Chemistry of Fire Page 23

  Ever since Apollo, the great debate about NASA—and about the space station—has been: Why do we need it? What is it for? NASA’s answer is that the space station is an orbiting laboratory for doing the best kinds of scientific and medical research, and the visionaries of NASA believe that it is going to change not only the way we do that research but also the way we live. We can’t deny that the space program has done so. Research begun at NASA has brought us better versions of everything from running shoes and Velcro to pacemakers, sunglasses, and a wide variety of electronic devices.

  “It’s about vision,” Tharpe said, storming around the room, gesticulating. He called Dan Goldin “Superman, the most persistent person for human space flight. He is numero uno and has that fire in the belly,” Tharpe said. “Superman, I tell you. He survived the uprising in Moscow while he was negotiating the space station. We were on the phone with him. We could hear the bullets.”

  On a TV monitor above Tharpe’s head, I could see a live, closed-circuit image of Node 1, called Unity, which Cabana would take into space. It was finally real—Tharpe could walk down the hall and see the work progressing. And he could hardly contain his excitement.

  I went down that hall to a gigantic hangar called the high bay, where they were doing the final tests on the node—the actual version of the model I’d seen Ross and Newman working on in the pool. In that enormous room, in the midst of a chaos of scaffolding and wire, men and women in blue hospital scrubs, hairnets, and particle masks were working all over the node, an aluminum cylinder fifteen feet in diameter with six hatches used for docking other elements of the station. When an astronaut named Nancy Currie helped to grapple the two main pieces of the ISS together in orbit, she wouldn’t even be able to see them. She would have to watch on a video monitor using the Space Vision System. She would bring one within six inches of the other, then Bob Cabana would fire the shuttle engines to dock the two components, just like docking with Mir. That is what astronauts are. They perform astonishing feats such as this one, the equivalent of bringing two apartment buildings together while blindfolded without breaking any windows.

  Ten days before Cabana’s flight, the Russians launched the Functional Cargo Block, called Zarya, a twenty-ton pressurized element. Once in orbit, Zarya extended its solar panels from an accordion fold a few inches wide to seventy feet tall, like the unfolding of a butterfly’s wings as it hatches. During the process of assembly, Zarya provides power, propulsion, and communication by way of the antennas that Ross was practicing attaching in the pool. Once the service module is up, Zarya will be powered down as larger solar arrays—some twenty-seven thousand square feet of them—are assembled and begin to function. Eight miles of wire are required just for the electrical power system.

  “I don’t think people realize how big this show is going to be,” Tharpe told me. And indeed, without being in the middle of it, as we were then, it’s difficult to grasp just how big it is. It’s said to be the largest peacetime scientific and engineering project in history. The water system on the station will be so sophisticated that it will turn pure urine into drinking water. Along with other wastewater, that’s what the astronauts will drink—their own urine. Trash will be collected into a Progress module, and when it’s full, they’ll send it back to Earth, allowing it to incinerate itself upon reentry into the atmosphere. Interestingly, the space station will have no central control panel or cockpit in the convention sense that an aircraft or a big ship has one. It will be run through small, portable IBM computers, which can be plugged into outlets placed all over the station.

  Aside from the moon and Venus, the space station will be the brightest object in the night sky. Students on the ground will be able to take photographs from a camera mounted on the space station. They’ll do it through the internet. The quality of the images will be the highest ever generated from a spacecraft. This is the ultimate cool stuff.

  I discussed the spiritual nature of their work with Cabana and Ross. Ross said he thought that in the near future, I’d be talking to a crew that was on its way to Mars, but in the meantime, he hoped the science done on the space station would “help to reveal some of God’s secrets to us for the benefit of all mankind.” I asked him why he was doing this. He said, “I think God has a plan for me. I think God wants me to be here.” I realized that at NASA, in the astronaut corps, they’re all white male Christians. Even the blacks and the women are white male Christians.

  Cabana said, “Time on orbit is extremely precious. It is very difficult to take time and just appreciate where you are. I always tell all the first-time fliers, ‘You have to take some time up there to appreciate where you are and what a unique opportunity it is, how fortunate you are to have it, and how special it really is. And you have to just look out the window and make a memory in your mind. Don’t take a picture of it, because you’re going to be disappointed when you get home, because no picture is as good as what you see. And you kind of burn that into your brain and it’s special.’ And I’ve got one from each of my flights.”

  As we left, I told Cabana that I thought his was a good answer. He laughed and shrugged, saying, “I knew that’s what you wanted to hear.”

  On my last day at Kennedy, I watched them load the node into a huge canister and seal it up. Then a giant door in the side of the building opened, and the canister rolled out to the launchpad. Unity was unloaded from it and placed aboard the shuttle. Hanging out with the astronauts, Tharpe and I watched the space station being assembled. He told me, “ISS, in terms of exploration, forms the basis of deep space by giving us a deep understanding of living in space. We revere our astronauts. We don’t want them to die. The Gemini program was a stepping-stone to the moon. Rendezvous and docking—people forget about Gemini. ISS is our Gemini. It’s mystifying to me to this day how technically competent we were to pull of the stuff we had to do to go to the moon. Now how do we muster that to go to Mars? Get NASA out of the day-to-day operations and engage the private sector. Eventually, industrial groups will run the space station. That’s the key. Wait’ll we find that first drug that’ll cure cancer—the universities and pharmaceutical companies, they’ll all want a ticket then.”

  Eleven days later, in December of 1998, Cabana, Ross, and Newman launched in an attempt to do in space what they had practiced in the pool. And everything went smoothly. After eight days of work, Cabana floated through the air lock and went inside the newly hatched titanium dragonfly to turn on the lights. The crew plugged in an IBM ThinkPad 760 computer, one of the basic control units for the space station. Ross even tested the SAFER system. He was tethered, of course.

  After a few days, they all climbed back into the space shuttle, closed the cargo-bay doors, and lit the fires to come home. For the first time in years, the station was out of danger of being put on the scrap heap.

  For years Dan Goldin has been telling everyone that we’re going to Mars. I sat in his office in Washington one day as he waved his arms and pointed at a painting of Mars as he tramped up and down in his cowboy boots shouting, “That’s where we’re going! We’re going to Mars!” He leaves the impression that Mars is just the next subway stop after the moon. At its closest, Mars is thirty-six million miles away, 150 times farther than the moon. For comparison, imagine flying in a balloon from Manhattan to Albany, a distance of about 140 miles. Now imagine flying the balloon all the way around the world. That has been done, but it took more than a hundred years to accomplish. The flight to Mars would be at least a six-month trip, and we don’t know how to keep astronauts alive and healthy in space for that long.

  On my last day at Johnson Space Center in Houston, the hot, high sun looks like a white hole in the sky, a hazy window to other worlds. I enter the small building where machines make identity badges. I have to return mine. The woman who takes mine wears a red button on her shirt that says, “Mars or Bust.” I ask her what the button means. She pulls on it and looks at it as if she hasn’t noticed it before. “I don’t know,” she says. �
�Just everybody wears one.”

  12

  The Cult of War

  I HAVE NEVER killed anyone, but I’ve seen a lot of death.

  When I worked in a medical school, I saw many cadavers in various stages of dissection. One I recall looked like a man who’d been hit by a land mine. Vessels ran like wiring, pale and colorless, in every direction from the bone and muscle that had been wrenched back to expose bulging organs, which seemed to be fleeing the bonds of white tissue, frail as cobwebs under the dew of formaldehyde. And there was always something green, a fluid, a pus, a suppuration—no one ever seemed to know what it was, that green stuff coming out of the corpse.

  It’s the same green the army has chosen for everything. A truck pulled up near us, out by the forest at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where we waited for the C-130 transport plane. The truck and the plane and even the forest seemed to be that color of death, and the trailer fixed on to the back of the truck was green, too, and the green officers wore green clothes as they unburdened the truck of its wooden crates of bombs and rockets, mines and bullets, missiles and flares, and laid everything out on the wet green grass.

  “You lose my shit, and I’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth,” an officer from the Eighty-Second Airborne Division told someone. He wore a T-shirt and sipped coffee out of a thermos cup as he stood over his stores. The rounds were laid out on the grass by the airstrip as if for the Fourth of July, and men with clipboards were walking along the rows, counting them, writing, double-checking for accuracy.

  One big area was set out for M16 cartridges, boxes and boxes of them in speed loaders. The M16 is the military version of the AR15 assault rifle. Next to those speed loaders was ammunition for the Squad Automatic Weapon, a machine gun known as SAW. Each belt held two hundred rounds. They were stacked in green metal ammo cases. I saw 40 mike-mike all in gay colors, nestled in wooden crates that lay open on the ground. The mike-mike-grenade round has the diameter of an old-fashioned silver dollar, squat and short and improbably colored. Blue ones are practice rounds, which leave a dye marker where they hit. Blue in the military is the color that signifies something for practice only: it is fake, unlike corpse green, which signifies what is real. Smoke grenades are green and yellow and red. Beside the crates of mike-mike were silver flares for illumination and signaling. Red means “Cease firing.”

  Squatting beside a wooden crate, a paratrooper was zipping open cardboard tubes, each a foot long and five inches in diameter. He’d pick one out of the wooden crate, zip the pull string, twist the cap to make sure it was loose, then put it on the ground. I picked one up and looked inside. It was one of the new mortar rounds, a little silver-finned rocket with a selectable fuse in its conical golden-colored nose. By flipping a switch, I could set it to detonate on impact, on proximity with the ground, or on a whim. These paratroopers would be firing the new mortar rounds for the first time on this mission. Until that night they had been firing mortar rounds from the Vietnam era.

  I was impressed with how casually these soldiers handled these high explosives. Holding a mortar rocket next to my chest, I felt that I was carrying my own death like a baby. The soldier next to me was cradling the tubes against his stomach as he zipped open the paraffin seals. A few yards across the green grass, I saw a man sniffing a command-detonated claymore mine with a cigarette in his mouth. Although the cigarette was unlit, he looked crazy putting his face so close to so much death. One paratrooper ambled past with an armload of mortar rockets, bobbing and weaving and kind of jiving to a tune no one else could hear, saying, “I’m own ’splode on impack.”

  An officer was saying, “Claymore jumpers, listen up: keep it on your body. Check to see it’s all there, tester and clacker.” To anyone familiar with modern infantry warfare, the claymore mine is infamous, but no more so than the stand of grapeshot was in previous wars and times. In fact, the claymore is a stand of grapeshot brought up to date with modern materials. Its fiberglass shell is packed with plastic explosive in which are embedded seven hundred steel ball bearings. It is a rectangular device about six to ten inches long and an inch and a half thick, dull silver in color, curved from side to side, with pointed metal legs that fold down from underneath so that it may be stuck into the ground like a miniature drive-in movie screen. When it is fired, that load of grapeshot sprays out, and anyone within a 325-foot swath is reduced, as they say, to Hamburger Helper.

  Pure night had fallen over the forest and the airfield. The high-intensity floodlights outlined the troops starkly where they lined up for the munitions they would pack on this jump.

  “Do these mortar rounds fit in the butt pack, sir?”

  “It’s a stuff, but they’ll fit.”

  Dozens of men now sat in groups on the ground clacking rounds into clips, putting rockets into butt packs, smoking cigarettes, talking. Between us and the first rising stars, the busy airfield was ablaze with lights and roaring airplanes. Out on the grass, an officer threw himself down with a cigarette between his teeth and began doing push-ups.

  “I don’t know how they expect us to fire all this,” a big, gentle-looking jumper said, zipping speed loaders into M16 clips with a practiced hand, spacing them with red phosphorous tracer rounds.

  “All right, jumpers!” an officer yelled. “When I call you, I want five at a time, no more, no less.”

  The jumpers began lining up, two by two, helping one another into their parachutes and packs. It is a little difficult to imagine what a paratrooper has to put on in order to accomplish a mission such as this one. First his load-bearing vest goes on, a webbing device that holds two canteens, butt pack (which may contain mortar rounds), ammo pouch, knife, flashlight, and so on. Then his thirty-five-pound parachute goes on his upper back, with straps over his shoulders, across his chest and stomach, and through his crotch. Then his reserve chute goes onto the strap across his chest, and below that is his ALICE (All-Purpose Lightweight Individual Carrying Equipment) pack (or rucksack), which can weigh thirty-five pounds or more. It is affixed to the front of his body upside down, so that the metal brace, which rests on his kidneys when he’s walking, encompasses his belly when he’s jumping. The bulk of the rucksack hangs down to his knees. If he is carrying anything extra, as some of the men are tonight (for example, the bases for mortar tubes, which are the size of card tables), the extra paraphernalia is attached outside the rucksack. Last he straps on his personal weapon, such as the M16, which is in a weapons case.

  Thus encumbered, he is ready to be inspected to see if all the straps and lanyards, clips and hasps, have been done up right, to see if the parachute is still holding together, if this is all going to come unraveled like a skinless baseball in midair. Parachute riggers in red seed caps and green T-shirts scurry around the field making last-minute adjustments on the rigs. Each jumper in inspected from top to bottom, and then he waddles off to the grass, at this point thoroughly wet with dew, to collapse in a heap against the backdrop of the black forest and try to get comfortable while waiting for a C-130 to taxi out.

  It is bad enough to be a pack animal, weighed down with 150 pounds of equipment, and it’s bad enough to have to wait and wait, trying to get comfortable inside of all those biting straps in the wet grass with the night growing cold and the chiggers trying to crawl up into your crotch where no hand can reach. But the thought of jumping out of an airplane like that—well, it seems so extreme, so desperate, that it’s difficult to imagine what threat could inspire a person even to consider it as a means of self-defense. As with the perverted genius of the claymore, one is forced to wonder where it came from. Was it a nightmare? Divine inspiration? Or is there truly evil in the world, and is this how it finds expression in the methods of warfare?

  To say that war is an instinct does not satisfy. What instinct causes us to leap from an airplane? By what instinct do we walk through a wall of fire? Crawling into the coffin-like space of a Sheridan tank and devising strategies to prevent the 152-millimeter gun from taking off my kneecap during
its recoil was hardly what I’d call an instinct. My only instinct in there was to get out before I died of fumes and claustrophobia. No, war today is not an instinct. It is a great deal of trouble overcoming the instinct of self-preservation. And I don’t believe it could be done without something akin to a spiritual conversion.

  Sometimes psychologists have used an unpleasant term to describe that transformation. They call it “brainwashing.” The term is unpalatable because we’ve always used it against our enemies. But it’s the only word we have for a stress-induced willingness to accept . . . well, just about anything. Even primitive tribes use it.

  When the C-130 came, I got on and watched the paratroopers file in and get belted down. One story above the cargo hold, the air force pilots sat up out of the way in the dark cockpit with green glowing instruments while a hundred men in their amazing gear waddled up the cargo ramp and collapsed with a clatter of knives and rockets and automatic rifles onto the metal benches with the red web seats. I stood above them at one end, observing how they were wedged in—no one could move—and I felt the panic of claustrophobia rising within me.

  But as soon as they were strapped in, they calmly took off their helmets, put their heads down—amid mortar tubes, giant mortar bases, personal weapon cases, spars and cables and conduit, the suffocating kerosene fumes, and the screaming Angelus of the engines—and they went straight to sleep.

  War cannot exist without an enemy. And so, through much of modern history, where enemies have been lacking, they have been invented to serve the purpose they always serve: to separate “us” from “them” so that we can make war. The Institute of Human Relations at Yale University published a book in 1943 called A Social Psychology of War and Peace. Its author, Mark May, in discussing the psychology of Nazi Germany, writes: “The primitive man attributes all fortunes and misfortunes to personal agents, living or dead, human or divine. He does not believe in accidents. . . . When a primitive society is persuaded that its troubles are caused by its early enemies, whoever they may be, it is well on its way toward aggressive war. The more intolerable its burdens and the greater its deprivations and sufferings, the greater will be its tendency to appease or to attack and destroy the causal agent.”