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FM: BMC GLENN FESSLER, USN (RET), JACKSONVILLE FL TO: ALL HANDS SUBJ: A SHIPMATE 1. On November 24, 1969, I was a nineteen-year-old seaman in the deck department of the USS Hornet, CVS-12, in the South Pacific, and I watched the crew of Apollo 12 come aboard. I never met Pete Conrad that day. I was about forty feet away holding a line and trying not to look like a kid. But I got a good look at him, and I never forgot it. 2. I did twenty-two years in the Navy and retired a Chief Boatswain's Mate in 1990. I'm not a writer and I'm new at computers. My daughter got me started. When I heard on July 9 that Pete was gone, I sat down at this thing and it took me most of the summer, but here it is. 3. He was a Navy man, a test pilot, and an astronaut, in that order, and I think he'd say that too. He was also the funniest man that ever went to the Moon. Anybody who was there will tell you. |
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SERVICE RECORD
Born in Philadelphia. Graduated from Princeton in 1953 in aeronautical engineering and went straight into the Navy. Flew jets, went through test pilot school at Patuxent River, Maryland, and stayed on as a test pilot and instructor. NASA picked him in September 1962, in the second group of astronauts, the New Nine. Retired from the Navy and from NASA at the end of 1973 with the rank of Captain.
Four flights. Two of them as commander of something nobody had ever done before. He fixed a space station with a pair of cable cutters. You want a Navy man on your ship. |
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THE LIGHTNING
We were already at sea when they launched, but the whole ship heard about it. It was a rainy day at the Cape, November 14, and about half a minute after liftoff the Saturn V got hit by lightning, and then again a few seconds later. Every warning light in the command module came on at once and the power dropped out. A young flight controller in Houston remembered an obscure switch from a test he'd seen, and Al Bean found it and threw it, and everything came back. The rocket itself never quit. From what the fellows who heard the tapes said, Pete was laughing about it before they even got to orbit. Most men would still be shaking. That's the kind of commander he was. |
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ON THE MOON
Pete was a short guy, and when he jumped off the last rung of the ladder onto the Moon he made a crack about it: that Neil's small step had been a pretty big one for him. That was Pete. Then he and Al went to work, and you could hear them the whole time, joking and humming and having the best day of their lives. They did two moonwalks, set up the experiments, and hiked over to that old Surveyor that had been sitting there since 1967 and cut off its camera to bring home. It's in the Smithsonian now, I'm told. Twelve men walked on the Moon. I've read about all of them. I think Pete had the most fun. |
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NOVEMBER 24, 1969
They came down south of American Samoa. It was rough water that day and the splashdown was hard enough that a camera came loose inside the capsule and cut Al Bean over the eye. The swimmers got the collar on and the helicopter brought the three of them to the Hornet, and they walked across the hangar deck and straight into the quarantine trailer. Back then they still weren't sure if they'd brought home any Moon germs. The whole crew was lined up. The band played. I was holding my line and I saw Pete look around at all of us, all those sailors, and grin, the gap-tooth grin, like he was the one who ought to be thanking us. That's the whole memory. It's a short one. I've told it about five hundred times. The Hornet brought them to Pearl Harbor. She was decommissioned the next year. She's a museum ship now, in Alameda, California, opened just last fall. I'm going out to see her in November for the thirtieth. First time back aboard since 1970. |
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AFTER
He didn't slow down after NASA. He went into business, spent a long time at McDonnell Douglas, and worked on the DC-X, the Delta Clipper, a little rocket that took off and landed standing up on its tail, out at White Sands in New Mexico in 1993. He was still trying to make it cheap and easy to get to space when he died. He was sixty-nine and he was riding motorcycles. On July 8 he went off the road on his motorcycle near Ojai, California. He died of his injuries later that day. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery later in the month. I watched what they showed of it on the news. In 1994 I stood in line for an hour at an air show in Pensacola with my old cruise book, the one with the Apollo 12 pages in it, and he signed it. He looked at the date and grinned. I didn't tell him I was there. I should have. |
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For Pete Some men look up and wonder. You went and took a look. You laughed straight through the lightning, you fixed what the launch shook, you walked where no one had walked and carried a camera home. Now you've gone out ahead of us one more time, on your own. Fair winds and following seas, Captain. We have the watch. — G.F. |
