In the company of ‘The Right Stuff’

MANILA, Philippines - There is something absolutely fascinating, mystical and legendary about human beings living their lives figuratively “on the edge” — going about their risky, death-defying professional callings with such intrepidity and coolness that mark them as extraordinary, or even foolhardy mortals way above the range of ordinary creatures.

Throughout the history of mankind, the development of weapons, by its very nature, has consistently served as the breeding ground for men who stared death in the face without blinking, as if the act was the most natural thing in the world. Driven by whatever motivation — patriotism, idealism, fatalism or whatever — these were the men who courageously faced and engaged their enemies in mortal combat during countless battles on blood-soaked and corpse-laden battlefields; who risked their very lives in daring paratroop drops on enemy territories classified as no-man’s land; who gallantly assaulted heavily-fortified enemy positions amidst heavy machine-gun fire.

To this rare breed of men belongs the American fighter/test pilots and astronauts, the conquerors of the skies and even space beyond, who are the characters in Tom Wolfe’s electrifying, swashbuckling true-to-life literary masterpiece The Right Stuff. The 367-page saga chronicles the exploits and adventures of heroic American flyboys as they endeavored to push their aircraft to its optimum performance and capabilities, as both man and machine broke free from the constraints of gravity and ascended into virginal outer space. The book also lets readers enter the psyches of the pilots and their very competitive natures while they jockeyed for their respective places in the pantheon of aviation greatness, to be accorded the badge of courage, determination and recklessness that are the hallmarks of the so-called “best of the best,” and the determinants of the “right stuff.”

Finally, the story also provides the political reason behind the United States’ sustained efforts to aggressively pursue its space program: the threat of being left behind by the Russian technological advances in the field of space exploration and control of the earth’s airspace, with its attendant national security concerns.

Wolfe’s literary gem starts off with the eerie fact that becoming, and being, a fighter pilot is fraught with great personal risk and danger: US Navy statistics showed that for a career Navy pilot there was a 23 percent probability that he would die in an aircraft accident. Indeed, flying is brutally unforgiving to non-observers of, or lapses in, prescribed procedures — the “human factor” aspect in aviation accidents, with its so-called twin, the “material fatigue” side, giving the term “widow maker” a chilling effect for the pilots’ wives back home.

The author also provides the readers a glimpse of the unique fraternity of military pilots, a clique where men were not rated by their outward rank as lieutenants, captains, majors or whatever. To them, the world was simply divided into those who had “it” and those who did not. The idea seemed to be that a pilot should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery, push it to its operational limits with a mixture of bravado and coolness while courting death, and then to go up again the next day in an apparently never-ending series.

Personalities worthy of hero worship adorn the pages of the book. There is the legendary Chuck Yeager, widely considered as the epitome of the fighter pilot, and a testament to how far a country boy with only a high school education and no credentials could go with his display of true grit and natural flying abilities. He distinguished himself as World War II ace, accounting for 13   kills in dogfights with the German Luftwaffe over Europe. Despite sustaining an accidental broken rib a day before his historic flight, Yeager etched his name in aviation annals by being the first to break the sound barrier (760 miles an hour) with the X-1 aircraft on Oct. 14, 1947 — a daring feat achieved after several futile attempts by other test pilots who lost their lives in the process. And then there were the seven Mercury astronauts (Carpenter, Copper, Glenn, Grissom, Schirra, Shepard and Slayton) and the thrilling accounts of their death-defying sub-orbital/orbital missions, and of their individual personality and character differences, despite their having a common thread in their field of specialty which was test flying.

The individual outcome of the six astronauts’ missions (Slayton was disqualified from flying for medical reasons) also points to a marked difference in temperament and disposition in each of them when exposed to crisis situations. Thus it can be said that, over and above the technological requirements, a mission’s accomplishment is very much dependent on how the human factor impacts on the overall scenario.

There can be no greater thrill than finding an engrossing book that pulsates with excitement and figuratively drives the reader to the edge of his seat, taking him to an era where larger-than-life heroes defied death many times over with their daredevil exploits in the wild blue yonder and beyond to the weightlessness of space. In its entirety, Tom Wolfe’s book was indeed a thrilling historic document about America and its elite fraternity of fighter/test pilots and astronauts whose desire to reach and then remain at the very top of the “right stuff” pyramid was most probably born out of an unspoken disdain for settling for second best.

That all of these daring human exploits were set against the backdrop of the space race between the world’s two superpowers at the time was a big bonus in itself, as the reader is offered a ringside view of the political underpinnings that set the stage for the test pilots and their astronaut brethren to perform their toughest act, which is right up there in the list of mankind’s greatest achievements. If only for this avalanche of human drama unfolding within the sphere of the Cold War years, this book is highly recommended as “must” reading for everyone. To paraphrase an oft-repeated remark, fact is much, much more interesting than fiction, and with his superb storytelling, Tom Wolfe has made us realize that it really should be. In so doing, he, just like the real-life heroes that he so vividly brought to life in the book, confirmed his status as a writer par excellence — a man with all “the right stuff” himself.

This week’s winner

Winston A. Ares of Clark Field, Pampanga is with the Armed Forces of the Philippines and currently assigned at Camp General Emilio Aguinaldo, Quezon City. When not engrossed in his professional calling, he finds pleasure in getting lost in the pages of books like Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. He enjoys the company of his loving wife and kids who are both in the OB Montessori Center.