American Hero

Ever Since Tom Wolfe's book was published, the question I'm asked most often and which always annoys me is whether or not I think I've got The Right Stuff. I know that golden trout have the right stuff, and I've seen a few gals here and there who I'd bet had it in spades, but those words seem meaningless when used to describe a pilot's attributes. The question implies that a guy who has the right stuff was born that way. I was born with unusually good eyes and coordination. I was mechanically oriented, understood machines easily. My nature was to stay cool in tight spots. Is that the right stuff? All I know is, I worked my tail off to learn how to fly, and worked hard at it all the way. And in the end, the one big reason I was better than average as a pilot was that I flew more than anybody else.

As a kid, I never dreamed of being an aviator. I was a pool hustler from the West Virginia hollers. I saw my first airplane close up when a Beechcraft bellied into a cornfield on the Mud River. I was 15 and stopped by on my bike to see the wreck before heading out to the county poor farm, where I helped out on Saturday afternoons, shaving the old codgers.

Besides running chores, playing Kelly pool in the pool hall or poker under a covered bridge at the edge of town and catting around with three or four different gals, there wasn't a helluva lot going on in my life in the summer of 1941. I had my diploma from Hamlin High School tucked in a drawer somewhere, and I fished it out, together with my birth certificate proving I was 18, when an Army Air Corps recruiter came to town. I enlisted for a two-year hitch. I thought I might enjoy it and see some of the world. Dad never preached at us, and I can recall him giving me only two pieces of advice: Never buy a pickup truck that wasn't built by General Motors and---on the day I left for the Service---"Son, don't gamble." He hadn't been pleased with a job I'd had sweeping up and racking balls at the pool hall for ten bucks a month, while picking up side money hustling games.

I became an airplane mechanic. Growing up around truck engines and drilling-equipment generators, I was one of the few kids in town who could take apart a car motor and put it back together again. Dad was an expert mechanic, and I just understood motors---a natural ability, like having exceptional eyes and coordination to be a crack shot. Hand a rifle to a hillbilly and he'll hit a bull's-eye every time. So, without knowing it or even caring, I had the talents needed for flying in combat. But after taking my first airplane ride, I'd rather have crawled across country than go back up. I took off for a spin with a maintenance officer flight-testing a ship I serviced and threw up all over the back seat, staggering out of that damned thing as miserable as I'd ever been. But teenagers blot out the past when the present seems appealing. (continued on page 118)American Hero(continued from page 112) I saw a notice announcing a "flying sergeant" program. I'd take my chances with flying to become a sergeant: Three stripes and you were out of pulling K.P. and guard duty. I applied.

The war was only months old when I was accepted. There were just a few of us enlisted men---the rest were college boys, cadets who would become commissioned officers when they received their aviator's wings. At first, I worried about keeping up with guys who were a little older and a lot better educated than I was, but once we took off in a trainer, we were all equal. I got sick the first few flights but quickly overcame it. Because I was well coordinated, I had less trouble than most handling a stick and rudder. But it was hard work learning to fly and, like everyone else, I sweated through my first solo and bounced in for a landing in one piece.

Flying became fun. I knew what I was doing in the cockpit and understood the airplane. In only a month, I graduated from being airsick even while flying level to actually enjoying spins and dives. Being cocky and competitive, I began bouncing other students and staging mock dogfights. I could line up on air or ground targets before others in the class even saw them. My instructor knew who was best in the group, and in the end, I was the one he recommended to become a fighter pilot. I was thrilled.

•

March 1943. You're whipping through a desert canyon at 300 miles an hour, your belly barely scraping the rocks and sagebrush, your hand on the throttle of a P-39 fighter. It's a crystal-clear morning on the desert of western Nevada, and the joy of flying---the sense of speed and exhilaration 20 feet above the deck---makes you so damned happy that you want to shout for joy. A hillock rises ahead, and you ease back, skim over the top of it, dropping down above cottonwoods lining the bank of a stream. You feel so lucky, so blessed to be a fighter pilot. Nearly 100 of us are testing our skill and courage by leaving prop marks on the dirt roads, stampeding grazing cattle (a few angry ranchers even take pot shots at us) and raising the shingles off ranch houses. Swooping over the desert like a horde of metal locusts, we practice for strafing runs, the most dangerous missions, which will eventually kill many of us. Our instructors warn us to get down on the deck as low as we can, staying below the tree line, where enemy machine guns can't target a clear shot.

That was Tonopah, Nevada, where 30 fledgling pilots began six months of intensive training to become a combat fighter squadron---the 363rd. We lived surrounded by sand dunes in tar-paper shacks belching black smoke from the oilburning stoves that warmed only themselves on cold desert nights. The wind never stopped blowing and the chow was awful, but none of us complained. We flew from dawn to dusk, six flights a day, six days a week, dogfighting, buzzing and practicing gunnery. We crawled exhausted into the sack at ten and straggled to breakfast at 4:30 A.M., taking off on our first flight just as dawn broke. I logged 100 hours of flying that first month. Hog heaven.

Once I was a fighter pilot, I couldn't imagine being anything else. We were hellraising fighter jocks with plenty of swagger. When we weren't flying, we zipped on our leather flight jackets, which told the world who we were, and crowded into Bud Anderson's 1939 Ford convertible and drove into Tonopah, a wide-open silver-mining town. On paydays, we crowded around the blackjack tables of the Tonopah Club, drank ourselves blind on fifths of rotgut rye and bourbon, then staggered over to the local cat house. Miss Taxine, the madam, tried to keep a fresh supply of gals, so we wouldn't get bored and become customers of Lucky Strike, a cat house in Mina, about 70 miles down the road. But we went to Mina anyway, wrecked the place, and the sheriff ran us out of town. The next morning, a P-39 strafed Mina's water tower.

In late June, we left Nevada to begin training in bomber-escort and coastal-patrol operations at Santa Rosa, California. The morning we left from the train depot, Taxine and the gals came down with sandwiches, doughnuts and hot coffee and gave us a heroes' send-off. For us, the war was drawing ever closer.

Oroville, California, was the next stop on our training schedule. My first day in town, I went over to the local gymnasium to try to arrange a U.S.O. dance---a way for our guys to meet the local girls. I walked the length of an enormous gym to a small office where a very pretty brunette was seated behind a desk. Her name was Glennis Dickhouse. I asked her if she could arrange a dance that evening for about 30 guys. She looked so annoyed that I thought she might throw me out.

"You expect me to whip up a dance and find 30 girls on three hours' notice?"

"No," I said, "you'll need to come up with only 29, because I want to take you."

Glennis did it.

•

Glennis remembers: I really don't know why Chuck appealed to me so much, but obviously he did. He was very skinny in those days, and his grammar was just atrocious---because of that West Virginia accent, I barely understood every third word he spoke. I had dated a few soldiers but never a fighter pilot. I think that really impressed me, even if he was the most junior officer in his squadron. But I also sensed that he was a very strong and determined person---a poor boy who had started with nothing and would show the world what he was really made of. That was the kind of man I hoped to marry.

We finally got together on his final weekend of training in Casper, Wyoming, before he shipped out for overseas. The entire group, all three squadrons, had a big party in a hotel in downtown Casper. I danced with everyone in his squadron. The men were confined to the base after the party until they shipped out on Monday morning. Chuck sneaked out to stay with me. When I returned home and went to work, one of the girls looked at me rather strangely. "What on earth happened to you?" she asked. "Look in the mirror." My face was a mass of tiny red pimples. I had chicken pox. I had to laugh thinking that through Chuck, I had spread chicken pox among all those quarantined fliers.

Chuck called me the day he left. As the maintenance officer, he stayed behind for a few days to help pack and move equipment. He said he had loaded 500 pounds of Christmas candy for children into the washing machines they were taking to England. Then he left for New York to catch up with the squadron. He wrote regularly from England, telling me he had named his fighter Glamorous Glennis.

•

Clarence E. "Bud" Anderson---leading ace of the 363rd, with 17 kills---remembers: Chuck Yeager is my closest friend. Our bonds are firm and deep and were forged while we flew together in combat.

He was a standout pilot and character from the day I met him in Tonopah. He flew like a demon and was always taking the calculated risks that are the essence of his personality. We all liked to buzz, but Chuck buzzed a few feet lower than the rest of us. He was aggressive and competitive, but awfully skillful, too. In combat, he didn't charge blindly into a gaggle of Germans, but with the advantage of having sharp eyes that could see forever, he set up his attack to take them by surprise when the odds were in his favor. And when Yeager attacked, he was ferocious. There wasn't a pilot in the squadron, including a few who didn't like him, who didn't want Yeager close by in a dangerous mission.

•

On October 12, 1944, leading the group on a bombing escort over Bremen, I scored five victories---the first ace in a day. I take (continued on page 166)American Hero(continued from page 118) credit for being plenty lucky. We picked up our two boxes of B-24s over Holland and I positioned two squadrons to escort them, then took off with my own squadron to range about 100 miles ahead. We were over Steinhuder lake when I spotted specks about 50 miles ahead. Combat vision, we call it. You focus out to infinity and back, searching a section of sky each time. To be able to see at such distances is a gift that's hard to explain, and only one other man and I could do it. The other guys, who had excellent eyesight on the ground, took it on faith that the two of us actually saw something far out there. I didn't even radio to the others but just kept us heading toward the German fighters from out of the sun. We were at 28,000 feet and closing fast. Soon I was able to count 22 individual specks. I figured they were Me-109s sitting up there, waiting for our bombers. And I was right.

They were just circling and waiting and didn't see us coming at them out of the sun. We closed to about 1000 yards, and if their leader saw us, he probably thought we were additional 109s, because he made no effort to scramble out of our way. In the lead, I was the only one yet in firing range, and I came in behind their tail-end Charlie and was about to begin hammering him when he suddenly broke left and ran into his wingman. They both bailed out. It was almost comic: I scored two quick victories without firing a shot. But apparently the big shortage in Germany was not of airplanes but of pilots, and the Germans were probably under orders to jump for it in tight spots. By now, all the airplanes in that sky had dropped their wing tanks and were spinning and diving in a wild, wide-open dogfight. I blew up a 109 from 600 yards---my third victory---when I turned around and saw another angling in behind me. I pulled back on my throttle so hard that I nearly stalled, rolled up and over, came in behind and under him, kicking right rudder and simultaneously firing. I was directly underneath the guy, less than 50 feet away, and I opened up that 109 as if it were a can of Spam. That made four. A moment later, I waxed a guy's fanny in a steep dive: I pulled up at about 1000 feet; he augered straight into the ground.

On rainy nights in the flight leader's Nissen hut, we'd listen to Glenn Miller records and toast grilled-cheese sandwiches on the coke stove. If we'd had a good day at work, we heated a poker redhot and branded another swastika on the front door. Each swastika represented a dogfight victory, and by the end of my tour, that door displayed 50. During the last week in November, I became a double ace with 11 kills by shooting down four German planes during a historic dogfight.

•

Glennis remembers: Being a military pilot's wife seemed exciting, especially with a husband like Chuck, who loved action, whether it was flying or hunting or fishing. So I was primed to say "Yes!" if and when he ever proposed. He arrived at my door in California, straight from the war in Europe, and told me to pack.

"I'm taking you home to meet my folks."

"What for?" I asked.

"What do you think?" he replied.

•

I reported to Wright Field in July 1945, a few weeks before the atomic bomb ended the war. I was assigned as an assistant maintenance officer to the fighter-test section of the flight-test division---the hub over the next decade for the testing of a radically new generation of powerful airplanes that would take us to the edge of space and change aviation forever. Two weeks after arriving at Wright, I was flying the first operational American jet fighter.

I had no idea what the future might hold. It was like having Aladdin's lamp with unlimited rubs. I could fly as much as I wanted, building flying experience on dozens of different kinds of fighters. The first chance I got, I flew to Hamlin and buzzed Glennis, who was living with my folks because we couldn't find any housing at Wright. I called her that night and said, "I miss you, hon, but I'm in hog heaven."

I had a small office between hangars seven and eight, where all the fighters were kept, and got to know some of the test pilots. It never occurred to me that I could be one of them---I lacked the education. All of them were college grads, mostly with engineering degrees. There were about 25 fighter test pilots, and they weren't shy about their status. They were the stars of the show. I thought, Well, fair enough. If they're fighter test pilots, they must be hotter than a whore's pillow.

So, every time I took off in a P-51 on a test hop, I climbed to 15,000 feet and circled over Wright, waiting for one of those guys to take off. As soon as a test pilot climbed to altitude, I dove at him. I went through the entire stable of test pilots and waxed every fanny. A few of them fought back halfheartedly, but none of them had any combat experience, and when they saw that I was merciless, they just quit. And they weren't amused at being shown up by an assistant maintenance officer.

I flew six to eight hours a day; I flew everything they had, including most of the captured German and Japanese fighters. I checked out in 25 different airplanes. I never did understand how a pilot could walk by a parked airplane and not want to crawl into the cockpit and fly off. I would touch ground just long enough to climb out of one airplane and service-check another. I even flew the first prototype jet fighter, the Bell P-59, which had been secretly tested on the California desert in 1942.

Everything about airplanes interested me: how they flew, why they flew, what each could or couldn't do and why. As much as I flew, I was always learning something new---whether it was a switch on the instrument panel I hadn't noticed or handling characteristics of the aircraft in weather conditions I hadn't experienced. In order to have an eager curiosity about an airplane's systems, you've got to love engines and valves and all those mechanical gadgets that make most people yawn. It was a terrific advantage when something went wrong at 20,000 feet.

The jet age arrived for me the day I was seated in the cockpit of the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star---the first operational American jet fighter. I felt like I was flying for the first time. I greased that thing in on landing, as happy as a squirrel hunter who had bagged a mountain lion.

But I came within an inch of being bounced out of test-pilot school and out of the Service. I took off with my instructor one day in a two-seat prop trainer to run a power-speed test at 5000 feet. Suddenly, the master rod blew apart in the engine and the ship began to vibrate as if it would fall apart. I cut back on the power and began looking down to see where I could make an emergency landing. We were over Ohio farmland with plenty of plowed fields. I didn't want to bail out unless it was absolutely necessary. My instructor, a Lieutenant Hatfield, hadn't done much flying, and I looked back at him in the mirror and saw that his teeth were sticking to his lips. I said, "No sweat. Lock your shoulder harness and make sure your belt is tight, because I'm gonna try and make it into one of these fields."

There was a farm with fields on either side, and I started to set myself up on one of them. But I was sinking too fast coming in on a dead stick to make one field and was really too high to use all of the other, so we came in between the two, directly in the path of the farmhouse, a chicken house, a smokehouse and a well. Wheels up, we hit the ground, slithering along, and went through the chicken house in a clatter of boards and a cloud of feathers. As the airplane skidded to a stop, the right wing hit the smokehouse, turning us sideways, and the tail hit the front end of the farmhouse porch, flipping us around. We came to rest right alongside the farmwife's kitchen window. She was at the sink, looking out, and I was looking her right in the eye. Dust and feathers were raining down. I opened the canopy and managed a small smile. "Morning, ma'am," I said. "Can I use your telephone?"

Because there had been a loss of civilian property, a board of inquiry was held. One of the witnesses was a councilman in a nearby village who claimed that before I crash-landed, I had buzzed down Main Street. Lieutenant Hatfield, who was my passenger, supported my denial, but those four majors on the board seemed hostile in their questioning, and I was scared to death. I could easily be court-martialed. The barograph aboard my airplane was my best defense. It clearly showed my altitude at the time of the engine problem and what we were doing before I hit. Without that thing aboard, I'd probably be back in Hamlin, digging turnips.

I had figured that our lives would settle down as soon as I got test-pilot school behind me. Little did I know. A few months after I graduated, I was selected to be the principal pilot to fly the X-1 and to try to break the sound barrier.

•

Twice during quick trips out to Muroc Air Base in the Mojave Desert to pick up airplanes and ferry them back to Wright, I saw the X-1 being shackled beneath a B-29 bomber prior to taking off on a flight. It was a small ship, painted bright orange and shaped like a .50-caliber machine-gun bullet. Somebody told me it was rocket-propelled with 6000 pounds of thrust, designed to fly at twice the speed of sound. That was beyond my understanding, and I let it go at that.

The pilot was a civilian named Chalmers "Slick" Goodlin. He was a sharp-looking guy, rumored to be making a fortune from Bell in these risky flights. I heard he was real hot, and he had to be to walk away from a few of those X-1 tests. In those days, civilians did all of the research flying, so they could be paid risk bonuses; nobody wanted to ask an Air Corps pilot to risk his neck on a military pay check.

I was busy doing air shows and flight-test work; being the most junior test pilot in the shop, I was lucky to be asked to make coffee, but I did manage to get a few interesting jobs. In May 1947, I attended a meeting of all the fighter test pilots, requesting volunteers to fly the X-1. My friends and fellow test pilots Bob Hoover and Jack Ridley raised their hands along with me and five others.

Hoover and I were renegades who were gone a lot of the time and definitely weren't part of the clique, so all we heard was that the X-1 research program was in some sort of trouble and that the Air Corps was planning to take it over from Bell and Slick Goodlin. I said, "Sure, put my name down," knowing there were at least a dozen others with more seniority in the section; then I flew off to Cleveland to do an air show. Colonel Albert G. Boyd was also there, and I flew back on his wing. He was head of the flight-test division and a tough, demanding disciplinarian. When he landed, I remarked on the radio, "Not bad for an old man."

Colonel Boyd wasn't amused. "Who said that?" he barked. There was absolute silence, though I figured my drawl had given me away. Colonel Boyd had just bought a new car, and he was the kind who kept meticulous records about its per formance. So a couple of us decided to put some pebbles in his hubcaps. We watched from a window: He backed up, stopped, got out, looking puzzled, got back in, drove a little more, stopped, got out. We laughed until we almost wet our pants.

But a few days later, he sent for me, and I thought, Oh, God, here we go! It was either the pebbles or my remark when he landed that had caught up with me. Colonel Boyd never looked sterner, and when I saluted in front of his desk, he kept me standing at attention for nearly half an hour while we talked. I left in a state of shock. He didn't exactly offer me the X-1, but he sure moved around the edges. He asked me why I had volunteered, and I told him it seemed like an interesting program, something else to fly. He said, "Yeager, this is the airplane to fly. The first pilot who goes faster than sound will be in the history books. It will be the most historic ride since the Wright brothers'. And that's why the X-1 was built." He told me there were all kinds of incredible planes on the drawing boards, including an aircraft that could fly six times faster than the speed of sound and a supersonic bomber powered by an atomic reactor. The Air Corps was developing a project that would put military pilots into space---but all these plans were stuck on a dime until the X-1 punched through the sound barrier.

"I haven't any doubt it will be done," Colonel Boyd told me, "and that an Air Corps pilot will be the one to do it."

He told me why the Air Corps was taking over the program. Slick Goodlin had contracted with Bell to take the X-1 up to 0.8 Mach, which he had done. Then he had renegotiated his contract and demanded $150,000 to go beyond Mach one. Point eight Mach was phase one of the program. Phase two was to take it on out to 1.1 Mach---supersonic. Slick had completed 20 powered flights but felt that things were getting too thrilling and tried to renegotiate his bonus by asking that it be paid over five years to beat taxes. Bell had brought in their chief test pilot, Tex Johnson, to take a test flight and verify the danger involved. He had flown around 0.75 Mach and reported that Slick deserved every dime he asked for. But the Bell lawyers turned down Slick's payment-on-the-installment-plan idea, and until the matter was resolved, Slick refused to fly. The Air Corps had lost patience with all the delays and decided to take over the X-1 project.

I asked the old man if he thought there was a sound barrier. "Hell, no," he said, "or I wouldn't be sending out one of my pilots. But I want you to know the hazards. There are some very good aviation people who think that at the speed of sound, air loads may go to infinite. Do you know what that means?"

"Yes, sir," I said. "That would be it."

He nodded. "Nobody will know for sure what happens at Mach one until somebody gets there."

•

Before his death in 1976, Major General Albert G. Boyd remembered: I asked my deputy, Colonel Fred Ascani, to sit down with me and review all of the 125 pilots in the flight-test division and see what kind of list we could compile.

I wanted a pilot capable of doing extremely precise, scientific flying. Above all, I wanted a pilot who was rock solid in stability. Yeager came up number one.

•

Major General Fred Ascani remembers: Well, we all wanted to be somebody, but some got to be somebody more than others. In those days, Chuck wasn't quite a nobody, but he wasn't a somebody, either, and I knew him mostly by reputation, which was as an extremely proficient pilot who flew with an uncanny, instinctive feel for the airplane. He's the only pilot I've ever flown with who gives the impression that he's part of the cockpit hardware---so in tune with the machine that instead of being flesh and blood, he could be an autopilot. He made an airplane talk.

•

Glennis remembers: When I moved out to Muroc, I was practically the only wife there. Shortly after we settled in, Chuck drove me to the base to show me the X-1. He purposely hadn't told me that he had named the plane Glamorous Glennis, but there it was, written below the cockpit, just like he'd done on his Mustang in England. This was an important research airplane and I was very surprised. And proud. He said, "You're my good-luck charm, hon. Any airplane I name after you always brings me home." I really think that's why the Air Corps allowed my name to stay on the X-1. Chuck didn't ask permission to do it, and they weren't delighted that he had---the official pictures of the ship had my name airbrushed out---but none of the brass wanted to interfere with his good-luck charm and perhaps jinx the mission. So Chuck got his way and I had a namesake that one day would be displayed in the Smithsonian near another famous airplane, the first one flown by the Wright brothers.

•

Shivering, I banged my gloved hands together and strapped on my oxygen mask inside the coldest airplane ever flown. I was cold-soaked from the hundreds of gallons of liquid-oxygen fuel stored in the compartment directly behind at minus 296 degrees Fahrenheit. No heater, no defroster---I'd just have to grit my teeth for the next 15 minutes until I landed and felt that hot desert sun. But that cold saps your strength: It's like trying to work and concentrate inside a frozen-food locker.

That cold will take you on the ride of your life. You watched the X-1 get its seven-A.M. feeding in a cloud of vapor, saw the frost form under its orange belly. That was eerie; you're carrying 600 gallons of LOX and water alcohol that can blow up at the flick of a switch and scatter you over several counties. But if all goes well, the beast will chugalug a ton of fuel a minute.

Anyone with brain cells would have to wonder what in hell he was doing in such a situation: strapped inside a live bomb that was about to be dropped from a bomb bay. The butterflies are fluttering, but you feed off fear as if it were a high-energy candy bar. It keeps you alert and focused.

You can't watch yourself fly. But you know when you're in sync with the machine, so plugged into its instruments and controls that your mind and your hand become the heart of its operating system. You can make that airplane talk and, like a good horse, the machine knows when it's in competent hands. You know what you can get away with. And you can be wrong only once. You smile reading newspaper stories about a pilot in a disabled plane who maneuvered to miss a schoolyard before he hit the ground. That's crap. In an emergency situation, a pilot thinks about only one thing---survival. You don't say anything on the radio, and you aren't even aware that a schoolyard exists. That's exactly how it is.

There are at least a dozen ways the X-1 can kill you, so your concentration is total during the preflight-check procedures. You load up nitrogen-gas pressures in the manifolds---your life's blood, because the nitrogen gas runs all the internal systems as well as the flaps and the landing gear. Then you bleed off the liquid-oxygen manifold and shut it down. All's in order.

Half an hour ago, we taxied out to takeoff in the mother ship. Because of the possibility of our crashing with so much volatile fuel, they closed down the base until we were safely off the ground. That's the only acknowledgment from the base commander that we even exist. There's no interest in our flights, because practically nobody at Muroc gives us any chance for success. Those bastards call our flights Slick Goodlin's Revenge. The word is that he knew when to get out in one piece by quitting over money.

One minute to drop. Ridley, my flight engineer, flashes the word from the copilot's seat in the mother ship. We're at 25,000 feet as the B-29 noses over and starts its shallow dive. Major Robert Cardenas, the driver, starts counting backward from ten.

C-r-r-ack. The bomb-shackle release jolts you up from your seat, and as you sail out of the dark bomb bay, the sun explodes in brightness.

The moment of truth: If you are going to be blown up, this is likely to be the time. You light up the first chamber.

Whoosh. Slammed back in your seat, a tremendous kick in the butt. Nose up and hold on. Barely a sound; you can hear your breathing in the oxygen mask---you're outracing the noise behind you---and for the first time in a powered airplane, you can hear the air beating against the windshield as the distant dot that is Hoover's high-chase P-80 grows ever bigger. You pass him like he's standing still, and he reports seeing diamond-shaped shock waves leaping out of your fiery exhaust. Climbing faster than you can even think but using only one of four rocket chambers, you turn off one and light another. We're streaking up at 0.7 Mach; this beast's power is awesome. You've never known such a feeling of speed while pointing up in the sky. At 45,000 feet, where morning resembles the beginning of dusk, you turn on the last of the four chambers. God, what a ride! And you still have nearly half your fuel left.

•

Pancho's was a dude ranch as well as a watering hole and barbecue. One night we walked over to the corral and had them saddle up a couple of horses. It was a pretty night, and we rode for about an hour. We decided to race back. Unfortunately, there was no moon, otherwise I would have seen that the gate we had gone out of was now closed. I saw the gate only when I was practically on top of it. I was slightly in the lead, and I tried to veer and miss it, but it was too late. We hit the gate and I tumbled through the air. The horse got cut and I was knocked silly. The next thing I remember was Glennis kneeling over me, asking me if I was OK. I was woozy, and she helped me stand up. It took a lot for me to straighten up; I felt like I had a spear in my side.

Glennis knew immediately. "You broke a rib," she said. She was all for driving straight to the base hospital.

I said, "No, the flight surgeon will ground me."

"Well, you can't fly with broken ribs," she argued.

"If I can't, I won't; if I can, I will."

Monday morning, I struggled out of bed. My shoulder was sore, and I ached generally from bumps and bruises, but my ribs near to killed me. Glennis drove me over to Rosamond, where a local doctor confirmed that I had two cracked ribs and taped me up. He told me to take it easy. The tape job really helped. The pain was at least manageable, and I was able to drive myself to the base that afternoon.

I was really low. I felt we were on top of these flights now, and I wanted to get them over with. And as much as I was hurting, I could only imagine what the old man would say if I were grounded for falling off a horse. So I sat down with Jack Ridley. I said, "If this were the first flight, I wouldn't even think about trying it with these busted sumbitches. But, hell, I know every move I've got to make, and most of the major switches are right on the control-wheel column."

He said, "True, but how in hell are you gonna be able to lock the cockpit door? That takes some lifting and shoving." So we walked into the hangar to see what we were up against.

We looked at the door. Jack said, "Let's see if we can get a stick or something that you can use in your left hand to raise the handle up on the door to lock it. Get it up at least far enough where you can get both hands on it and get a grip on it."

We looked around and found a broom. Jack sawed off a ten-inch piece of broomstick, and it fit right into the door handle. Then I crawled into the X-1 and we tried it out. By using that broomstick to raise the door handle, I found I could manage to lock it. We tried it two or three times, and it worked. Finally, though, Ridley said, "Jesus, son, how are you gonna get down the ladder?"

I said, "One rung at a time. Either that or you can piggyback me."

Jack respected my judgment. "As long as you really think you can hack it," he said. We left that piece of broomstick in the X-1 cockpit.

•

Glennis drove me to the base at six A.M.

It was October 14, 1947---the ninth test flight of the X-1. The moment we picked up speed, I fired all four rocket chambers in rapid sequence. We climbed at 0.88 Mach and began to buffet, so I flipped the stabilizer switch and changed the setting two degrees. We smoothed right out, and at 36,000 feet, I turned off two rocket chambers. At 40,000 feet, we were still climbing at a speed of 0.92 Mach. Leveling off at 42,000 feet, I had 30 percent of my fuel, so I turned on rocket chamber three and immediately reached 0.96 Mach. I noticed that the faster I got, the smoother the ride.

Suddenly, the Mach needle began to fluctuate. It went up to 0.965 Mach, then tipped right off the scale. I thought I was seeing things. We were flying supersonic! And it was as smooth as a baby's bottom: Grandma could be sitting up there sipping lemonade. I kept the speed off the scale for about 20 seconds, then raised the nose to slow down.

I was thunderstruck. From 0.965 Mach to supersonic was one unexpected dip! And in the blink of an eye. After all the anxiety about breaking it, the sound barrier had turned out to be a perfectly paved speedway. I radioed Jack in the B-29. "Hey, Ridley, that Machmeter is acting screwy. It just went off the scale on me."

"Fluctuated off?"

"Yeah, at point nine six five."

"Son, you is imagining things."

"Must be. I'm still wearing my ears and nothing else fell off, neither."

The guys in the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) tracking van interrupted to report that they heard what sounded like a distant rumble of thunder: my sonic boom---the first one by an airplane ever heard on earth! The X-1 was supposedly capable of reaching nearly twice the speed of sound, but the Machmeter aboard registered to only 1.0 Mach, which showed how much confidence the Air Corps had; I estimated I had reached 1.05 Mach. (Later data showed it was 1.06 Mach---700 miles per hour.)

And that was it. I sat up there feeling kind of numb but elated. After all the anticipation of achieving this moment, it really was a letdown. It had taken a damned instrument meter to tell me what I'd done. There should have been a bump on the road, something to let you know you had just punched a nice clean hole through that sonic barrier. The unknown was a poke through Jell-O.

•

Major General Fred Ascani remembers: Colonel Boyd came into my office. "Well, they did it," he said, and from the grin on his face I didn't have to wonder what he was talking about. Coincidentally, only a few days before Chuck's historic flight, President Truman had declared the Army Air Corps to be a separate branch of the Service. We were now officially the U.S. Air Force. What better way to celebrate than to crow about this flight? In fact, we had planned to go after every aviation record on the books as soon as the speed of sound was achieved and really give the Navy a run for its money. So we were shocked when orders came down from the highest levels in Washington to clamp the security lid on this flight. And it stayed clamped more than eight months.

The public was kept in the dark, but official Washington knew all about it, and everybody wanted to meet the intrepid hero who had broken the awesome sound barrier. I recall General Hoyt Vandenberg's getting the word back to us at Wright to "keep that damned hillbilly Yeager out of Washington." The general was very Ivy League. But he was whistling in the dark. About a week after he made the flight, we flew Chuck back to Wright and had a top-secret ceremony in the commanding general's office, where he received the Distinguished Flying Cross. I remember his whispering afterward, "I needed that like a hole in the head."

He played his new fame perfectly and knocked Washington on its ear. Very modest, very matter-of-fact, an easygoing, likable country boy with more bravery than Prince Valiant. The Secretary of Defense and the Senators who met him were in awe. They shook their heads in wonder, patted him on the back and asked him to autograph the pictures he had taken with them. Chuck wasn't play acting; he was just being himself. But he was also astute and knew the impact he was making. He had big balls and he knew it. But he played the hillbilly to the hilt: "Aw, shucks, I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. It was no big deal. Just another job."

•

Glennis remembers: I saw that flight--- what I could see of it, which was mostly the white contrails from Chuck's engine exhaust streaking up in the sky. I didn't hear the sonic boom when he flew at Mach one, because it was about 40 miles away, so I had no idea that anything special had happened. I recall he drove up in the fire chief's truck, got out and flopped into our car. "I'm beat," he said. "Let's go home." I turned on the ignition and was about to drive off when Dick Frost and Bob Hoover came running over and began clapping him on the back and making a big fuss. And that's how I found out that Chuck had broken the sound barrier.

•

Dick Frost, Bell project engineer on the X-1, remembers: I didn't learn that Chuck had broken his ribs until a long time later, but it was so typical of him to be matter-of-fact. He was going to go home with Glennis, but we said, "No way." I remember grabbing him and jumping up and down. We were one happy bunch. We went over to the operations office, where I called Larry Bell at the plant to tell him the news. Chuck and Ridley called Colonel Boyd. Then we went over to the officers' club to eat and drink a toast. We planned a big party that night out at Pancho's. Meanwhile, Colonel Boyd's office called back and informed us that the tightest possible security lid had been clamped on the flight. It was not to be discussed with or disclosed to anyone. Well, Muroc was a small base, and here we were, rowdy and celebrating in the officers' club---the word was definitely out. But orders were orders, so we decided against holding a party at Pancho's. Instead, about 4:30, we drove to Chuck's house.

He fixed us a pitcher of martinis. Around six, we decided to go on to my house and continue partying. It really was bizarre being forced to celebrate in secret the most historic flight of the age.

Chuck had an old motorcycle that Pancho had given him---a beat-up old thing without headlights. He cranked up the motorcycle and led the way. We were so damned excited and happy about what we had accomplished that we sat around cackling like geese, insulting the hell out of one another, and by eight or nine o'clock, we were definitely pickled.

No one was in any condition to drive and certainly not to drive a damned motorcycle. Hoover and I urged Chuck to leave his bike at my house and drive back to his place with us. He said, "Aw, shit, I can manage. No sweat." Needless to say, he prevailed. It was decided that I would provide his headlights. He said, "Yeah, well, I'll keep right in front of you all."

He got on the bike and cranked it up. It sounded louder than the X-1, and right then I should have known we were in trouble. He roared away. Hoover and I followed in my Chevy coupe. By the time we got on the road, Yeager was way ahead, blazing off in the dark. Now, this is a road out in the boonies, not much traffic, nothing but desert on either side, so on a moonless night, the darkness is total. Only somebody with Yeager's incredible eyesight would have dared to drive it without headlights. And he didn't just drive it. That son of a bitch was racing it. He was nowhere in sight.

But just as we approached a right-angle turn in the road, Hoover and I saw a big cloud of dust. You never saw two guys sober up faster than we did. There was Chuck stretched out on the road, underneath that motorcycle. He had skidded on sand making his turn. We ran to him, certain that he was dead. And it was sheer terror, because he was the man of the hour, who had just broken the sound barrier, and Hoover and I could be held accountable for the death of an American hero.

So we pulled that bike off him and saw that he was not only still alive but giggling like a loon. He wasn't even scratched.

Chuck got to his feet, still laughing. But he put up his hands in surrender. He said, "OK, OK, you guys are right. I'll take it easy. I'm sober now." And he started to get back on that bike.

"Bullshit," I said. "No way. Get your ass in my car." He shook his head. Off he went. Hoover and I ran back to my car and took off after him. But there he was, still going balls out in the pitch-dark. We had a brief glimpse of him crouched low over the handle bars, and then he just zoomed out of sight. By the time we pulled up at his house, he was in the kitchen, fixing us one more pitcher for the road.

•

I lived balls out, flew the same way. I had my own standards, and as far as I was concerned, there was no room for test pilots who couldn't measure up to the machines they flew. We dealt with a high-powered team of scientists and engineers from NACA, the forerunner of NASA, but, whatever its initials, I rated it about as high as my shoelaces. Its pilots were probably good engineers who could fly precisely, but they were sorry fighter pilots. Today it is a new breed. I'll take my hat off to any of the NASA pilots flying shuttle.

Neil Armstrong may have been the first astronaut on the moon, but he was the last guy at Edwards to take any advice from a military pilot. Neil was NACA's backup pilot on the X-15. One day his civilian boss, Paul Bikle, called me to say that NACA was scheduling an X-15 flight and planned to use Smith's Ranch Lake as an emergency landing site. Smith's Ranch Lake was about 250 miles away, and I told him that I had flown over it recently and it was soaked from the winter rains. He said, "Well, my pilots were over there today and they said it's not wet."

I laughed. "Well, then, be my guest." But Paul had doubts of his own or he wouldn't have called. He asked me if I would fly Neil up there and attempt a landing. "No way," I said.

"Would you do it in a NACA airplane?" he asked.

"Hell, no. I wouldn't do it in any airplane, because it just won't work."

He then asked, "Would you go up there if Neil flew?"

"OK," I said. "I'll ride in the back."

I tried my damnedest to talk Armstrong out of going. He said, "Well, we won't land. I'll just test the surface by shooting a touch and go"---meaning he'd set down the wheels, then immediately hit the throttle and climb back up into the sky.

I told him he was crazy. "You're carrying a passenger and a lot of fuel, and that airplane isn't overpowered anyway. The moment you touch down on that soggy lake bed, we'll be up to our asses in mud. The drag will build up so high, you won't be able to get off the ground again."

He said, "No sweat, Chuck. I'll just touch and go."

And that's exactly what Armstrong did. He touched, but we sure as hell didn't go. The wheels sank into the muck and we sat there, engine screaming, wide-open, the airplane shaking like a moth stuck on flypaper. I said from the back, "Neil, why don't you turn off the sumbitch? It ain't doin' nothin' for you."

He turned off the engine and we sat there in silence. I would've given a lot to see that guy's face. Very soon it would be dark and the temperature would drop to below freezing. We were wearing only thin flying suits and the nearest highway was 30 miles away. "Any ideas?" I asked him. Neil shook his head.

Before dark, NACA sent out a DC-3 to search for us. I got on the horn with the pilot and told him to give us time to walk over to the edge of the lake bed, about a mile away. I told him to touch down but not to stop. "Open the door and keep on moving while we jump aboard." He did a good job, and when we got back to Edwards, Bikle was still there. I don't know what he said in private to Armstrong, but when he saw me, he burst out laughing.

•

The Air Force had hoped to put the first men into space, but the Eisenhower Administration had chosen NASA---a civilian agency that, ironically, selected all military pilots for its first group of astronauts. The Air Force wasn't interested in going to the moon. We had had plans on the boards since 1947 for orbiting military space stations manned with our own astronauts. We knew damned well that the Russians had similar plans, and we aimed to beat them to it. In 1961, I was appointed to head the new Air Force Aerospace Research Pilots' School at Edwards to train military astronauts.

NASA's Mercury astronauts had been chosen before our school geared up. But over the next six years, the space agency recruited 38 of our graduates to its corps of astronauts. Some of our guys turned the NASA people down flat. They came back from their interviews in Houston and told me, "We're overqualified for their program. All we get to do is take a ride, like one of those damned chimps they sent up. We don't want to get involved, because everything is controlled from the ground and there is nothing to fly."

I said, "Hell, I don't blame you. I wouldn't want to have to sweep off mon-keyshit before I sat down in that capsule."

But as time went on, NASA made its program damned attractive to recruits. It was in a tough spot, needing outstanding pilots who were little more than Spam in the can, throwing the right switches on instructions from the ground. Even then, they had trouble landing precisely and it sometimes took half the Navy to locate a capsule bobbing in the Pacific, miles from where it should have been. Also, NASA had many more astronauts than available rides, and a lot of guys never flew or had to wait for years to get their opportunity. So the agency sold its program like one of those fly-by-night land developers selling tracts in the desert. For signing up, a guy got a free expensive house, donated by a Realtor in Houston, and a cut of a lucrative contract with Time-Life. The glamor, splash and money made it attractive to some pilots. The guys came back from their interviews and told me, "All the talk in Houston is about how much money we are going to make."

My attitude was that they shouldn't get a dime for being selected for the program, especially when the risks involved weren't half as great as some of the research flying done at Edwards over the years.

Risk was what our life was all about, and take my word for it, I was always afraid of death. Facing death takes many different kinds of courage. There's battle-field courage where a guy, hopelessly trapped, suddenly decides to take as many of the enemy as he can with him before he himself is killed. Many Congressional Medals of Honor were awarded posthumously for that kind of heroics. Then there is a more calculated kind of courage that comes when you are strapped inside a bullet-shaped rocket airplane to fly at speeds at which many experts think the ship will disintegrate. Does that kind of courage merit the Medal of Honor? I was awarded that medal the year after I retired, and the nicest part about winning it was that I received it standing up.

•

The Right Stuff? I don't deny that I was damned good. If there is such a thing as "the best," I was at least one of the title contenders. But what really strikes me as I look back over all those years is how lucky I was---how lucky, for example, to have been born in 1923 and not 1963, so that I came of age just as aviation itself was entering the modern era. Being in my early 20s right after the war was the key to everything that happened in my life, placing me smack in the golden age of aviation research and development, allowing me to participate in the historic leap from prop engines to jets and from jets to rockets and outer space. For Christopher Columbus to make his mark on history, he had to be born at a time when the world was believed to be flat. For me to make mine, people had to think that the sound barrier was a brick wall in the sky. Reaching my 21st birthday in the age of the Concorde would have done me no good at all.

Not that flying today isn't fascinating, but technology has removed much of the stress and danger that made being a test pilot similar to being a matador. Still, life is as unpredictable as flying in combat. If the day comes when a flight surgeon tells me I can't fly anymore in high-performance jets, I can always sneak out back and fly ultralights.

Not long ago, the Piper Cub people asked me to fly one of their airplanes nonstop from Seattle to Atlanta to try to establish a new distance speed record. I did it and shaved a couple of hours off the old record. So nobody needs to remind me of how lucky I am.

I haven't yet done everything, but by the time I'm finished, I won't have missed much. If I auger in tomorrow, it won't be with a frown on my face.

"You're whipping through a desert canyon at 300 miles an hour, your belly barely scraping the rocks."