Document created: 10 October 2003
Air University Review,
July-August
1974
Of the twelve Americans who have walked on the moon and returned to earth, the first few were heroes, honored on world tours and tumultuous parades; the last few can walk down any street in America and not be recognized. Some moved from the space program to new goals: new space flights, religion, areas of lifelong interests now made possible. One went to a psychiatrist and has now written a book about it.*
*Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr., with Wayne Warga, Return to Earth (New York: Random House, 1973, $7.95), 335 pages, 15 photographs.
“Buzz” Aldrin was the copilot of that memorable first moon landing one Sunday afternoon in July 1969. In the book he describes his own return to earth, a return that begins on page 1 with the Apollo 11 capsule splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. “There is no way to determine which way you’ll end up after landing,” he writes, referring to the two stable floating modes—nose up or nose down—which the Apollo command module can assume. But there was no way then for him to know which way he himself would wind up, either.
We followed Colonel Aldrin’s subsequent career through bits and pieces in the newspapers: world tours, brief projects with Skylab and the future Space Shuttle, a return to Air Force duty as commandant of the Aerospace Test Pilot School at Edwards AFB, his retirement from the Air Force the following year. And then, there were the rumors and stories about psychiatric problems, depressions, and mental illness.
Return to Earth describes both of his journeys: the first, to the moon and back with the encouragement and support of NASA, the United States, and the entire world; and the second, into his own mind, alone, with difficulties and detours thrown in his path by the same forces that had aided him on his voyage to Tranquility Base. While none of us is likely to repeat his first journey for a decade or more, his book tries to be a guide for those who might need help, as he did but which he did not receive, along the second journey.
Readers who are looking for an insider’s view of space flight will find more than enough to satisfy them about Aldrin’s space training and two space flights (the other on Gemini 12 in 1966). Perhaps he told most of the laundered details to Life magazine, but now the full, human, believable story comes out. Aldrin and his colleagues found that what most people read and thought about them was a myth compounded of NASA press releases, an unconscious hero worship, and the nation’s desire to find real models in the uncertain times of confused war and fractured social relationships.
This time, he can tell the whole story. The technical and engineering problems are there, along with the human ones. How do people really get picked for space missions? What does it feel like to have your best friend’s death in a plane crash open up your opportunity to make a space flight? What were Aldrin’s real feelings about being selected for the first moon landing? How did the astronauts—mostly military pilots—feel about their “safe” tickets in NASA while their friends were being shot down over Hanoi? What triumphs, tragedies, and everyday drudgeries could not until now be told? It’s all here, and it makes for a fascinating half of the book.
Aldrin trained for six years to fly to the moon. For what came after, he had not even an hour’s briefing. The speeches, parades, world tours, press conferences, and endless ceremonies are described in mind-numbing detail. If Aldrin suffered half as much going through the real thing as the reader does in plowing through page after page of it, one soon appreciates his problems.
But what went wrong inside Aldrin’s head? The pressures on him are well described, but they were suffered and endured by other men, like his crewmates Armstrong and Collins, like America’s first man in orbit, John Glenn, like many others. What was it about Aldrin, the rock-solid action-minded pilot, that led to depression, mental illness, “dysfunction”? If it could happen to him, could it happen to any of us? Aldrin says it could.
This is the most important part of the book. Until this point, our impressions must be that Aldrin went over the edge because of the terrific pressures of being one of the first men on the moon. Consequently, while we may find his story interesting, it does not appear relevant to our own lives. Aldrin suggests that it is.
He wanted a better explanation than the obvious one that he couldn’t handle being a hero. Sure, maybe the rest of his life was a downhill epilogue, a footnote. What could he do to top that day he planted the American flag on the moon? How could he live when the rest of his life was an anticlimax and his best moments were behind him?
Armstrong, for one, managed. He found his way into something he had always wanted: teaching aerodynamics. Glenn entered politics, and although he has not yet found the success he achieved in space, he found a better thing: a new, more difficult goal. He pursues it yet.
Aldrin had no such goal. He began an aimless drifting. Two years later, after extensive psychiatric counseling, he started to piece together what might have gone wrong.
It soon emerged that my life was highly structured and that there had always existed a major goal of one sort or another. . . . I had gone to the moon. What to do next?
As the philosopher worded it, Aldrin suffered “the melancholy of all things done.” He was worse off than Alexander, with literally no more worlds to conquer.
Throughout his life, people had directed him into goals that he had loyally accepted as his own. First his father, then his summer camp in Connecticut, where “the team winning. . . competition was served turkey, and the losers were served beans,” then West Point, then the Air Force, then the NASA astronaut team. But when he returned from the moon a celebrity, he was told, “OK, Hero, you’re on your own. What do YOU want to do next?”
Goals. The desire to excel. Single-mindedness. These were the qualities that got Aldrin into trouble. But why should anyone be afraid of them? They are supposed to be exemplary qualities of the archetypical American. Yet they almost killed Aldrin.
The second flight to the moon managed to evade the hero syndrome after a perfunctory round of tours, and both moonwalkers stayed on in the space program to command the first and second Skylab flights in 1973. Armstrong and Collins got out and used their prestige and status to achieve their own personal goals.
Aldrin did too, or so he thought. But it wasn’t working out right, and he needed some man-to-man advice. Not psychiatric care, certainly not a straitjacket, but just some honest talk with someone to listen.
At this point, enter the second villain. According to Life, NASA, and the new astronaut mythology, Aldrin and his colleagues were perfect men, “ . . . squarely on the side of God, Country, and Family . . . . the most simon-pure guys there had ever been.” So Aldrin, when he confided to friends that he thought things weren’t perfect, ran into a wall. After a long, intimate conversation with his father-in-law, Aldrin found to his despair that “ . . . it was inconceivable to him that a guy with my drive and accomplishments could feel this way.” “Even his wife, he thought, “ . . . had really believed all that crap she read about me.”
Then, too, he had little choice about where to go for help. He at first had his sessions paid for by NASA health insurance because he didn’t want the treatment entered on his military record. Military health coverage would have paid for the financial costs, he reasoned, but “ . . . the repercussion psychiatric treatment tends to have on service careers has no insurance coverage of any kind.” Aldrin elaborated:
My personal theory—confirmed by others who, like me, have spent over twenty years learning the military ropes—is that my chances for promotion ended when I asked for psychiatric help.
That attitude may have been a symptom of a paranoia that testified to his real need for help. Or it might be a realistic judgment, which implies that thousands of others who need mental help are not going to get it for fear of the factors Aldrin describes.
And with this turn of events, he found a new goal. Aldrin is today a director-at-large of the National Association for Mental Health. He decided to write a book describing what happened to him, honestly, fully, in hopes that it might help others with similar problems. No matter from what cause their depression, “dysfunction,” or other mental illness might spring, they still needed to seek help without being dissuaded by concern over the stigma that “mental illness” still carries.
Psychiatric science has made some great strides and one of them is that a depression, noticed and diagnosed in its early stages, can be successfully treated. If not, it will only grow until it becomes unmanageable, devastating, and, in some cases, fatal. It is no different from any other illness.
Millions of Americans would be willing to follow in Aldrin’s footsteps to his first goal, the moon. But not nearly so many would follow on what he called “ . . . the most significant journey of my life. . .,” a journey into his own mind. But Aldrin’s book will help those who need to make that second journey find the courage to set out.
Washington, D.C.
Captain James E. Oberg (M.S., Northwestern University; M.S., University of New Mexico) is an instructor at the DOD computer Institute, Washington, D.C. His previous military assignment was as a computer systems analyst at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, Kirtland AFB, New Mexico. Captain Oberg is the author of numerous articles on the Soviet and American space programs.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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