Magnificent Desolation (8 page)

Odd as it might seem, I have always wished that I could have shared that exhilarating experience with everyone else on Earth as they watched the electrifying moments leading up to our touchdown. We missed sharing in the reaction, the emotion embodied by the sight of broadcaster Walter Cronkite wiping away his tears.

A
FTER WE SHOWERED
, we were given a more thorough medical exam. Then Neil, Mike, and I, dressed in our freshly provided light blue flight suits, replete with our Apollo 11 insignias and special pins reading
HORNET PLUS THREE
, went to the window of the quarantine trailer.

The sight outside our window was a bit unnerving. A barrage of television lights nearly blinded us, about two hundred officers and dignitaries stood to the rear, and standing there amid all the hoopla was
President Richard M. Nixon. The President had a reputation for being serious and stoic, cold and calculating, but on this warm morning in the western Pacific Ocean, he seemed ebullient. He practically did a little dance when he first saw us in our window; we looked more like a circus spectacle than space explorers. Nevertheless, the President leaned in toward the microphone by the window to talk with us. Millions of people watched on live TV as President Nixon welcomed us back to Earth. The ceremony lasted about ten minutes with a lot of smiles, and a lot of lighthearted banter going back and forth. The President remarked how the world seemed bigger now, but that its population had never before felt as close together as they did watching the mission unfold. Following the brief ceremony, President Nixon flew off and we relaxed as the
Hornet
carried us back to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

From Pearl Harbor to Hickam Field we were transported along with a flight surgeon and staff in a trailer that was loaded on a flatbed truck. From there we were flown to Houston, quarantine unit and all. When we got to Houston, they backed up the trailer next to the building set aside for our prolonged quarantine at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center (now known as Johnson Space Center), so they were able to transfer us from the trailer into the building without letting loose any germs. The building had sleeping quarters and a mess hall, and the people who were debriefing us were on the other side of a glass partition. If anyone came inside the quarantine unit, that person was not permitted to leave until we did. Someone had whimsically placed a sign over the door,
PLEASE DON’T FEED THE ANIMALS.

We were in quarantine for twenty-one days after we came back from the moon. From the time we were picked up from the ocean until the time we entered the more permanent quarantine quarters in Houston, we wore biological garments to protect the rest of the world from any potential toxicity or strange new microbes we might have picked up from the lunar surface. Nobody I knew at NASA actually feared that we had been contaminated, but it was better to be safe than sorry. Beyond that, the mandatory quarantine served a much more functional purpose
in keeping Mike, Neil, and me away from the public, and the public away from us, for a few weeks, till we had a chance to process all that we had experienced—to write our mission reports, as well as to debrief and help the Apollo 12 astronauts with any information we might have gained from our experience. Quarantine also provided us with time to pause and reflect on the events of the past week or so, trying to understand it all, and wondering how it would impact our future.

Craig Fisher, the medical doctor, brought in plenty of booze for us to celebrate, and I discovered that he kept the supply in the filing cabinet. When nobody was paying attention, I helped myself to a little extra of Craig’s stash. His sleeping quarters were right next to mine, and one morning I was in my bedroom reading—since our time in quarantine was a period of catching up on the news, rest, relaxation, and isolation—and that morning I heard the doctor say, “Who’s been drinking all the booze?”

I shifted uneasily. My need for a release to take the edge off the tremendous excitement we all felt in completing this mission had me drinking his stash. But that’s how it was over the span of my military career, where we would go to Friday-night beer calls after our rigorous Air Force flight-training exercises, sorties, and missions. Drinking was our way of celebrating a successful mission. Apollo 11 was clearly the most momentous mission I had ever flown. I felt I deserved a little extra indulgence.

During the three weeks we stayed in quarantine, we had several executive debriefings. We attempted to convey all that we had experienced to NASA and to the astronauts who would follow us on the next lunar landings. The three of us sat on a panel behind the glass walls that separated us, and NASA personnel quizzed us about our experiences. The questions were surprisingly benign, mostly I suppose because the other astronauts had been at various key positions in the control room and throughout Mission Control, and had experienced each step of the flight along with us. Either that, or they felt we had little they could add to their already arduous training.

While in the quarantine units, we had numerous medical checkups
to ascertain whether our journey had had any ill effects on us. There was some concern that even though we were all pretty healthy guys, exposure to radiation might cause a problem. We had little dosimeters that we wore while in quarantine, and when we left, the doctors said that the radiation to which we had been exposed was nothing to worry about. When we were finally released from the quarantine facility in Houston, it was determined that none of us had suffered any adverse effects from contact with the lunar dust or any other aspects of our journey. Physically, we were in top shape.

T
HE MOST OBVIOUS
, inevitable question still remains the hardest to answer: What was it like, being on the moon? What did it feel like, what were your thoughts and feelings as you walked on the moon? I’ve grappled with those questions for forty years, and still have not come up with an adequate answer. As military men, we were not expected or inclined to express our thoughts or feelings. In some respects, it was distinctly discouraged by NASA during the course of our missions. Consequently, on the moon, our heartbeats and brainwaves were measurable, and our activities on the moon verifiable. But there was no “emotion recorder” to measure my feelings or capture my emotional response.

Simply stated, I was exhilarated, but also guarded. Neil, Mike, and I knew that our every move and word were on display to the entire world, even though we were the only living creatures within a quarter of a million miles. With the camera on the moon’s surface, Neil and I were visible to millions of people watching their TVs on Earth, and audible to millions more listening in on their radios. But we tried to force that awareness to the back of our minds. We had a job to do. I know I tried my best to focus my attention on the tasks at hand, and to make sure that I wasn’t making mistakes. Yet it was impossible to ignore the fact that we were on a worldwide stage without precedent.

Many people have asked me since, “Weren’t you afraid up there, afraid that maybe something would go wrong and you’d never get off
the moon?” Sure, my heart was pounding the entire time we were on the surface, but thanks to our preparation, I had a fairly good idea of what to expect. We had rehearsed nearly every possible scenario, and we encountered few surprises on the lunar surface. Similar to the apprehension an athlete feels before the beginning of a big game, or that an actor or musician feels before the curtain goes up on stage, certainly I felt some anxiety some concern about wanting to make our nation proud. But it was not fear. We were extremely confident in the outlook for the success of our mission.

I’ve often wondered why it is, to this day, that people feel compelled to tell me where they were the moment when we first landed on the moon. Of course I pause, and with a twinkle in my eye, I pull out my little black book and thank them, often adding, “Well, I’m trying to keep track of where everyone was!”

Over the last forty years I have had time to refine my insights with added perspective, and I have come to believe that the real value of Apollo 11 was not the experiments we set up or the rocks we brought back. It was in the shared experience in which people throughout the world who witnessed our landing participated. Nothing like that had ever happened before, no other single event had ever galvanized the world’s attention to such a degree; people on every continent shared in our triumph as human beings, and bringing the world together in that way was one of the most tangible, meaningful, and valuable aspects of our accomplishment. In my lifetime I have not seen any other single event evoke such a response.

We won the race to the moon. We demonstrated America’s potential to carry out a unique mission, and we made it before the end of the decade, with a few months to spare. The relative ease with which we carried out our mission was the direct result of our hundreds of hours of training and the indefatigable efforts of so many people working together. Other problems can be solved in similar ways, by taking the long view, and committing ourselves to accomplish the necessary tasks. To me, that is a big part of the shared experience, and one of the greatest lessons of realizing the Apollo dream.

   4

W
HAT NOW?”
I
SAID ALOUD TO MYSELF AS
I
CHEWED ON THE
tip of the pipe I rarely smoked—the same pipe I had taken with me on my Gemini 12 mission.
What’s next?
I sat on a chaise lounge out by our family swimming pool, supposedly relaxing on a waning Saturday afternoon in the hot Houston August sunshine of 1969, my eyes scanning the low horizon above the flat land around me, but mostly pondering the speeches I knew I would be making within a few days.
What’s left?
I wondered.
What’s a person do when his or her greatest dreams and challenges have been achieved?
I reached over to the small table next to the chaise and reached for my drink, Scotch poured generously over some ice cubes.

I sipped the whiskey and swished it around in my mouth, savoring the taste. I let it slide slowly down my throat as I leaned my head back and looked up at the sky. The sun was already beginning to decline on the horizon. I felt much the same way. Little more than three weeks before, I had been kicking up dust on the moon along with Neil Armstrong, the first two human beings ever to set foot on another planetary body in space. The entire world had watched us, listened to us, felt the tension as we nearly ran out of fuel attempting to land on the lunar surface. Now we were back, and I wondered what the next phase of my life would be. Everything was different now, and would be forever. I didn’t
know it at the time, but the rest of my life would be measured in terms of the phases of the moon, and every quinquennial and decadal anniversary of that dusty July walk.

What does a man do for an encore after walking on the moon?

I was only thirty-nine years of age, and I’d been to the top of my world. What else was left for me? What was I going to do with the rest of my life? During the three weeks in quarantine along with my fellow astronauts, Mike Collins and Neil Armstrong, I had tried to drive such thoughts out of my mind by staying focused on how we could help support the next moon landings planned by NASA. Why worry about the future? We had enough to do just getting our thoughts together and going through debriefing procedures with NASA and the astronauts who were yet to venture on their missions.

And what did I have to worry about anyhow? I
should
be on top of the world. I
was
at the top of my game. After all, I had just walked on the
moon!
For an Air Force fighter pilot and a rocket scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that was the epitome of success. I took another gulp of Scotch, a much larger one than earlier. Hey, I should be feeling good! Wed done it; we had beaten the Russians to the moon, we had landed two men on the surface and had returned safely within the decade, just as President John F. Kennedy had challenged us to do. The entire world knew my name and more about me than I ever cared to have known. I was king of the hill!

Yet a nagging doubt about playing the role of a hero pervaded my mind. Blasting off and riding a fireball into space had been a task I was fully prepared to perform. Exploring the moon, ascending off its surface, and rendezvousing and docking with Mike, who was orbiting in the
Columbia
and waiting for Neil and me to rejoin him for the ride home—it all had gone much as planned. Oh sure, we had a few close calls, a few things that, looking back from the comfort of a lazy afternoon lounge around the pool, could have proven catastrophic. But they hadn’t. We worked with the team on the ground and together we made history, what some were already referring to as the pinnacle of modern man’s achievements.

In a few days my fellow astronauts and I would be off to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—President Nixon would join us in California for a black-tie event—and at each of the stops I’d be called upon to give a speech. As with most people, speaking in public didn’t exactly fall into my comfort zone. Sure, I had some speaking ability, and felt confident enough to stand in front of a crowd, but already I was discovering that everyone wanted me to answer that inevitable question: “What was it like, being on the moon?” I struggled with an answer. I wanted to say something profound, something meaningful. But I was an engineer, not a poet; as much as I grappled with the quintessential questions of life, questions of origin, purpose, and meaning—where did we come from, where are we going, why are we even here—I found no adequate words to express what I had experienced. Yet I recognized that people wanted me to provide them with some cosmic interpretation gleaned from the lunar landing. While on the surface of the moon, I had taken in the pervasive gray-ash barrenness all around, with the Earth hanging off in space like a tiny blue-green orb, and had called it “magnificent desolation.”

Now those words seemed to describe my own inner turmoil as I thought about the days ahead.

NASA
RATHER EXPECTED
a media circus from the moment we landed, and the three weeks in the quarantine unit did little to quench the public’s thirst for information about our journey, or the uncontrollable intrusions of the press into our private lives. Neil, Mike, and I left the quarantine facilities on Sunday, August 10, 1969, around 9:00 p.m., pronounced fit to go by the doctors there. Excited to see our families, with whom we had hardly even talked in more than a month, the three of us said hasty good-byes and piled into three separate NASA staff cars for the drive home to Nassau Bay, a short distance from the space center complex. Our cars had barely pulled away from the gate when a television crew nudged in behind us. My driver roared away from headquarters with the TV crew following closely behind us, careening
wildly, trying to get a better camera angle. The race was on. It was no better when I arrived home, where a bevy of reporters and photographers were waiting in the dark on my front lawn. I pressed through the crowd to my waiting family inside the house. My wife, Joan, and our three children—Mike, thirteen; Jan, twelve; and Andy, eleven—all threw their arms around me and welcomed me home. Somehow, we all knew our lives would never be the same again.

O
F COURSE, BEING
first on the moon had its advantages. We were informed before leaving the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston that on Wednesday, August 13, 1969, the three Apollo 11 astronauts and our families would be going to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles all in one day, to enjoy ticker tape parades and the accolades and appreciation of the American people. What an honor that was sure to be!

Joan and I had difficulty convincing our children of that distinguished honor as we tried to rouse them out of bed shortly after three in the morning to board our flight from Houston to New York at 5:00 a.m. But what a day it was!

Our means of transportation for the day was one of the presidential planes,
Air Force II
, whisking us first to New York, where we were met by Mayor John Lindsay and his wife. The streets were lined with thousands of people as our motorcade made its way slowly up Wall Street to Broadway. What seemed like an avalanche of confetti poured from the windows and decks of the buildings as the enormous crowd embraced us with an unbelievable outpouring of appreciation. For a while the skies above us literally turned white with all the confetti and ticker tape as we waved to the people in the streets. Hands reached out to touch us, many people tried to shake our hands, but our security guards warned us about trying to shake hands with those we passed by. We could easily have been pulled right out of the car and mobbed by well-wishers.

In front of us marched a troop of Boy Scouts, each one carrying an American flag. As I saw those young people marching, and the response
of the crowd all around us, I was suddenly overwhelmed with a flood of patriotism unlike anything I had ever before experienced. Not at West Point, not in Korea as an American fighter pilot, not even when I first donned the spacesuit with the American flag on the left shoulder. But seeing those young Scouts and hearing the cheers of the people, not just for us, but for all of those who had worked so hard to get us to the moon and back, evoked a powerful response in me. I wanted to say to the American people, “Don’t thank me; let me thank you!”

The parade lasted more than an hour, ending up at City Hall, where Neil, Mike, and I briefly addressed the crowd. The theme of my speech was one I would repeat many times and still believe to this day: that the footprints we left on the moon were not ours alone, but belonged to all humankind.

From New York’s City Hall, we drove to the United Nations for a brief ceremony, and then it was on to Chicago, where we repeated a quite similar scene, the parade leading down Chicago’s famous Michigan Avenue and State Street. The crowd in Chicago was even more demonstrative and ebullient than the New Yorkers had been! Once again, confetti and streamers poured down on us like snow, covering the streets as the city went wild. It was a sight and a feeling I will never forget. I don’t think I’d ever smiled so much in my life!

The outpouring of adulation was especially heartwarming in light of the fact that our nation had experienced such tumultuous times in recent years. Few people were extolling the virtues of America on the news each evening. Racial tensions, body bags and other grotesque images of carnage in Vietnam, riots on college campuses, and antiwar demonstrations pummeled the national psyche. So when America discovered something to feel good about, our people cut loose in a big way, celebrating our achievement. It was as exhilarating as it was gratifying.

On to Los Angeles! The flight took three and a half hours, and I spent almost that entire time preparing another speech for the big night ahead. As in New York and Chicago, we were welcomed by the mayor, given the keys to the city, and treated like royalty. Making the Los Angeles trip even more exciting was the gala celebration that
evening with President Nixon and about a thousand of his closest friends. My mother had passed away the year before, but in addition to Joan and our children, my father attended the Los Angeles event, as did my two sisters and other extended family members. As President Nixon presented Neil, Mike, and me with the Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given to civilians in our nation, all of my family members were beaming, especially my father.

Then on August 16, 1969, only six days after Neil, Mike, and I were released from quarantine, more than 300,000 people crowded downtown Houston for a parade welcoming us back home. It was a tremendously heartwarming experience to receive the applause and smiles from our hometown crowd. Later that evening, 45,000 people packed the Astrodome for an event hosted by Frank Sinatra to celebrate our accomplishment. All three of us were on stage with Frank as he sang “Fly Me to the Moon.” I had been a fan of Frank Sinatra since junior high school, so for Frank to be honoring us was indeed something special.

Another marvelous celebration took place a few weeks later, when my hometown of Montclair, New Jersey, pulled out all the stops to honor me with a parade and banquet. It actually rained on my parade as Joan and I rode through town in a convertible, but the drizzle didn’t dampen my spirits a bit. One of the highlights that I would cherish all my life took place when the longtime U.S. senator from New Jersey, Albert W. Hawkes, told the banquet crowd, “In all my years as a senator, in all the many votes and suggestions I have made, I shall remember that, to me, the most significant decision I made was to nominate a young man from Montclair, New Jersey, as a cadet at West Point. His accomplishments exceeded my wildest dreams.”