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    Carrying the Fire: 50th Anniversary Edition
    Carrying the Fire: 50th Anniversary Edition
    Carrying the Fire: 50th Anniversary Edition
    Ebook656 pages11 hours

    Carrying the Fire: 50th Anniversary Edition

    By Michael Collins

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Reissued with a new preface by the author on the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 journey to the moon

    The years that have passed since Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins piloted the Apollo 11 spacecraft to the moon in July 1969 have done nothing to alter the fundamental wonder of the event: man reaching the moon remains one of the great events—technical and spiritual—of our lifetime.

    In Carrying the Fire, Collins conveys, in a very personal way, the drama, beauty, and humor of that adventure. He also traces his development from his first flight experiences in the Air Force, through his days as a test pilot, to his Apollo 11 space walk, presenting an evocative picture of the joys of flight as well as a new perspective on time, light, and movement from someone who has seen the fragile earth from the other side of the moon.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 16, 2019
    ISBN9781466899261
    Carrying the Fire: 50th Anniversary Edition
    Author

    Michael Collins

    Michael Collins was a pseudonym for Dennis Lynds (1924–2005), a renowned author of mystery fiction. Raised in New York City, he earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart during World War II, before returning to New York to become a magazine editor. He published his first book, a war novel called Combat Soldier, in 1962, before moving to California to write for television. Two years later Collins published the Edgar Award–winning Act of Fear (1967), which introduced his best-known character: the one-armed private detective Dan Fortune. The Fortune series would last for more than a dozen novels, spanning three decades, and is credited with marking a more politically aware era in private-eye fiction. Besides the Fortune novels, the incredibly prolific Collins wrote science fiction, literary fiction, and several other mystery series. He died in Santa Barbara in 2005.

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    Reviews for Carrying the Fire

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    • 5/5
      Thank You This Is Very Good, Maybe This Can Help You
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    • 5/5
      The first 'astronaut biography' I've read, and now I'm concerned that it sets the bar too high! Collins pays a lot of attention to the details, but still finds the time to talk about more emotional and personal experiences. He's not afraid to be self deprecating, which is always appreciated in any biography. The additional author's foreword found in the 2009 edition is a nice bit of text that you'll miss with an earlier edition.
    • 4/5
      Mike Collins' wrote his famous memoir himself. He is quite frank, including a list of his colleagues' personalities, and a bit of a kvetch, but he gives an exciting and in-depth account of his training, NASA politics, and both his Gemini and Apollo missions.
    • 3/5
      Good story of the lunar landing in 1969.
    • 4/5
      This is the definitive astronaut account. If you read only one astronaut book, this is it. Collins is an engrossing author.
    • 4/5
      Of the three crewmen for Apollo 11, which is likely to have the most interesting story? The mission commander, first man to set foot on the moon and subsequently a household name? The co-pilot of the lunar module, cheated of glory by being only the second man to walk on the moon? Or the command module pilot, alone in orbit around the moon while the landing progressed, never setting foot on its surface?

      Charles Lindbergh believes the latter, and I am inclined to agree with him.

      Carrying the Fire is the story of Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 command module pilot, and his career as a test pilot and astronaut. The book does not suffer the fate of early drudgery that befalls most biography: Collins knows that his childhood and family life are of little interest to his readers, so he merely notes that they happened and moves on. This is the tale of his career, the journey of one man through planes and spacecraft and the agencies that build and manage them.

      The book is engagingly written and surprisingly introspective. I found the discussions of mission planning to be pretty interesting as well: the amount of forethought put into hazard prevention is astounding, even for one familiar with NASA's legacy of hazard and risk analysis. How do you determine the risks of an unknown yet undoubtedly hostile environment? You get a lot of smart people, do a lot of brainstorming, and be very, very careful.
    • 4/5
      This is my new favorite astronaut autobiography. Collins is a surprisingly good writer, both in his deft use of metaphor & simile, and in his meticulous attention to detail. I learned things about piloting Gemini and Apollo spacecraft that I had never read in others' books. The foreword and afterword were written for the 2009 edition, decades after the original book itself was composed. So in this version, you get the best of both worlds: the fresh after Apollo view and the time-worn, life-goes-on view. But both are inspirational in their way.
      [Audiobook note: Good reader whose voice seems to fit the author well.]
    • 4/5
      Author Michael Collins was the command module pilot who orbited the Moon as Armstrong and Aldrin made their historic landing. This memoir covers Collins' early experiences in the NASA astronaut program, including his Gemini 10 flight, and his decision to leave the space program after the success of Apollo 11.

      As expected, it covers Collins' two spaceflight missions in detail, and provides copious information about the general training undergone by the astronaut corps, mentions a few internecine feuds in passing, and discusses the difficult transitions the author and other Apollo crewmen faced when returning from their missions.

      Collins does write well, but the overall pace of the book drags a bit, and the ending just sort of dribbles off into a series of "then I took this job" mentions.

      Definitely worth reading for those interested in the U.S. space program, but not necessarily the best book out there on the topic.
    • 3/5
      Most popular stories about the lunar space race focus almost entirely on the astronauts, because it is a much easier story to tell. I find this frustrating since the astronauts are not even the tip of the tip of the iceberg. In the case of an astronaut's memoir, though, the focus makes sense, and I really enjoyed learning about everything Collins was doing. Collins doesn't hold back too much, and is willing to say the bad as well as the good, and to name names.

      What I didn't like: The casual sexism and racism is disturbing. Collins's inability to communicate with his fellow astronauts and with the NASA organization gives me some understanding of Bell Hooks. Collins also isn't terribly self-reflective. He blames NASA's PR team for the public losing interest in lunar exploration, but can't consider that perhaps he deserves some of the blame, by treating the television broadcasts as jokes. Collins couldn't care less about lunar science. I also skipped the half-dozen introductions and prologues.
    • 5/5
      Michael Collins' 1974 memoir of his career as a test pilot and astronaut, including, of course, his historic journey aboard Apollo 11. I've read a zillion different accounts of this period in the American space program now, and somehow I never, ever get tired of them. Each one seems to offer some new perspective or to tell me a few things I didn't already know, and this book is emphatically no exception. Collins' account is very detailed, with day-by-day and sometimes even hour-by-hour descriptions of his activities on his Gemini and Apollo flights, including his own thoughts and reflections and opinions. Turns out, in addition to all his other accomplishments, he's also a pretty good writer. He manages to be very specific and clear about the more technical aspects of the job without either dumbing things down or making the readers' eyes glaze over with facts and figures and acronyms. (Well, except when he's deliberately demonstrating how this stuff can make your eyes glaze over, anyway!) He also possesses a terrific sense of humor, with lots of self-deprecating jokes and amusing asides and entertainingly forthright commentary making this a surprisingly fun read. And his description of his trip to the moon is downright thrilling. Mind you, I always find this particular subject thrilling, but there's nothing quite like a firsthand account. Although ironically, unlike the rest of the species, Collins didn't get to experience humanity's first steps on the moon as they happened; he was on the far side of the moon at the time, and out of communications range.

      I think I'd call this one a must-read for the true space enthusiast. Hell, it's unforgivable that it's taken me this long to get around to reading it, especially considering how long it's been sitting on my shelves.
    • 5/5
      “There seem to be two moons now, the one I see in my back yard and the one I remember from up close. Intellectually, I know they are one and the same but emotionally they are separate entities. The small moon, the one I have known all my life, remains unchanged, except that I now know it is three days away.”


      Michael Collins’ memoir, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys is an incredibly fitting title. Here Mike takes us all the way from his test pilot days to his orbital time in Gemini 10 and then to his piloting of Apollo 11 where his job was to essentially drop the kids (Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong) off on the moon and pick them up later when they were through. Whether he’s writing about his test pilot days, his astronaut training days, or his days on Gemini 10 or Apollo 11, Collins doesn’t spare any details. Sometimes the details are funny (one man wrote a letter to the Apollo 11 crew to watch out for the giant ant hills on the moon – he could tell them where they were – for a fee); sometimes they are crude (how do astronauts do that in space anyway?) and sometimes they are incredibly heartbreaking such as the loss of three astronauts in the on-the-ground fire in Apollo 1. This book is only the second one I’ve read on the space program (the first one being Lost Moon) and I learned a lot from it.

      Training to be an astronaut was no easy thing. Up and coming astronauts had to spend 240 hours studying various things such as astronomy, aerodynamics, and flight mechanics. A lot of time was spent studying geology since the astronauts were expected to bring back a pretty sizeable haul of moon rocks. Since it was predicted that if a rocket was going to fall back to Earth it would crash near the equator, the astronauts-in-training had to complete a few days of learning how to survive in the desert and the jungle. Survival training included some classroom time plus a survival manual bible, “Air Force Manual 64-5’s, entitled Survival,” with its sage advice for the new jungle dweller: “ ‘Dangerous beasts – tigers, rhinoceros, elephants – are rarely seen and best left alone.’ I’ll say!”

      Not only do we get to fly shot-gun with Mike on his two space flights, he also takes us with him through all those hours upon hours in simulators where he would try to solve every possible scenario the engineers could throw at him. The questions of “what if?” “what do we do if?” and “how do we deal with THAT?” were inexhaustible and it required a gigantic team of all kinds of experts to brainstorm all the contingencies. Bad enough to have to spend so much time getting ready for the space flight itself, but there was PR to tend to as well. A few months before the Apollo 11 flight, an exhausted Collins went straight from simulator exercises to flying himself to some PR event . On the way back home he realizes he has become disoriented: “With a jolt I realized it had been a long day and I was making mistakes no alert air cadet would; this guy who couldn’t tell Washington from Baltimore was within a few months of navigating to the moon and back.” He did manage to successfully navigate back home and then eventually (thankfully!) from Earth to moon and back. He probably occupies a unqiue place in the universe as the one and only person to be separated, quite literally, from the entire world: “… I disappear behind the moon. … I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side.” I remarked to my son the other day that the closer I got to the end of this book – with the astronauts getting closer and closer to actually landing on the moon - the longer the book seemed to get. That’s when I realized I was having a little-kid-like “Are we there yet?” moment! As far as adventure goes, I don’t think you can beat going to the moon.

      Collins would disagree with me. In the new 1989 version there is a new preface written by Collins: "Today I look back on the moon not so much as a place, but a direction.” He talks at some length about his fascination with Mars and his belief that we need to explore it. “… I don’t think we should establish a time-table for Mars, although it seems to me a human landing could come in the first decade of the twenty-first century…." He also takes a moment to address the 1986 Challenger explosion, defend the aerospace industry, and laments the fact that the space program doesn’t enjoy the “spirit, the mood, the vitality of Apollo” that it once had.
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    • 4/5
      This book is really two. The first part is a memoir of Collins participation in the space race, while the second part, under the title "epilog" is Collin's opinion of where humans are going with respect to space knowledge and exploration. I think the second part is the more interesting and important of the two. Because it was written bifore the International Space Station was built, it did not get the correct outcome of that program. That program degenerated into covering pottie repair with a total disinterest by the public of any exploration value or stepping stone function. Consequently that space station may not have contributed to Collin's conclusion of mankind being basically pioneering in nature and eventually expanding out of our earth cradle.

      In the first part of the book, there is good insight on the personalities of the astronauts and of the Nasa Gemini and Apollo management style.

      Having worked with professional astronomers, I feel the same as Collins that the general public has not gotten the message that the earth is not the center of the solar system, galaxy, or anything else and that the earth is round and whole so that pollution in one area truly degrades quality of life for all, not just locally where it is geneerated.

      Collin's epilog is worth reading by all. Since he has witnessed the big picture of the earth in its locale, his opinions speak from knowledge and experience.
    • 5/5
      Simply magnificent! As I've spent the last few days tearing through this engrossing book, I've been mindful of how I might be able to review it once I'd reached its end. Now that I have done so I find that I don't really know quite how to express what it is about Michael Collins' writing that moved me so much - except that I know this is most definitely one of the best memoirs I've ever read. It is truly a one-off, as the events it describes are so unique (most obviously the historic Apollo 11 mission) that they could only have been written by one of the members of 1960s NASA space program who was actually 'there'.

      Collins' writing is very laid back and as informal as it is informative. I rarely read books (for pleasure at least) with quite so much scientific content: rocket propulsion, trajectories, inter-planetary navigation, and so forth, but he puts these topics into words that I found no problem in understanding. Not that these subjects really dominate the narrative - his tale is told in a very personal and humourous style. For an astronaut (& fighter pilot for that matter!) Collins is incredibly humble and self-effacing - he repeatedly reminds the reader of how poor a mechanic he is and how lazy he can be...

      The early chapters retell his experiences as a USAF test pilot while in the background NASA's manned space program is underway. After some early setbacks he is eventually accepted into the astronaut staff at NASA in Houston, and begins the arduous training for the Gemini program. Amidst tales of geological field trips and survival training in inhospitable desert or jungle environments (in the event of any future re-entry going awry), and endless sickness inducing zero gravity dives, he gives a great sense to the day to day existence of an astronaut-in-waiting. As enjoyable as these pages are, the reader knows - as does the author of course - that it is all building up to the momentous day when he will finally sit at the 'tip of the pencil on the launch-pad' at Cape Kennedy on his way into space.

      The Gemini 10 mission he flies along with John Young is covered in every breathtaking detail, none more so than Collins' 2 EVAs (Extra Vehicular Activity - spacewalks to you and I). In the first, as he was taking star readings with his sextant whilst standing up in the hatch - head and shoulders out 'there' in space - he writes that he felt at that moment "like a Roman god riding the skies in his chariot". The 2nd EVA, where he has to leave the Gemini altogether and cross the void to reach the adjacent Agena craft (sent up previously specifically for this planned rendezvous), for the purposes of removing and replacing an experiment installed on its outside, is altogether more terrifying. He finds himself grappling with zero gravity while attempting to 'climb' aboard the rear end of a craft patently not designed for such an activity (there were no foot or handholds for his convenience) in bulky spacesuit complete with cumbersome gloves and yards of entangling umbilical line... There is no 'up' and there is no 'down' - talk about vertigo! All this while simultaneously reminding the Gemini pilot Young not to use whichever thruster may happen to be nearest to burning through either said umbilical lines or indeed Collins himself! It's edge of your seat stuff.

      The final third of this terrific book covers the famous Apollo 11 mission to the moon itself. The quirks of fate that led him to this moment are not lost on Collins as he writes of the medical problem which was discovered while he was due to be assigned to the Apollo 8 mission. His flight status of 'grounded' for several months inadvertently leads to his later inclusion on Apollo 11.

      I won't retell all that happens, but the moments when he is truly as alone as any human being has ever been - Charles Lindbergh's later congratulatory letter tells of relating to his experience more so than Armstrong's or Aldrin's - in lunar orbit while the landing module 'Eagle' is away on the Moon's surface are some truly gripping passages of tension. That said, the whole exciting tale is really page turning stuff.

      The final chapters contain Collins' thoughts on space travel in general (written in 1973) and where it might be headed. As well as his thoughts on humanity's attitudes to our 'blue and white planet', he poignantly expresses with one word above all how he sees Planet Earth now that he has seen the 'world in a window' - fragile.

      An excellent read and one which I heartily recommend to all.
    • 4/5
      This book isn't an easy holiday read. However, if you have always wanted to know what the early astronauts did and what was the Apollo program in more depth, this is the book for you - and told from the human perspective of one of the key astronauts; Michael Collins.

      The difficulty the book faces in delivering the above is that to discuss how the early test pilots got into the then new field of being astronauts, and how the Mercury program fed into Gemini and then Apollo, and how Apollo 1 to Apollo 11 played out requires quite a bit of detail and a large degree of science as well.

      Overall this book is for those who are keen on the topic of space travel and they will get satisfaction from this book, as it will fill in some of the gaps in their knowledge, as well as allow them to re-live the experience of 1969. However, some effort will be required on the reader to achieve this outcome; this book follows the old axiom "you only get out what you put in".
    • 5/5
      I once read that this is widely considered to be the best book written by any of NASA's former astronauts. I agree wholeheartedly, although I have not (yet?) read all the others.

      The part when Collins is alone in Columbia, orbiting the moon while Armstrong and Aldrin are on the surface, was particularly striking and always remains in my memory long after I have read it. (I've read Carrying the Fire three times and someday hope to buy a good hardcover copy before this dear, yellowed paperback falls to pieces.)

    Book preview

    Carrying the Fire - Michael Collins

    1

    There are only two ways of learning to ride a fractious horse; one is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast awhile, and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safer, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders. It is very much the same in learning to ride a flying machine; if you are looking for perfect safety you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds, but if you really wish to learn you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.

    —Wilbur Wright, 1901

    I suppose Russia must test new airplanes over the Pripet Marshes, or Siberia, or wherever desolation dictates. In this country, it is Edwards Air Force Base, California—Mojave Desert country, in a vortex of the Antelope Valley wind tunnel, one hundred miles north of Los Angeles. Although I had flown over the area many times before, when I first approached Edwards on the ground I couldn’t believe it. I had left the tinsel-shiny, neon-bedecked high rollers of Las Vegas a few hours before, ricocheting down the highway in an overheated 1958 Chevy station wagon, seeking Valhalla or Mecca, or at least an opportunity to fight for admission into the arcane world of high-speed flight testing. For Edwards was all these things and I had been accepted as a member of Class 60-C at the USAF Experimental Flight Test Pilot School, along with thirteen other exalted ones, mostly Americans (one Italian, one Dane, one Japanese), mostly hyperthyroid, superachieving first sons of superachievers. To this day, I am impressed by this group; I love them, they leer at me from my study wall. One of them has walked on the moon, two have circled it; two—two of the best—are dead.

    But in the spring of 1960 I knew only that a nest had to be prepared for wife and infant daughter, arrangements had to be made, housing procured, forms signed, and the other necessary impedimenta gotten out of the way so that the decks would be cleared for the real action to follow.

    Vaunted Edwards, the Air Force Flight Test Center, the big time at last! At least it was big, with a dry lake twenty-five miles long serving as a super runway, an earth mother for pilots in distress, for those who must land their aircraft immediately no matter what.

    It was also dry and hot and windy and isolated, and not at all what a proper Bostonian—my wife—would expect as a nursery for her firstborn. I knew this, and winced, but I also knew that she would prevail, and neither Joshua tree nor rattlesnake nor sandstorm would dim her New England resolve, nor her ability not only to make it but to change it! After all, in a historic sense, it was a place for upstarts. Recorded history of the area spans only a few more years than does the airplane itself.

    No matter how advanced the technology or sophisticated the flying machine, the lake still calls the tune, reasserting each winter the primordial dominance of nature over puny, impatient pilots. Each spring and summer, as the lake gets drier and as more high-pressure aircraft tires abuse it, surface cracks and blemishes appear, so by late autumn the lake bed appears rough and ruined. Then come the winter rains, sparingly, but providing enough water to allow a couple of inches to accumulate on the lake bed and to be blown back and forth by the omnipresent wind. By early spring, the newly dried surface reappears, as silky as a baby’s bottom, ready to take another year’s traffic smoothly and safely. Of course, in recent years concrete runways adjacent to the lake bed have made the Air Force less dependent upon this annual cycle, but it is still interesting to note that the most advanced machines, such as the X-15 rocketcraft and more recently NASA’s lifting body, still use the lake bed itself, and are more dependent on nature’s schedule, not man’s.

    I had been flying F-86 Sabrejets out of George Air Force Base in nearby Victorville a few years before, so that in the spring of 1960 I was not unfamiliar with the area. I knew that Captain Joseph McConnell, our foremost Korean War jet ace, had been killed on the lake while on temporary assignment from George Air Force Base. In 1954, I had witnessed from my cockpit the fatal dive of a supersonic F-100 fighter, and followed the lifeless body of North American test pilot George Welch to earth as his undamaged parachute slowly descended. I knew about Edwards.

    I also knew that despite the desolation, the one-hundred-plus heat, the perpetual howling of the wind, this was the place. Here the very first American jet had been tested, with a make-believe wooden propeller stuck on its nose whenever it was parked, so as not to arouse suspicion; here Captain Chuck Yeager had broken the sound barrier on October 14, 1947; here Captain Mike Collins was going onward and upward. Ad Inexplorata, said the motto of the Flight Test Center: Toward the Unknown. Next to the motto of the Air Rescue Service (That Others May Live), this one was my favorite, and I noted with approval that it was prominently plastered on buildings and flying suits alike: a futuristic, aerodynamic shape escaping from a sandy, cactus-bedecked background into a blue-black sky. On the other hand, the insignia of the test pilot school itself gave me pause. It featured a lot of blue sky, but superimposed above all was a slide rule.

    I signed in somewhat pensively, was assigned a neat cinder-block house, nothing fancy but white-gloves clean, and then headed on back up the highway to Las Vegas to break the good news to Pat. A neat place, you’ll love it! At least I hoped she would, and I would, because for the first time in my Air Force career, we were due for a long and stable assignment. God knows, Pat deserved it; in less than four years of marriage we had lived in four houses, four apartments, and what seemed like forty-four motels. For that matter, I had been moving all my life at frequent and regular intervals, with never more than four years in any one spot. My father had been a career Army officer for thirty-eight years, and in the seventeen years I had lived at home, I had seen dramatic and frequent shifts in scene, from a rooftop apartment in Rome, where I was born, to a modest old colonial house in Alexandria, Virginia, to which he retired in 1945. Along the way, the family had sampled snake-infested country life in Oklahoma, bright lights in Manhattan, as viewed from nearby Governor’s Island, and—most unusual of all—a couple of years’ residence in Casa Blanca, which is generally recognized as the oldest dwelling in the Western Hemisphere. Built by Ponce de Leon’s nephew around 1530, this imposing old fortress overlooks the harbor of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Assigned as living quarters to the commanding general of the Puerto Rican Department, as it was called in 1941, Casa Blanca was the most fascinating place I had ever seen, with seven-foot-thick outer walls, an immense ballroom, a sealed-off tunnel with a secret entrance, and a host of features not to be found in today’s puny lath and plaster or dryboard construction. Even more impressive to me, as a ten-year-old, were the surrounding gardens, teeming with tropical plants and animals. I spent hours studying lizards, hermit crabs, turtles, and tiny tropical fish, and getting acquainted with such stomach-ache producers as under-ripe mangoes and overripe coconuts.

    In Puerto Rico, I also took my first airplane ride, in a small twin-engine amphibian, the Grumman Widgeon. The pilot even let me steer a little bit, an indignity the old Widgeon endured with grace as I jerked the nose up and down unevenly, trying to heed the pilot’s advice to keep her on the horizon. My father watched all this from the rear of the plane with obvious amusement. No pilot, he preferred horses to airplanes, but as an old polo player and horse cavalryman, he did appreciate the excitement of this swift new medium, and allowed as how the Air Corps boys did have a certain juvenile appeal. In fact, he relished telling how he had, in 1911 in the Philippines, taken his first airplane ride, in a Wright machine, sitting on the wing next to Frank Lahm, who was the second military pilot to be taught by the Wrights. Frank flew the frail craft over a forest fire, and the updraft from the heated air caused a sudden lurch, which nearly dislodged Daddy (or so he said) from his makeshift perch. I was intrigued by this story, as indeed I was by Lahm himself, whom I met years later at West Point. Quiet, dignified, without pretense or affectation, this old gentleman had lived right at the cutting edge of the advances slicing through our society in the wake of the new air technology. What changes Lahm had seen in his lifetime, and not passively from an armchair, but actively from the cockpits of a series of ever more complex and fascinating machines. I was impressed, especially when I compared this solitary old eagle to the lemming-like horde of Follow me, men, over the hill young Army leaders I was familiar with at West Point.

    As West Point graduation approached, I had to decide whether to stick with the Army or strike out in a new direction with the recently independent Air Force (to my dad it would always be the Army Air Corps). Unlike that of many young Americans, my love affair with the airplane had been neither all-consuming nor constant. In the years between the Widgeon and meeting Frank Lahm, there had been occasional passionate flings into model airplane building, but airplanes were less a part of my young life than chess, football, or girls. Also, the airplane as a career posed practical problems. One could—25 percent did—wash out of pilot training. One could be killed, practically as easily in peacetime as in war. Promotions were predicted, by those who kept book on such things, to come more slowly in the future Air Force than in the Army, because of past excesses on the part of the Air Force, which had caused a hump of young but senior officers, blocking the rapid advancement of those who followed. All these things, plus the entire thrust of the Army curriculum at West Point, spoke for the Army as a more sensible career choice. Against this was the wonder of what the next fifty years might bring. It had been less than fifty years since the Wrights first flew, and already we were into the jet age.

    Then, too, I had a personal problem. My father’s younger brother, J. Lawton Collins, was Army Chief of Staff at the time; my father had retired as a two-star general; another uncle had been a brigadier; my brother was a colonel; my cousin a major—all in the Army. With no similar entanglements in the Air Force, I felt I had a better chance to make my own way. Certainly there was no chance for nepotism, real or imagined.

    So the Air Force it was, and after a pleasant month’s vacation in Europe following graduation, I found myself in the front cockpit of a single-engine T-6 Texan over the flat farmland of northeastern Mississippi. It was a delightful place to be, especially after four cloying, confining years at West Point. Columbus, Mississippi, was a small, friendly town with a large girls’ college, and a bachelor second lieutenant was appreciated if for no other reason than that he had access to the Officers’ Club, which featured the only bar in town. But the main thing was the flying! Flying was so much fun it didn’t seem right to get paid for doing that and nothing else. Fortunately it came easily to me, and I could relax and enjoy it without the constant apprehension over washing out which plagued so many of my classmates.

    After six months at Columbus learning the basics, I moved on briefly to San Marcos, Texas, to learn instrument and formation flying, and then to Waco for jet indoctrination. Graduating with shiny silver wings at Waco in late summer of 1953, I was among the few chosen to go to Nellis Air Force Base, Las Vegas, Nevada, for advanced day fighter training. This was the most desirable of all assignments, since it was the sole channel into the two Fighter Wings in Korea, which, with their North American F-86 Sabrejets, were battling the MIGs so successfully. At Nellis we really learned to fly—a concentrated, aggressive course designed to weed out anyone who might be a marginal performer in Korea. It was a brutal process as well. In the eleven weeks I was there, twenty-two people were killed. In retrospect it seems preposterous to endure such casualty rates without help from the enemy, but at the time the risk appeared perfectly acceptable. We weren’t sure we were going to make it through the course, but somehow we were sufficiently psyched up by the instructors to give it our all, despite the fact that the Korean armistice had just been signed and prospects for meeting any MIGs were growing more and more remote. We flew as well as we knew how, three and four times a day, wheeling high above the Nevada sky in fifty-minute forays, learning to shoot the guns and to develop the aerial teamwork which would keep MIGs off our tails. At night we roared into Las Vegas, driving our cars in as close a formation as we flew our Sabrejets, terrorizing the natives, gambling away our paltry salaries, snatching a couple hours of sleep before dawn, when we were expected back at the flight line, ready to hurl our little pink bodies into the blue once more. It was a hectic time, and I’m surprised to have survived. I have never felt quite so threatened since.

    Because of the armistice, my destination was changed from Korea to California, and upon graduating from Nellis Air Force Base, I found myself assigned to the 21st Fighter Bomber Wing at Victorville. I had a pleasant year there, still flying Sabrejets but now concentrating on ground attack and nuclear delivery techniques. In mid-December 1954 our wing was transferred to France, so we picked up, part and parcel, and flew East. Christmas found us in Goose Bay, Labrador. By the New Year, we had inched along to Bluie West 1, Greenland (up the fjord at Narsarssuak). Unbelievably bad weather and amply stocked bars made the going treacherous, and we arrived at Chaumont, France, some thirty days after departure in our supersonic jets, having averaged four miles per hour.

    The trip had been fascinating (I have never seen anything from the air more beautiful than the clear azure blue of the Greenland glacier’s fissured rim) and France was a new flying experience. No more the pure clean air of the California desert, where one could get an unimpeded view all the way from Mount Whitney to Death Valley, from the highest point in the continental United States to the lowest, all in an eye’s blink. Now it was the Saar Valley, leaden and flat and heavy with smoke and clouds and greasy pollution, making it difficult for the sun to penetrate even on the best days. No longer were we the proud eagles, flying high, scraping our wings against the troposphere, but now we skulked along, clinging to the protective mists of the valleys, as we practiced our new art of skimming the ground toward our imagined targets across the Iron Curtain. Only occasionally could we escape to the sunny shores of the Mediterranean, where once again we practiced our trade of bombing and gun firing and flying in the crystal-clear air. Near Tripoli, in Libya, the U.S. Air Force had established Wheelus Air Base, a large complex where the various fighter units from England and France could come and keep honed the various skills which they could not practice in the crowded, cloudy skies of continental Europe. Once a year a competitive gathering was held among the Fighter Wings, a gunnery meet, and in 1956 I managed to win one of the events and was presented with a silver loving cup, which to this day I treasure above more prestigious honors that have since come my

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