The Right Stuff (13 page)

Word of the Enema Bag Showdown spread rapidly among the other candidates, and they were delighted to hear about it. Practically all of them had wanted to do something of the sort. It wasn't just that the testing procedures were unpleasant; the entire atmosphere of the testing constituted an affront. There was something… decidedly
out of joint
about it. Pilots and doctors were natural enemies, of course, at least as pilots saw it. The flight surgeon was pretty much kept
in his place
in the service. His only real purpose was to tend to pilots and keep 'em flying. He was an attendant to the pilots' vital stuff. In fact, flight surgeons were encouraged to fly backseat with fighter pilots from time to time, so as to understand what stresses and righteous stuff the job entailed. Regardless of how much he thought of himself, no flight surgeon dared position himself
above
the pilots in his squadron in the way he conducted himself before them: i.e., it was hard for him to be a consummate panjandrum, the way the typical civilian doctor was.

But at Lovelace, in the testing for Project Mercury, the natural order was turned upside down. These people not only did not treat them as righteous pilots, they did not treat them as pilots of any sort. They never even alluded to the fact that they were pilots. An irksome thought was beginning to intrude. In the competition for
astronaut
the kind of stuff you were made of as a
pilot
didn't count for a goddamned thing. They were looking for a certain type of animal who registered bingo on the meter. You wouldn't win this competition in the air. If you won it, it would be right here on the examination table in the land of the rubber tubes.

Yes, the boys were delighted when Conrad finally told off General Schwichtenberg. Attaboy, Pete! At the same time, they were quite content to let the credit for the Lab Rat Revolt fall to Conrad and to him alone.

At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where they went for the psychological and stress testing, the air of secrecy was even more pronounced than at Lovelace. At Wright-Patterson they went through the testing in groups of eight. They were billeted off to themselves at the BOQ, the Bachelor Officers Quarters. If they had to call for anything on the base, they were not to refer to themselves by name. Instead, each of them had a number. Conrad was "Number 7." If he needed a car to take him from one place to another, to keep an appointment, he was supposed to ring up the car pool and say only: "This is Number Seven. I need a car…"

The testing, on the other hand, seemed—at first—more like what a self-respecting fighter jock might expect. They gave the candidate an oxygen mask and a partial-pressure suit and put him in an air-pressure chamber and reduced the pressure until an altitude of 65,000 feet was simulated. It made one feel as if his entire body were being squeezed by thongs, and he had to force his breath out in order to bring new oxygen into his lungs. Part of the stress was in the fact that they didn't tell him how long he had to stay there. They put each man in a small, pitch-black, window-less, soundproofed room—a "sensory deprivation chamber"—and locked the door, again without telling him how long he would have to stay there. It turned out to be three hours. They strapped each man into a huge human milkshake apparatus that vibrated the body at tremendous amplitudes and bombarded it with high-energy sound, some of it at excruciating frequencies. They put each man at the console of a machine called "the idiot box." It was like a simulator or a trainer. There were fourteen different signals that the candidate was supposed to respond to in different ways by pressing buttons or throwing switches; but the lights began lighting up so fast no human being could possibly keep up with them. This appeared to be not only a test of reaction times but of perseverance or ability to cope with frustration.

No, there was nothing wrong with tests of this sort. Nevertheless, the atmosphere around them was a bit…
off
. Psychiatrists were running the show at Wright-Patterson. Every inch of the way there were psychiatrists and psychologists standing over you taking notes and giving you little jot'em'n'dot'em tests. Before they put you in the Human Milkshake, some functionary in a white smock would present you with a series of numbered dots on a piece of paper on a clipboard and you were supposed to take a pencil and connect the dots so that the numbers beside them added up to certain sums. Then when you got out of the machine, the White Smock character would give you the same test again, presumably to see if the physical experience had impaired your ability to calculate. And that was all right, too. But they also had people staring at the candidate the whole time and taking notes. They took notes in little spiral notebooks. Every gesture you made, every tic, twitch, smile, stare, frown, every time you rubbed your nose—there was some White Smock standing by jotting it down in a notebook.

One of the most assiduous of the monitors was a psychologist, a woman named Dr. Gladys J. Loring—as Conrad could tell from the nameplate on her smock. Gladys J. Loring was beginning to annoy him intensely. Every time he turned around she seemed to be standing there staring at him, without a word, staring at him with utter White Smock detachment, as if he were a frog, a rabbit, a rat, a gerbil, a guinea pig, or some other lab animal, scribbling furiously in her notebook. For days she had been watching him, and they had never even been introduced. One day Conrad suddenly looked her straight in the eye and said: "Gladys! What… are… you.. writing… in… your… notebook!"

Dr. Gladys J. Loring looked at him as if he were a flatworm. All she did was make another notation of the specimen's behavior in her notebook.

To fighter jocks it was bad enough to have doctors of any sort as your final judges. To find psychologists and psychiatrists positioned above you in this manner was irritating in the extreme. Military pilots, almost to a man, perceived psychiatry as a pseudo-science. They regarded the military psychiatrist as the modern and unusually bat-brained version of the chaplain. But the shrink could be dealt with. You just turned on the charm—lit up the halo of the right stuff—and did some prudent lying.

In the interviews for this job of "astronaut," as in other situations, the psychiatrists would get on the subject of the hazards of the assignment, the unknowns, the potentially high risk, and then gauge the candidate's reaction. As all heads-up pilots knew, this called for "second-convolution" thinking. It was a mistake to say anything along the lines of:
Oh, I rather enjoy risks, I enjoy hanging my hide out over the edge, day in and day out, for that is what makes me superior to other men
. The psychiatrists always interpreted that as a reckless love of danger, an irrational impulse associated with the late-Freudian concept of "the death wish." The proper response—heard more than once during that week at Wright-Patterson—was to say: "Oh, I don't regard Project Mercury as a particularly high-risk proposition, certainly not compared to the routine test work I've been doing for the Air Force, the Navy, the Marines. Since this project has a high national priority, I'm sure that the safely precautions will be far more thorough and reliable than they were on something like the F-100F, F-102, F-104, F-4B, when I had
that one
in the test stage." (Very slight smile and roll of the eyeballs.) Beautiful stuff! This showed that you were a rational test pilot, as concerned about safety as any sensible professional… while at the same time getting across the idea that you had been routinely risking your life and were so used to it, had such righteous stuff, that riding a rocket seemed like a vacation by comparison. That created the Halo Effect. Offhand allusions to derring-do would have the psychiatrists looking at you with big wide eyes, like little boys.

Conrad knew all this as well as the rest of them. He knew exactly how the prudent officer should deal with these people. It was hard not to know. Every night the boys got together in the BOQ and regaled each other with stories of how they had lied their heads off or otherwise diligently subverted the inquiries of the shrinks. Conrad's problem was that somewhere along the way the Hickory-Kid always took over and had to add
a wink or two
for good measure.

In one test the interviewer gave each candidate a blank sheet of paper and asked him to study it and describe what he saw in it. There was no one right response in this sort of test, because it was designed to force the candidate to free-associate in order to see where his mind wandered. The test-wise pilot knew that the main thing was to stay on dry land and not go swimming. As they described with some relish later on in the BOQ, quite a few studied the sheet of paper and then looked the interviewer in the eye and said, "All I see is a blank sheet of paper." This was not a "correct" answer, since the shrinks probably made a note of "inhibited imaginative capacity" or some goddamned thing, but neither did it get you in trouble. One man said, "I see a field of snow." Well, you might get away with that, as long as you didn't go any further… as long as you did not thereupon start ruminating about freezing to death or getting lost in the snow and running into bears or something of that sort. But Conrad… well, the man is sitting across the table from Conrad and gives him the sheet of paper and asks him to study it and tell him what he sees. Conrad stares at the piece of paper and then looks up at the man and says in a wary tone, as if he fears a trick: "But it's upside down."

This so startles the man, he actually leans across the table and looks at this absolutely blank sheet of paper to see if it's true—and only after he is draped across the table does he realize that he has been had. He looks at Conrad and smiles a smile of about 33 degrees Fahrenheit.

This was
not
the way to produce the Halo Effect.

In another test they showed the candidates pictures of people in various situations and asked them to make up stories about them. One of the pictures they showed Conrad was a piece of American Scene Okie Realism, apparently from the Depression years. You could see a poor sunken hookwormy sharecropper in bib overalls trying to push a rusty plow through some eroded ground that was more gully than topsoil, aided by a mule with all his ribs showing, while off to one side the man's sallow hollow-socketed pellagra-ravaged wife with a swollen eight-month belly covered by a dress made from a fertilizer sack leans up against their shack to catch her breath or else to prop up the side wall. Conrad looks at the picture and says, "Well, you can tell that this man is a nature lover. He not only tills the soil, he appreciates the scenery, as you can tell by the way he is looking off toward the mountains, the better to observe the way the pale blue of the range in the distance harmonizes with the purple haze of the hills near his beloved homestead"—and on and on in this fashion until, at long last, it dawns on the interviewer that this wiry wiseacre who chatters away with a gap between his front teeth… is sending him up, him and his whole test.

This did not create the Halo Effect, either.

Oh, Conrad was rolling now. He was beginning to have a good time. But he had one piece of unfinished business. That night he called up the car pool.

"This is Number Seven," he said. "Number Seven needs a car to go to the PX."

The next day, after the heat-chamber test, in which he spent three hours shut up in a cubicle heated to 130 degrees, Conrad was rubbing the sweat off the end of his nose when he looked up—and sure enough, Dr. Gladys J. Loring was right there, making note of the event in her spiral notebook with a ballpoint pen. Conrad reached into the pocket of his pants… and came up with a spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen just like hers.

"Gladys!" he said. She looked up. She was startled. Conrad started scribbling in his notebook and then looked at her again. "Aha! You touched your ear, Gladys! We call that inhibition of the exhibitionism!" More scribbling in the notebook. "Oh-oh! Lowering of the eyes, Gladys! Repressed hypertrophy of the latency! I'm sorry, but it has to go in the report!"

Word of how the flatworm turned… how the lab rat had risen up… how Pavlov's dog rang Pavlov's bell and took notes on it… oh, word of all this circulated quickly, too, and everyone, from Number 1 to Number 8, was quite delighted. There was no indication, however, then or later, that Dr. Gladys Loring was amused in the slightest.

When Scott Carpenter called home to California from Wright-Patterson in the evenings—and he was always careful to take advantage of the lower evening rates—his wife, Rene, was usually in the living room. They had a house in Garden Grove, a town near Disneyland. The focal point of the living room was a three-piece sectional sofa that had a great teardrop-shaped monkeypod coffee table in front of it and a monkeypod end table at this end and another monkeypod end table at the other end. A great deal was summed up by those three great showy slabs of monkeypod wood with the yellow-brown grain streaks curling this way and that. Every officer and his wife in the U.S. Navy in the year 1959 understood the Monkeypod Life.

Scott was a lieutenant, which meant that his pay, including subsistence and housing allowance, was only about $7,200 a year, plus some extra flight pay. Young officers and their wives realized from the outset, of course, that abysmal pay was one of the realities of a service career. There were other forms of compensation: the opportunity to fly, which Scott loved; the status of a Naval officer; the community of the squadron (when one was in the mood for it); a certain sense of mission (if you were feeling good about yourself) that civilians lacked—extras, such as flight pay and a housing allowance, and
the goodies
. Given the dreadfully low pay, the goodies, which were usually trivial by ordinary standards, tended to take on an over blown importance. That was why so many young military couples in the late 1950's had living rooms dominated, ruled, oppressed, enslaved by the most bizarre furniture imaginable: Chinese k'ang tables with entire village scenes carved into the tops of them in deep relief, squads of high-backed Turkish chairs that could have swallowed a ballroom, Korean divans with wood frames so ornately inlaid with mother-of-pearl that the entire room seemed to be grinning hideously, Spanish armoires so gross, so gloomy, so overbearing that the mere sight of them brought conversation to a halt… and the flamboyant monkeypod. For one of the goodies was the opportunity to buy hand-carved wooden furniture cheaply when you were assigned to the far ends of the earth. That was your opportunity to furnish the living room at last!—and the military would ship it back to the States free of charge. Of course, your choice was limited by the local taste. In Korea you settled for mother-of-pearl or Chinese baroque. And in Hawaii, where Scott and Rene had been assigned, there was always the monkeypod.