Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (23 page)

In the blustery weather of the Sea of Japan, a routine day could quickly turn deadly. An unexpected blast of wind, a small mechanical error, a lapse in timing or judgment, and you’d be gone. For Shepard, luck would be a constant copilot. He would forever argue that skill, discipline, and attention to detail protected him. As he liked to say, “There are old test pilots and there are bold test pilots, but there are no old, bold test pilots.” Still, there are events that are simply out of a disciplined pilot’s hands.

Even without the help of enemy planes and missiles, a twenty-seven-thousand-ton aircraft carrier capable of moving at nearly forty miles an hour—fast enough to pull a water skier—is a profoundly dangerous vehicle, and the
Oriskany
’s cruise toward Korea was not without its mishaps. Billy Lawrence, a short, tough Naval Academy football player from Nashville, was one of the few “nuggets”—pilots on their first assignment—in Air Group 19. One day, off the coast of Hawaii, Lawrence experienced what was blandly called a “partial catapult.”

Two hydraulic-powered catapults were built
into the forward deck of the
Oriskany
. A plane’s front wheels attached to the catapult’s tow bar, which whipped the plane forward like a sling-shot to help it become airborne. But hydraulic catapults were in-famously temperamental. The explosion of a hydraulic catapult aboard the aircraft carrier USS
Bennington
killed a hundred crewmen. In subsequent years hydraulic catapults would be replaced by stronger and safer steam-powered catapults.

Billy Lawrence hooked his Banshee to a catapult tow bar, pushed the jet to full throttle, and prepared for the jolt of the catapult’s shove. But the catapult inexplicably lost power halfway through the launch, and the plane belly-flopped two hundred yards off the bow and began to sink as the fast-moving ship bore down on it. Lawrence was able to escape from the crippled jet, and a helicopter—which always hovers nearby during takeoffs—was able to drop a safety line. But Lawrence realized too late that he had forgotten to unstrap his parachute. The helicopter barely lifted him and his w
aterlogged parachute to safety.

When Captain Griffin later summoned him to the bridge, Lawrence expected to get chewed out. Instead, Griffin told him, “Well done.” Lawrence later learned that Shepard, as the officer assigned to investigate the mishap, had written up the a
ccident report and instead of crucifying Lawrence praised him for handling the emergency with poise.

Other aviators weren’t so lucky. One landed too hard on the deck, and a bomb attached to the wing exploded, killing him and several others. One pilot took off perfectly one morning, banked left, and just kept going left—into the sea. Another was killed when his propeller plane’s wings, which folded in toward the cockpit to allow more planes to fit on the carrier deck, inexplicably folded in the air.

Still, with advice and training from Shepard, who took on a mentoring role during the cruise toward Korea, the hard landings declined and Griffin’s deck required fewer repairs. As the
Oriskany
’s record came to outshine that of most other ships in the Pacific, colleagues began marveling at Shepard’s expertise. He had more experience at twenty-nine than most aviators a decade older. “He had an aura of confidence that was unbelievable,” said squadron mate John Mitchell. “Whether it was in a roomful of admirals or in mixed company, he just exuded it. And that confidence carried ov
er into his flying. He was fearless.”

As the Oriskany neared the coast of Korea in the summer of 1953, significant progress had been made in the armistice talks, and the aviators began to suspect that war would turn to peace before the
Oriskany
reached the scene. Still, the stormy seas complicated many otherwise routine landings, forcing the LSOs to wave off incoming jets, which then looped around for another approach. While waiting for his chance to land one afternoon, Shepard’s squadronmate Frank Repp began running low on fuel and received permission for an emergency landing. Alighting on an aircraft carrier
in calm seas is difficult enough. But in foul weather the ship might rise and fall as much as fifteen feet and would rock from side to side as well. Landing on such an unstable target was like trying to thread a needle held by a d
runk. Pilots were told to time their approach so that they would land precisely as the deck was falling into a trough between waves.

Repp approached slowly and, in an effort to touch down before the next wave lifted the ship’s rear, lifted the Banshee’s nose a bit to slow it down. But he had slowed down too much, and his Banshee flamed out and stalled. Repp was now a falling brick, and despite the LSO’s frantic wave-off signal, it was too late to veer left or right. All he could do was coast—a hail Mary dead-stick landing—and pray for the best. The deck was still too high, and for a second it looked to Repp as if he was done for, as if he was going to slam right into the backside of the
Oriskany.
Then, slowly, oh so s
lowly, the deck began to fall into the trough between sea swells.

In the game of inches that is an aircraft carrier landing, Frank Repp came up a few inches short that day. His Banshee hit the rear edge of the deck and cracked open like an egg. The plane split apart just behind the cockpit—feet from Repp’s head— shredding the tanks where the last few hundred gallons of fuel sloshed around and unleashing a fireball that shot flames two hundred feet into the sky. Two-thirds of the plane—wings, engines, tail—stopped dead on the edge of the ship’s fantail, then slid back into the water. Bouncing forth from the flames, at more than a hundred miles an hour,
was the front third of Repp’s Banshee, less than fifteen feet of nose and cockpit, which had somehow escaped without being blown to pieces. Inside, Repp held his hands tight to his chest—he remembered that in similar accidents men had lost limbs by bracing themselves against the cockpit walls. The wingless tube tumbled and flipped across the deck until a barrier caught and stopped it. Repp thought he was dreaming when he saw the figure of a man wrapped in a puffy asbestos suit, who pulled him free of the wreckage.

Most of those on the ship who saw or heard the explosion assumed the worst. Jig Dog had even picked up th
e telephone to call Captain Griffin and report another fatality. Then he saw Repp walking across the deck.

“Frank!” he yelled. “I thought you were on that airplane.”

“I was, Jig,” Repp yelled back. “Pretty colorful, wasn’t I?”

The next day Repp was flying a new Banshee.

Shepard’s colleague John Mitchell once found himself in a similar dead-stick landing, bearing down fast on the
Oriskany
’s tail. Just the night before, Shepard had told him not to let his speed drop too low on approach or, like Repp, he’d stall. But when Mitchell tried to accelerate, there was no response. Instead of trying a “colorful” landing, he jerked the Banshee down and left at the last second, hoping he’d hit water, not steel. But the jet slammed into an open section of the ship’s rear end, just below the flight deck, an area called the “spudlocker.” The plane burst into fl
ames, and Mitchell heard the screams of five men who were sleeping nearby. The screams made him realize:
I’m not dead.

After crawling from the wreckage and helping carry the other injured men to the ship’s hospital, Mitchell phoned the ready room to tell his colleagues he was okay. Another pilot picked up the phone and Mitchell said, “Hi, this is Mitch.” After a moment of silence an angry voice on the other end said, “That’s a pretty sick joke, whoever you are.” And Mitchell realized:
They
think I’m dead.

Another officer grabbed the ready-room phone and began screaming at Mitchell, “You fucking son of a bitch, you sick fucking—”

“Willie!” Mitchell yelled, recognizing the voice of a craggy, forty-five-year-old warrant officer, Willie Williamson. “Willie, Willie, Willie! It’s me.” Finally Mitchell convinced Williamson he wasn’t dead. Shepard rushed down to the doctor’s office, where the doctor had touched up Mitchell’s miraculously minor scrapes and cuts and was offering him a shot of whiskey to calm his nerves. He took a glass of whiskey for himself and told Mitchell
to rest up and give him a full statement tomorrow. “And Mitch,” Shepard said, “good to have you back.”

In July 1953 an armistice was signed by the United Nations, North Korea, and China. Even though South Korea refused to sign the treaty, the Korean War began winding to a close. Shepard’s chance to blast the enemy from the sky had passed. Instead of dropping bombs or chasing MiGs, he and his squadronmates remained in “alert posture” and spent their days patrolling the skies, like cops on a beat.

Korea had been Shepard’s last, best opportunity to reach the exalted ranks of certified combat aviators. But Shepard would not, in an otherwise stellar career, earn a single kill. Tha
t fact would haunt him years later when his record was stacked against that of his fellow astronaut, John Glenn, who five days before the cease-fire was flying with his four-plane division when they encountered and downed three MiGs. Glenn painted another red star beside the words “MiG Mad Marine” on his jet. Three stars for three kills—not quite an ace, but close. Glenn’s last MiG turned out to be the last of 792 Soviet-made MiG jets downed by U.S. aviators in the war.

Arriving too late to join that elite group was a disappointing twist of timing for Shepard. But he was never known to mope or complain about things. Like his optimistic mother, Renza, he rejected dejection. Even during bad times his colleagues would notice his “irrepressible spirit.” Shepard could be insensitive, dismissive, and pithy. Sometimes he was distant and contemplative, other times pedantic and overbearing. He had a low boiling point and could easily explode into noisy anger. But an emotion he never displayed was melancholy, as if even a brief submission to woe was the ultimate sign
of weakness. Besides, Shepard always found ways to enliven a disappointing situation.

At the end of its patrol duties off the Korean coast, the
Oriskany
returned for a brief stop back in San Francisco. During the Pacific crossing, VF-193 practiced some formation flying. Four-plane divisions returning to the ship usually bypassed the carrier in the echelon formation—each plane a little behind and below the other, like steps, so that each pilot could see the next. They’d then separate and land one by one. Shepard one day convinced his three other divisionmates to assemble in a tight diamond formation and pass low over the ship. It was a trick borrowed from the Navy’s four-year-old stunt team, the Blue Angels. Formation flying requires i
ncredibly steady hands, but disassembling a tight-packed diamond formation is even more difficult and dangerous—and, without prior approval, completely against the rules. As Shepard’s quartet roared past the
Oriskany,
the deck crew cheered its approval. Captain Griffin and Jig Dog, however, weren’t amused. Shepard was put in hack—just as he had been back at Patuxent River. He had to stay in his tiny room for an entire week.

Billy Lawrence, John “Mitch” Mitchell, and the other younger pilots visited Shepard at mealtime so that he wouldn’t have to eat alone. But, just like those swats in the ass at Annapolis, Shepard took his punishment with a smirk. In fact, he seemed proud to have distinguished himself from his peers. Soon after the flyover stunt his squadron commander wrote in his fitness report an assessment that could have easily applied to Shepard’s whole career: “LT Shepard is a very fine Naval Aviator, but he occasionally strains the bounds of good flight discipline.” In time, however, Sh
epard convinced Jig Dog that his skills were valuable enough to outweigh his indulgences.