and agriculture. But being a fraternity man gave me an edge: Smitty says I fell in love so often that he would just ignore me when I returned from a date, enchanted with the latest lady in my life.

  I went out for basketball and baseball, but quickly learned I wasn’t good enough for Big Ten varsity competition, no matter how hard I tried. But I could play intramural sports, and that schedule was almost as difficult, since the players included former high school all-state athletes and borderline varsity jocks. On the Fiji and NROTC teams, we would frequently play not only other Purdue squads, but baseball and basketball teams from similar programs in other universities.

  Many Purdue students were older guys who had seen combat in Korea and were back in school on the GI Bill. One of Smitty’s best friends from New Trier was Jan Sharon, who happened to be the girlfriend of one such former serviceman. This fellow was a year ahead of our class, and so modest that you would never know he had flown seventy-eight missions in Panther jets off the aircraft carrier Essex and won three air medals. His name was Neil Armstrong.

  Years later, when Neil was a top test pilot for the experimental X-15 rocket plane at Edwards Air Force Base, Smitty dropped by for a visit and soon found himself beneath the house with the quiet aviator, wrapping pipes with insulation tape. Smitty, by then an aeronautical engineer, was naturally curious about the plane, which was the hottest thing in American skies, and asked, “So, Neil, you’re flying the X-15 now?” Neil kept wrapping the pipes and said, “Yup.” End of conversation. Neil was not one to worry about impressing people with mere words, content to let his work speak for him. In fact, he was so quiet that when he made his historic first step onto the Moon and said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” those of us who knew him were not surprised that he had come up with such a memorable phrase. The real surprise was that he said anything at all.

  Purdue eventually would be able to list among its alumni both the first and the last men to walk on the Moon. Neil graduated in 1955; I finished in 1956; in the Class of’57 was the affable Roger Chaffee; ahead of us all, in the Class of 1950, was Gus Grissom, and one year ahead of Gus was Iven Kincheloe, the test pilot who set a world altitude record of 126,000 feet with the experimental Bell X-2. In coming years, many other pilots and engineers would discover that a main pipeline into the space program ran through West Lafayette. Obviously, the school’s engineering education was pretty good.

  The early semesters at Purdue were only slightly tougher academically than high school for me, and I breezed through them, keeping my grades high in the demanding electrical engineering major. While I Love Lucy was capturing the hearts of the growing American television audience, I missed out on her comedy because the Fijis stressed academic excellence and the brothers voted not to allow a television set in the house for fear that it might distract from our studies.

  I thought I had it made, until I had a real wake-up call one day in a theoretical circuits course. I suddenly realized that the work before me seemed strangely difficult, as if written in gibberish. I blinked. I didn’t understand it! My God, could I get a C in this class? Even a D? For someone who had always gotten good grades easily, it was a moment of reckoning, and I had to recognize that I was definitely in a new world. If I get a D, is it possible to fail? That certainly was not an option, not when my parents were working so hard to send me to school, not when a failure would disappoint my dad and also end my dream of flying. I realized that it was time to get down to business, and learn how to learn.

  TODAY, WE LOOK BACK on the Eisenhower years as a pleasant time, for we saw Ike’s famous grin as a beacon of better times. But there were dark aspects as well. The French were decimated in a sweltering valley called Dien Bien Phu in French Indochina, which we would come to know as Vietnam. At home, the Communist menace seemed to bloom around us, our fears amplified by the rabid campaign of Senator Joe McCarthy.

  Far out in the Pacific Ocean, American experts assembled a sixty-five-ton device with the benign name of Mike in the Eniwetok atoll, and at dawn on November 1, 1952, Mike, the first hydrogen bomb, exploded, and a fireball four miles across blazed like a sun while a monstrous mushroom cloud rose twenty-five miles above where an island used to be. Before long, the Soviet Union announced it also had a hydrogen bomb. The world had been violently ushered into the thermonuclear age. I had no idea that in only a few years, I would be flying a plane that carried a weapon of similar destructive force.

  If the time following the Great Depression had been my cradle, then the Cold War became the crucible in which my military career was forged. At the time, however, global events seemed so far away that they weren’t a pa
rt of my life, even when I would don my midshipman’s NROTC uniform and put in long hours studying naval science and history. But lying on my bed in the Fiji house at 640 Russell Street about two o’clock on some mornings, I would hear the ominous drone of B-36 bombers from the Strategic Air Command lumbering through the night sky. We figured they carried the Big Bombs, but although the thought didn’t change my life, the real world was tapping at my door, for Midshipman Cernan wanted to be a naval aviator.

  In my junior year, the Navy finally started paying the promised scholarship money, the princely sum of twenty-seven dollars a month, and some help with the cost of books. At the end of my junior year, I was nominated to be president of the Fiji house. The seniors were still allowed to vote, and a couple of the guys didn’t want a Catholic to lead Phi Gamma Delta at Purdue. It was the first time that discrimination had affected me, but it rolled off my back, and although I lost, the brother chosen to be president dropped out of school and I ran the fraternity anyway.

  Then I got the same sort of treatment, minus the religious bigotry, when my grades and service record put me in line to become commanding officer of Purdue’s NROTC unit. Because I wasn’t in the regular Navy program, and ticketed only for a reserve commission, I had to settle for being executive officer in my senior year. That set me to wondering about whether I had a realistic chance for flight school.

  Of course, such discrimination was hardly in the same league as that being addressed that year by the U.S. Supreme Court in its mighty decision to end segregation in public schools, but for the first time in my life, I felt discriminated against. It just made me more determined than ever.

  LIKE THE OTHER RESERVE midshipmen, I was required to make a cruise during the summer of my junior year. I took a train to Norfolk, Virginia, and found the cruiser USS Roanoke waiting like a gray giant, with guns as big as telephone poles. I saluted the flag on the fantail, then the Officer of the Deck, requested permission to come aboard, and for the first time felt a solid steel deck beneath my feet. I soon realized that as huge as the ship seemed, something was missing. The Roanoke had no planes! The cruiser might be my home for a while, but it was not My Navy.

  I was sick as a dog during the first few days at sea. I never realized that on the ocean, something as big as the Roanoke could bob like a cork. Try going to sleep with your stomach churning in a swinging hammock with only four inches between your nose and the bulging body of a guy equally seasick in a hammock right above you. Most of us midshipmen spent the first few days at sea barfing over the side of that mighty warship, to the amusement of the experienced chief petty officers who became our friends and mentors.

  As we maneuvered around the Caribbean, we visited Puerto Rico and took shore leave in Havana in 1955. The Cubans were not exactly friendly, since an American sailor had recently urinated on a statue of their leader, the dictator Fulgencio Batista, amid the bright lights of the gambling casinos. In the distant mountains, Fidel Castro was brewing revolution.

  While I went about the routine midshipman’s duties of learning what made a ship like the Roanoke tick, my eyes constantly drifted up to watch real Navy pilots landing real Navy planes on a real Navy carrier that was steaming nearby. Not long now, I thought. I figured it was high time for me to go up in an airplane.

  AFTER TAKING A TRAIN to Chicago for some vacation time when the cruise ended, my dad bought me a fourteen-dollar ticket back to Purdue aboard a chunky DC-3 of Lake Central Airlines. My first flight sure was not the thrill I had anticipated: I sat in a cramped seat, just another passenger along for a routine ride aboard a plane that was considered old even at that time. Then a fraternity brother took me up in a little Cessna 152, and as soon as the engine revved and the wheels lifted off, I knew I had made the right choice for a career. Now I could look out of the small window at passing wisps of clouds, could see the spinning propeller pull me along and hear its strong, sweet murmur as the wings flexed overhead. When my friend let me get my hands on the controls, it was as if I became part of the aircraft. Ordinary people might be pinned to that distant grass, but the skies were going to be mine.

  By my senior year, a sense of rebelliousness was creeping into the culture. In Montgomery, Alabama, blacks led by a young minister named Martin Luther King were boycotting the public bus system. Elsewhere in university America, a group of “beats” were growing beards, reading poetry, and generally acting pretty strange. Hairline cracks were appearing in the firm base of the Ike years, but did not really have an impact on my life. I had worked too hard and was too close to my personal goals now to drift off in some other direction.

  As classes wound down, I received job offers with tempting salaries, for a good Purdue engineer could pull down about $380 a month. That was fine if you wanted to be an engineer, but my Navy dream was alive and well.

  With a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a 5.1 grade point average on a 6.0 scale, I graduated from Purdue on June 6, 1956, and was commissioned as an ensign in the United States Navy (Reserve). Two weeks later, I reported to Pensacola, Florida, for duty aboard CV-48, the USS Saipan, a boxy old carrier the Navy retired from fleet duty and reassigned for use in training. To my eyes, that antique flattop sparkled. I owed the Navy three years of service—my mandatory two-year obligation, and an extra one tacked on for signing up for flight training.

  I became part of the Saipan’s crew for the next eighteen weeks, until I could start pre-flight school in October. Meanwhile, after learning that pilots aboard the Saipan who were assigned to nonflying duties, such as operations or maintenance, had to have at least eight hours a month to qualify for flight pay, I cadged rides in their backseats as often as I could. A bonus came my way during those weeks when some of these career officers encouraged me to apply for the regular navy, which I did, and was accepted. That dropped the “Reserve” notation and I no longer seemed like a short-timer. It felt good to write USN behind my name, but a long naval career didn’t seem likely, for only graduates of the Naval Academy at Annapolis were destined for an admiral’s flag in those days.

  I served as just another ship’s officer and when the Saipan would put out into the Gulf of Mexico, I spent hours on deck watching student pilots try to land, not all of them doing it well. That was me up in those cockpits. Those guys were doing what I would hopefully be doing in about another year, driving a prop-driven T-28 down to the deck and snagging a Saipan wire with a tailhook. That year loomed like an eternity, and time moved as slowly for me as for a kid waiting for Christmas.

  While I was still taking instruction in ground school, Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev scorned America with his infamous “We will bury you” promise. I was a military officer now, and his challenge seemed personal. I looked in the mirror and saw a slim, crew-cut young aviator-to-be, complete with flight suit, the patch of my training squadron stitched on my sleeve, and carrying a bad-ass attitude. I was ready to jump in my jet and go show Khruschev a thing or two. There was a slight problem, however, for I didn’t yet know how to fly.

  Once it began in January, 1957, flying was very easy for me. My dad had taught me about engines, Purdue had taught me how to learn, sports taught me how to compete, and pre-flight taught me about aircraft. I thoroughly understood the machines that were taking me off the ground. Without realizing it, I was finally putting my engineering education to work. I now understood how planes flew, how they sounded under various conditions, and was aware enough to let the systems talk to me. For some of the student pilots, flying was equivalent to working in a sweatshop, as if they were at war with the plane. Some would wash out of the program and the marginal skills of a few others eventually got them killed. Getting ready for a mission one day, I watched in fascinated horror as one trainee bellyflopped onto the runway and his plane exploded. The pilot died because he forgot to lower his wheels before landing.

  For me, flying just felt natural. Less than a month after I began in January 1957, after a grand total of eleven hours of training, I looked around the
cockpit and realized there was no instructor in the backseat of my little T-34’single-engine plane. It was time for me to solo, to take her up by myself, to be in total control. I took off with a big grin, just wanting to get lost in the sky. It’s a euphoric feeling that everyone should experience.

  When we had logged thirty hours, the Navy split up the students, and sent those of us who qualified for single-engine training to Whiting Field to fly the T-28, a high-powered 1,425-horsepower plane. We moved forward inch by aerial inch during the next six months at Whiting, learning the intricacies of flying—formation, gunnery, and cross-country navigation, much of it at night. This was the first time that we had a real taste of the risks involved in military aviation, for there was the occasional crash, a midair collision, or some student just might not return from a night flight. Guys who had become friends died, and you felt they or their machines must have somehow screwed up. That’s not going to happen to me.

  After some 100 hours of cockpit time, I was transferred over to Baron Field to get ready for the carrier, and we learned to land a plane within the lines of a deck painted on a regular runway. That way, if a student went off the “deck,” he was still on dry land. Normally, after Baron Field and carrier qualification, I would be shipped off to Corpus Christi, Texas, for advanced training that eventually would lead to flying jets. This was what it was all about, the goal for which I had waited so long and trained so hard.

  Only a week before I was ready to go back aboard the Saipan, this time as a pilot, an unexpected opportunity fell into my lap. The admirals had gotten tired of spending a million dollars and eighteen months to train a naval aviator only to have him put in a mere year and a half of active duty before retiring to a cushy airline job. So a peculiar order came down from the Pentagon demanding a five-year commitment from anyone wanting to be a naval aviator. It was as if a paper scythe sliced through the corps of pilots. Aviators who were about to win their wings were suddenly faced with having to put in an extra two years, while others just starting to train could not even see the end of a five-year requirement. It was just too much of a commitment for some. The Navy later estimated that it lost almost half of its potential aviators.