The Last Man on the Moon Read online

  Flying on Zeke’s wing was easy, for he was one of the smoothest pilots ever coined. No sharp jerks, no funny twitches, slick as glass, and by staying locked to his wing, I never knew if I was upside down or rightside up. Coming out of a loop, if he had flown into the water, we would all have flown into the water, still in perfect formation. He could have put us through the eye of a needle, and at times he did, trailing colored smoke and making people wonder if we were really that good or only insane.

  ON MY TWENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY, I got up early and attacked Hawaii. The Shang was participating in an Operational Readiness Exercise that pictured an invasion of our fiftieth state, and four of us Stingers were rousted from our tiny cabins at three-thirty A.M. and briefed for a six A.M. flight. It was chilly and bouncy when I catted off into total blackness, unable to see the distant horizon. As dawn broke crystal clear, I dropped my dummy bombs on a small, uninhabited island that was the designated target, and with plenty of fuel left, flew over the lush green islands on my way home, an aerial tourist in a million-dollar trolley, looking at the pristine beaches and turquoise water. I got a lump in my throat as I swept past Ford Island and the old Battleship Row, which bore the brunt of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Only a third of the Utah stood above the water, and we could see the eternal oil slick seeping from the doomed Arizona, which went down with some 2,000 sailors aboard. This was history that had been made in my lifetime, a reminder of the horrors of real war.

  SOME INTERESTING THINGS WERE happening out in space, and finally they were significant enough to register on my personal radar scope. In September, 1959, the Soviets launched Luna 2, an 860-pound projectile that hit the Moon so hard it dug a crater ninety feet wide. Crude but effective, it was the first object built by man to actually impact the lunar surface. The following month, they guided Luna 3 into orbit around the Moon to photograph the far, unknown side. We had been surprised again, for these were not little Sputnik basketballs, but some pretty sophisticated machinery that was probing the universe around us, and it had Russian writing all over it.

  The United States balanced that with the introduction on April 2, 1959, of a group of seven American pilots called the Mercury Astronauts—Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton. Every military pilot in America wished his name was on that little list of four naval aviators (one of them a Marine) and three Air Force pilots. These were the guys who would take us into space.

  I was fascinated by their assignment. How did one get to be an astronaut? For that matter, just what the hell was an astronaut? According to the papers, an applicant had to be a graduate of test pilot school, have two years of experience as a test pilot in at least twenty major types of aircraft, own at least 1,500 hours of jet time, be not over forty years of age as of 31 December 1959, stand not more than five feet, eleven inches tall, weigh no more than 177 pounds and hold a bachelor’s degree in engineering or the equivalent.

  Out of the many requirements, I met only two—I wasn’t yet forty years old and I held the right kind of degree. Not the cloth from which astronauts were being cut. The Original Seven were all veteran test pilots, qualified far beyond my own modest accomplishments at that time. I was interested, but thought that by the time I earned those kind of credentials, the pioneering in space would be over. I had joined the Navy to fly, and the idea of riding a rocket ship into space had instant appeal. A new dream formed inside my crew-cut head.

  THE SHANGRI-LA RETURNED TO San Diego on the second day of October, 1959, and tied up at North Island while the air group flew into Miramar. My squadron was about to change boats. The Shang was transferred to the East Coast and our air group went to the USS Hancock, known to sailors as the Hanna-Maru. But first there would be some most welcome shore leave to push away the military stress for a while, and I chose to go back home for Christmas.

  I was in the ticket line at the Los Angeles International Airport, just behind a gorgeous, blond young woman dressed in the powder blue uniform and red beanie of a Continental Airlines stewardess. Damn, she’s good-looking, I thought, squaring my shoulders and straightening my uniform. But before I could even tell her about how I was invincible, invisible, and bulletproof, she received her tickets and, without a glance, left me standing there, heading for Chicago, away from her. Luckily, I had overheard her mention to the clerk that she was picking up tickets for a girlfriend and herself, and she spelled her last name A-T-C-H-L-E-Y. I asked the stewardess on my own Continental flight if she knew a stewardess named Miss Atchley. She did, and I learned my mystery girl’s first name was Barbara.

  Now I had a mission that had nothing to do with the Navy. I telephoned Continental, but the airline refused to divulge any information about their employee. Two weeks later, I was in Pasadena to visit my old Purdue roomie, Bill Smith, and his classy, auburn-haired wife, Lucy. “Smitty,” I declared when he answered the door. “I’m in love!” He rolled his eyes because he had heard me say that so many times before. “Yeah. Sure you are,” he replied. “Come on in.”

  I sat on the couch and to Lucy’s amazement, described my search for the lovely Barbara Atchley. Bill got tired of listening and took me downstairs to examine his 1955 Thunderbird, which had been in an accident. As we talked about cars, Lucy suddenly threw open a window and called out, “Geno. Geno. I’ve got Barbara on the line!” I stared at Smitty, who stared back at me and we both turned to stare up at a beaming Lucy. She had telephoned Continental and told a monstrously effective lie, a sad tale about a long lost friend from back home and how Barbara needed to be contacted immediately. Continental called a puzzled Barbara, who called Lucy, who explained the ruse and persuaded her to talk to me.

  I chugged a beer for bravery and dashed upstairs, not knowing what I was going to say, and when Lucy gave me the telephone, I was as nervous as if I were trying to land on a carrier during a storm. My words stumbled out in rush, but she didn’t hang up, and eventually agreed to meet me. “What a snow job,” Lucy said, grinning.

  Barbara recalls that when I gunned my convertible up the sloping driveway at her house in Redondo Beach, late for our first date, my mufflers rumbled and she thought, “Oh, God, he’s a hot-rodder.”

  One look at this gorgeous Texas blonde and I knew it was time for me to do some growing up. Her mother, Jackie Mae Atchley, was there, as was her younger brother, and it felt as if I had stepped right into a new family. At our first dinner together, accompanied by Lucy and Smitty, Barbara had the first martini she had ever tasted and told me her background. She was born in Corpus Christi, moved at the age of two months to Baytown, near Houston, where she graduated from Robert E. Lee High School and worked as a secretary until she became a stewardess for Continental in June of 1959 and moved to California. One of her main runs for Continental was to Chicago, which led to me to describe my family and life. It would not be too long before Barbara would use one of those flights to meet my family, and my parents instantly fell in love with her. “Son,” my astute Dad observed, “That woman is built like a brick shit-house.”

  My roommate, Fred Baldwin, began dating Barbara’s roomie, who was also named Jackie, and the four of us soon burned up the 120 highway miles between San Diego and Redondo Beach almost every weekend. Baldy and his Jackie were secretly married in 1960, violating the airline’s rule requiring a stewardess to remain single. When Continental discovered the situation, she was fired, and a stern supervisor demanded to know if Barbara, too, was married. No, she firmly replied. Not yet.

  BY THE TIME THE Hanna-Maru left for a WestPac tour on June 9, 1960, Barbara and I were very seriously in love. But the job intervened, as it does with all Navy families, and I went to sea for the better part of a year, wearing the railroad tracks of a newly minted lieutenant, confident at the controls of my aircraft, and able to razz the new nuggets in the wardroom.

  Zeke had left for another assignment, so the remaining Stingers drafted another flight leader and continued barnstorming across
Asia when we weren’t flying missions. The precision work had a separate and deadly serious purpose, which was to refine our techniques to better do our true jobs in case we came up to the deck one morning and found our Scooters standing there on their stilt-like wheels with the red-shirted ordnance loaders hanging big nukes on the belly racks. Sometimes, as part of a readiness exercise, we would actually carry that big silver bomb—without the igniter—because Those Who Knew wanted our minds to be comfortable with the bomb in case we had to do it for real.

  The nukes were so heavy that they were the only bomb the A-4 could carry on those days. Bearing a full load of fuel in addition to the bomb, I needed a maximum velocity catapult shot to help me stagger off the deck. With one of those bombs hooked to my plane, the price of poker became very high indeed, for the A-4 was a finely designed little aircraft built for the purpose of delivering a terrifying weapon to a target. It would probably be a one-way trip for a pilot like myself, who would be aiming the sharp point of a nonreturnable nuclear spear.

  Such thoughts weighed heavily on me one day when I was on shore leave in Japan, visiting both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only two cities ever hit with atomic weapons. The serene parks were quiet, and monuments to the attacks were draped with colorful chains of paper cranes, considered a sacred bird by the Japanese, folded by schoolchildren who clustered about me, chirping greetings, not knowing who I was, since I was in civilian clothes. Looking out over the rebuilt cities, over herds of happy kids, I considered the enormity of the responsibility that I held, and of what my government was asking me to be ready to do.

  Catastrophe seemed awfully close in those days, and we weren’t flying those exercises just for the hell of it. The month we deployed, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union and its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured. Aggressive as ever, Khruschev used the incident to humiliate President Eisenhower at a Paris summit, a disarmament conference folded in Geneva, and the hot border between East and West Berlin crackled with new incidents.

  I left Nagasaki and Hiroshima disturbed by the magnitude of the destruction, thinking about what it must have been like in those two cities fifteen years earlier. However, I departed determined, more than ever, that I didn’t want that sort of thing to ever happen to New York, Chicago, Bellwood or any other American city. That was why I was part of the massive retaliation strategy that declared any nuclear attack on the United States would be answered with equal, probably superior, force. There was no question in my soul that if the ultimate war came while I was aboard that carrier, I would fly my mission.

  Somebody had to drop the Big Bomb, and that somebody was me.

  BARBARA WROTE ME EVERY day, just as I always had a packet to dispatch to her. I would pour my feelings into tape recordings that went out through the mail. When she returned such tapes, her voice soothed me and I counted the days until the cruise was over. My parents were worried that she was not Catholic, but Barbara agreed to convert.

  Religion had taken a curious twist in November of 1960 while I was still at sea. A young senator from Boston, John F. Kennedy, used the new power of television debates to narrowly defeat Richard Nixon and become the first Roman Catholic ever to be president of the United States.

  And out on the new High Frontier, as we called space, the Russians increased their menagerie, putting two dogs and six rats into orbit aboard Sputnik 5. The U.S. launched the first successful weather satellite and the first camera-equipped spy satellite. Such technological marvels were stunning.

  Grandpa Cernan, living alone since the death of Grandma, fell to the ground while patching the farmhouse roof and died, at the age of seventy-five, still without electricity in his home.

  As my second WestPac tour ended in March, 1961, I was ready for some peace and stability, ready to let someone else live on the edge of the nuclear razor for a while. I was ready to ask Miss Barbara Atchley to be my wife.

  6

  Two Commander Shepards

  THE BRIDE AND GROOM both wore white on that bright Saturday afternoon of May 6, 1961, when Barbara and I were married in the tiny chapel at Miramar, she in a flowing veil and gown, and me in my dress uniform with buttons of brass and wings of gold. As we walked from the chapel, beneath an arch of swords held aloft by my Navy buddies, she kept a close eye on Baldy, who had threatened to goose her with his gleaming blade.

  The day before the wedding, at Cape Canaveral in Florida, a square-jawed, crew-cut naval aviator named Alan B. Shepard, jammed into an incredibly tiny Mercury spacecraft, waited through a stop-and-go countdown, waited so long that he wet his pants, then finally blasted off for a sixteen-minute suborbital flight.

  On the last day of January, NASA had sent a chimpanzee named Ham on a suborbital ride, but only a couple of months later, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, strapped into a cannonball-shaped spaceship called the Vostok 1, blasted off from Earth and became the first man in space, flying a single orbit during a flight of 108 minutes. That was Sputnik all over again.

  A week after Gagarin’s historic flight, a CIA-sponsored plot misfired and an ill-prepared force of Cuban exiles, expecting U.S. support, landed at Fidel Castro’s favorite fishing spot, a place called the Bay of Pigs, and were slaughtered. Two weeks after that, civil rights activists started riding buses into the South to protest racial discrimination in America and were met by an astonishing amount of violence. Turmoil surrounded us. Then came the flight of Alan Shepard and the dreary headlines changed overnight. Now we had an astronaut who had flown, too, and everything else seemed to dim in the glow of Shepard’s success. Big Al made Americans feel good about themselves, and the future, again.

  While trying to keep my mind on the thousand things that needed to be done before the wedding, I had stayed glued to the television set, mentally putting myself inside that little Mercury capsule and imagining the wild, thundering ride of Alan Shepard. If someone had tapped me on the shoulder at that moment and told me that the next time Alan flew in space, his backup would be a veteran astronaut named Gene Cernan, who had two flights of his own under his belt and had gone to the Moon, I would have laughed out loud. I am proud that this genuine hero became a lifelong friend.

  AFTER OUR WEDDING AND a reception at the Admiral Kidd Officers’ Club, Barbara and I honeymooned in Mexico, taking wild, puddle-jumper flights from Tijuana to Mexico City to save a few bucks, then spending the difference on bottles of tequila. On reaching the hotel, we discovered that our room had two single beds, and that just wouldn’t do. I called the front desk immediately, and moments later a bellboy showed up and, with a big smile, shoved the two small beds together. One bed, he said, with a polite bow and a sweep of his hand.

  Then there was the frightening bus ride along twisting, narrow roads into Acapulco. We sat in the front seat, away from the live chickens carried by passengers in the back, and watched in horror as the driver waved and flirted with every woman he passed along the way while seeming to take aim at livestock, people, and vehicles that shared the narrow road through a mountain pass. Somehow, we survived our honeymoon.

  Back in California, we made our home in half of a rented duplex cottage in Del Mar, which Barbara described as a little dollhouse. It was right on the cliffs, and had a spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean, so each evening, golden sunsets streamed right into our living room. The owner, Clara Cook, who lived in the other half, took us beneath her wing and became a kind of surrogate grandmother.

  Not long after we returned, President Kennedy made a nationally televised address that challenged the entire nation and shook pilots like me right down to our flight boots. Within three weeks after Shepard flew for sixteen minutes, JFK declared the time had come for America “to take longer strides” in space.

  “I believe this nation should commit itself to the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth,” Kennedy told America. “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade… not because this will be easy, but because it will b
e hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills—because the challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.” Pretty brave words, since we had very little manned space experience. His statement did not use the word science, a fact that would assume great importance later in my career. One thing was certain—that pledge by JFK changed my life.

  I NEEDED TO MAKE a major career decision. My five-year commitment was almost up, and there was a chance that I might leave the Navy entirely. At his inauguration, Kennedy had made his stirring call, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Well, I had already done a bunch for my country and was willing to do more, but the question was, “Do what and for how long?”

  Then the Navy came through with a terrific offer. I could attend the Naval Post Graduate School at Monterey, California, and earn a master’s degree in a two-year program, with an option for a third year at a major university. And still fly Navy jets! Not the high performance operational aircraft that had spoiled me as a hot pilot, but still, jets is jets and I could make the minimal eight hours a month to maintain my flight pay.

  They wanted a two-year commitment for every year of school, which would keep me in for another six years. With the five I already had logged, that would give me at least eleven years and I would be well along the track to becoming a career Naval officer. I always believed in setting goals that I could reach, challenging but reasonable five-year plans, and this was right in the ballpark. After getting an advanced degree in aeronautical engineering at Monterey, I would have a good shot at an assignment to the Navy’s test pilot school at Patuxent River in Maryland. After that, I could return to the fleet and be in line for a squadron command of my own.