COLUMN: America's astronaut heroes

From Andrew Exum's, "Perilous Orthodoxy," Fall '98 From Andrew Exum's, "Perilous Orthodoxy," Fall '98This summer, I was sitting in my dad's office talking and flipping through magazines. Alan Shepard, the first American in space, had just died and we were reading the obituaries written for him. "Alan Shepard's no hero," my dad said. "Some guy who dies fighting for his country is a hero. Someone who rescues a child in a fire's a hero. Riding into space on top of a guided rocket doesn't make you a 'hero.'" In my dad's opinion, what Shepard did was impressive, but it didn't warrant the type of acclaim we give to men like Sergeant York or firefighters. He reasoned that what Shepard did didn't require any great feat of skill or self-sacrifice. All it required was the willingness to sit on a giant firecracker and be launched skyward. Heck, Shepard didn't even fly the thing. All he did was sit in it. In the end, my dad, a newspaper columnist, got so worked up over the obituaries he read in Time and Newsweek that he decided to write an article on the subject. But rather than see my father the subject of angry letters to the editor, I instead told him my opinion on Shepard. For the previous four weeks, I had been cloistered away at Fort Benning in the middle of Nowhere, Ga., with little else to do than shine my boots and read books in my ample free time. By the time I left, I had two pairs of immaculate black boots and six books I had just read. One of those books was The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, which I hadn't read before. In it, Wolfe chronicles the development of the Mercury Space Program and the early days of NASA. He does this by examining the men who first made the journeys into space, men he describes as "single combat warriors." The notion of single combat is an old one, predating much of our recorded history. In single combat, two armies would choose their greatest warrior or a team of warriors, and those warriors would fight, often in place of the entire armies fighting. David versus Goliath comes to mind, as does Hektor versus Achilles. As Christianity spread, single combat came to be thought of as a humanitarian alternative to two full armies slaughtering each other. This is the perspective that Wolfe viewed the Mercury astronauts -- against the backdrop of the Cold War, only instead of David versus Goliath, we had Yuri Gagarin versus Gus Grissom. In this sense, Shepard was very much an American hero. An entire society placed all of their hopes on his shoulders when he made that first foray into space. When he returned, a grateful nation returned their gratitude by way of celebrations not seen since the end of World War Two. As NASA advanced, and as the Russians one-upped the United States every step of the way toward President Kennedy's stated goal of sending a man to the moon within 10 years, the role of the Mercury astronauts as single combat warriors grew. Despite the pressure put upon them, the life of these warriors wasn't too bad. As Wolfe writes of their ancient counterparts, "They were revered and extolled, songs and poems were written about them, every reasonable comfort and honor was given to them, and women and children and even grown men were moved to tears in their presence." This isn't too different from the experiences of the Mercury astronauts. At the press conference where NASA announced the original seven, the assembled press rose and cheered for the brave men who held in their hands the hopes of the country. James Reston of The New York Times wrote that, "This is a pretty cynical town, but nobody went away from these young men scoffing at their courage and idealism." No astronaut captivated the press and public like the young Marine aviator John Glenn. He spoke with a candor and charm that filled the hearts of everyone he spoke to with pride in not only him, but the country as well. Eventually, it was Glenn's first trip into space that would turn the tide in the Great Space Race with the Soviet Union. By the end of my talk with Dad, he had changed his opinion on Shepard and the rest of the Mercury Seven. Although he reads upwards of eight newspapers and three magazines a day, he doesn't get the chance to read many book and hadn't gotten around to The Right Stuff. Still, by the end of the summer we came to agree that Shepard really was a hero and that legendary test pilot and aerospace pioneer Chuck Yeager is tied with Steve McQueen for the title of Coolest Man of the Century. As for Glenn, his second mission into space takes off this Thursday. He's a little older now and a bit slower at the controls, but once again he hold the hopes of a nation firmly in his grasp. Godspeed, John Glenn.