Falling to Earth (6 page)

We didn’t dare do anything that violated our honor. It applied not only if we were caught cheating ourselves, but also if we knew that someone else cheated and we didn’t say anything. With integrity came trust. At night, as we went to sleep, the older students would come around, knock on every door, and say, “Alright, sir?” We would reply with the same phrase, confirming that we were in bed with the lights out. They wouldn’t come in to check: we were trusted. Liars, however, were in big trouble. The rules were simple and unforgiving.

I saw a graphic example of the academy’s discipline right after I arrived. I remember marching through the main part of the campus and noticing a whole bunch of guys standing along a porch in one of the residential buildings. They were dressed partly in uniforms and partly in civilian clothing, lounging around and not doing much of anything. At a highly regimented place like West Point, they looked extremely out of place. I soon found out they were waiting to leave; they were being expelled for violating the honor code. I was joining West Point right after a huge scandal had broken. More than eighty students were kicked out for cheating on academic tests. Most were connected to the academy’s football team, including the coach’s own son.

I remember being very impressed that these cadets, even though they were great football players and very valuable to the school for their playing skills, were forced to leave. There were no gray areas: you just could
not
cheat. In my opinion, it was a great code to live by. I thought about it a lot, a couple of decades later, when I was kicked out of the astronaut office and accused of breaking some unwritten honor and professional judgment codes within NASA.

On the other end of the honor scale, I learned, was the West Point graduating class of 1950. I started at West Point in the middle of the Korean War, and most of those young men had been sent to Korea a few short weeks after graduation. They were sent into combat with no time for the training that may have saved many of them, because the conflict escalated surprisingly fast. As a consequence, a high percentage of those students died in the war. I learned of two different tragedies: the honorable dead and wounded and the cheaters from the class that followed. It was a lot for a young kid like me to think about. I didn’t want to share the fate of either, but given the choice I think I would have chosen the honorable death.

After my first year, we were allowed to venture into New York City alone for a couple of weekends each semester. My love of cars had not faded, so when the restrictions eased in my senior year I bought a new car with borrowed and saved money. We cadets received a monthly allowance, and while some was spent on uniforms and snack food, I scraped together enough to buy a 1955 convertible Chevy. I’d take that car out on the weekends whenever I could. The only thing my parents had to pay for while I was at West Point was my first set of uniforms, which cost them around $300. Other than that expense, they were off the hook.

By my last year at West Point, life was pretty good. In fact, we lived like kings. We outranked everybody and probably got to be a little bit snobbish. We had started as the lowest of the low in our first year, then worked our way up through the ranks, and got to feeling pretty cocky about it—almost as if we were better than the majors and captains on the staff. Of course, when we left West Point, we found out very quickly that wasn’t the case. But in the meantime, for one golden glorious year as seniors, we enjoyed life at the top of the heap. I ended up militarily ranked number six in my class and made battalion commander, which meant I had three companies under me. I had many privileges and could pretty much come and go as I pleased, as long as my three companies were behaving. Officers who had formerly commanded me acted more like advisors now, and my life loosened up a great deal.

At home for Christmas, still half in uniform, with my brothers and father

I know I was considered for even higher positions because they made me the commander of a joint operation with the Naval Academy, even before my senior year. Yet my early resolve to keep my head down and stay out of trouble may have backfired on me. I didn’t make an impression on the key people. I did what I needed to do and tried to be helpful to guys who needed academic help. For example, I took one student who was failing in math under my wing, spent a lot of time with him, and he finally graduated. I guess that was more my way to do things: staying low-key and out of serious trouble.

Even though socializing wasn’t on the agenda much, fortunately my life was not too monastic—which in my late teens and early twenties would have been a cruel torture. There were no women cadets at West Point then, so other than a few secretaries and nurses we never saw females around. But the academy sponsored a dance every Saturday night, and girls would come in from Vassar and the other nearby schools. Rather than “dating” them, this was a formal event organized by the colleges. The moment the dance ended, our female guests disappeared on a bus, never to be glimpsed again. We never made any real personal connection with any of them. They were generally much richer than we were, and since they were from exclusive girls’ colleges, I always felt that they disdained us a little. Some of them could be cruel. I vividly remember a cadet who had an unusual name introduced to one of these girls. When she heard his name, she laughed so hard and so long that eventually he had to just walk away.

If I hadn’t been caught doing something inappropriate with a girl, I might have been given the prestigious job of commanding a regiment. It sounds quite shocking to write about the incident that way, so I had better explain. The story will give you an idea of how strict life was at West Point. During advanced infantry training in our second year, we were allowed free time on Saturday afternoon and on Sundays, so I invited a girl up to see me. We had dated a couple of times, but we weren’t serious; I am embarrassed to say I can’t even remember her name. We rowed a boat across a lake and joined a large group of people on the other side. At some point, I took her hand to help her along the shoreline where the footing was tricky. A tactical officer was sitting across the lake with a pair of binoculars, watching everybody, and spotted us holding hands. Horror of horrors! Such familiarity was a violation of academy rules, because it constituted a “public display of affection.” They did not fool around when it came to infractions of the rules. My punishment was eight hours of what they called “walking the area”—marching nonstop outside in full uniform, rifle on shoulder, whatever the weather. I would eventually hold hands again with a girl in public, but not for the rest of my time at West Point.

One student, a year ahead of me, was a star. His name was Dave Scott and he was a regimental commander. The perfect cadet, he was at the very top in his class, with great grades and the commanding presence of a born military leader. I don’t remember meeting him in those years, since different regiments did not socialize much, but I heard about him. We would meet again, a decade later, at NASA.

Despite the charms of guys like Dave Scott, I knew of one New York girl who had eyes only for me. It began, like many romances, on a blind date. I had a roommate at West Point from Astoria, Long Island, named Dick. He and I were really great buddies, and when we headed to New York I would stay at his house. One time Dick had a date with a girl, and a friend of hers tagged along, so they invited me to make up the numbers. The friend was a very cute, soft-spoken girl named Pamela Vander Beek. She was tall and slender, with entrancing brown eyes and beautifully long auburn hair that curled just a little at the end. I found her very easy to be around. She had a down-to-earth approach to life, with no pretensions, and we hit it off right from the start. We dated during my last two years at West Point.

I found Pam’s family fascinating. They were one of the older Dutch families in New York, and many of the city’s institutions were run by the Dutch in those days. Her father worked at the old Hotel Astor, a historic hotel right on Times Square. All of the management staff at the hotel was Dutch. The Vander Beeks had, in the past, enjoyed wealth beyond a Michigan farm boy’s comprehension. Pam’s father had traveled to school every day in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes and married her mother back in the twenties. They were on their honeymoon in Europe when the stock market crashed and wiped out their wealth in one stroke. They managed the return trip to the States only because they had round-trip tickets. Having grown up in luxury, Pam’s father then had to go to work as a playground director for the city parks system, the only job he could find. However, the Dutch community all helped each other back then, and he ended up finding better work at the Hotel Astor as the purchasing agent, which was a very important job at the time.

Pam, therefore, grew up with little money, but in a smart, sophisticated family used to great affluence. When I first met her, she worked in New York for a greeting card company and shared an apartment with a couple of other girls. On weekends we would get together in the city, or she’d ride a bus up to West Point to join me for a football game, to tour the school museum, or just take long walks. Of course, I would also take her to the Saturday night dance, where the army band would play old, slow songs like “Aura Lee” for us to dance to.

Whenever I could get a weekend off in the summer, Pam and her parents would pick me up and we would go to the family’s private lake, up in the mountains near Binghamton. A lakeside cottage was one of the few things left from the family’s days of wealth. It was a great getaway where we could swim, boat, and rest on the shore without anyone else around who had not been specifically invited. A big crowd of people usually descended on weekends, and the Dutch chef from the hotel would come up and prepare dinners.

It was like nothing I had ever experienced in my farming background, and a lot of fun after a strenuous week at West Point. I soon grew very close to Pam’s mother and father. They became like second parents to me and even loaned me money to help buy my car during my senior year.

Pam and I married at the cadet chapel on the hill overlooking the West Point campus in 1955, just before I left the academy. Naturally, we had our reception at the Hotel Astor. I truly felt like I belonged as a member of Pam’s family, and that we had the same aspirations and dreams for the future. In retrospect, neither of us knew—or perhaps could have known—what a tough road it would be for us both. I dragged a kind, loving, and gentle girl into some hard places, where it was impossible for her to follow. Could we have known that was coming as we celebrated our wedding day? Probably not.

Pam was my first serious girlfriend, and now she was my wife. The day I married, I was still a virgin. It wasn’t that I’d lacked the opportunities in high school. It just meant something special to me, so despite all my raging teenage hormones, I had waited. However, my patience meant I knew little about love and marriage.

In retrospect, I was too young, too focused, and too ambitious to be a great husband back then. My ambitions, and the military life, simply would not allow a young love to grow and flourish. We were two naïve kids, headed for brutal military lives in distant outposts. I had no real business bringing this trusting girl along. But I didn’t know. We were in love and believed we could tough it out.

In those first months, we couldn’t have been happier. Yet with my time at West Point ending, I’d also had to make some decisions about which branch of the service I wanted to join. The free education came with a price, and it was time to pay the military back for the years they had invested in me. Pam and I steeled ourselves for the unexpected. Military life was new to both of us: we had no personal experience or military family members to learn from. But I was ambitious and ready to dive in.

During my first few years at West Point, I felt I would want to remain with the army. My idea of a glorious military career was to be the first guy charging up the hill in a battle, with all the troops behind me. In my final year, however, I began to change my mind. A couple of my tactical officers were from the air force, and they really started working on me, explaining how it was the place for a more technically minded guy like me. In the new jet era, the air force seemed like a glamorous service branch, too, and that also formed part of my decision. To be honest, however, I still wasn’t sure I would enjoy flying.

In the end I chose the air force because I thought I would get promoted faster than in the army. That’s what those tactical officers told me. It turned out to be totally false—complete sales talk. But damn them, it worked. It wasn’t the last time I would run across those guys either. One of them, an officer named Jim Allen, would offer me some great advice a couple of years later, when I felt like quitting the military altogether.

We all gathered to choose our service specialty in a process called branch drawing. Not everybody got his first choice. Instead, we lined up in a big theater in order of academic standing. Starting with the top guy, we chose different branches of the army or air force. Because they did not have their own academy graduates yet, one-third of the graduates went to the air force. Army engineering went fast, as the bright guys took those places. Once the number of slots for each branch was filled, they were crossed off the board. By the end of the process, the last guys had nothing to choose from.