A book you wouldn't know about if you weren't reading this

[Jerry Peterson]

A rescue helicopter almost wiped out Apollo 11 as the capsule fell toward the Pacific Ocean, says writer Scott Carmichael in Moon Men Return, his new book out from the Naval Institute Press.

Carmichael grew up in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, not far from where I live. He’s now a senior investigator with the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington.

Said a reporter in her story after she interviewed Carmichael, “Most of us never knew how close a Navy helicopter came to colliding with the command module . . .”

I knew. It was included in the live coverage of the splashdown on CBS television. True, there wasn’t any film or video of the incident, but it was in the report.

Here’s what happened. This is July 24, 1969, at the end of the flight that put the first man on the moon – Neil Armstrong. The commander of the USS Hornet dispatched helicopters and rescue crews to intercept the capsule as it fell toward the Pacific, to secure the craft once it was in the water.

The helicopters flew through heavy clouds that day to get to the spot in the ocean where the capsule’s trajectory showed it would come down. This is the pre-shuttle days of space flight. One copter broke out of the clouds just as the capsule, swinging from its parachutes, dropped past, a thousand feet ahead. The helicopter was closing at 166 miles an hour, so that thousand feet was seconds.

“I’ve listened to the audio tape of that event,” Carmicheal says. “All of a sudden you hear the pilot scream when he sees the command module directly in front of him.”

Seconds – four seconds – that’s all the time the pilot had to react. And he did. He slammed his helicopter left, out of the way . . . and no accident.

Carmicheal became concerned that little had been written about what he calls the behind-the-scenes stuff of the return of that Apollo moon flight, so he took on the project. He interviewed more than 80 Navy men who played significant roles on the Hornet and in the rescue at sea.

One of those he interviewed – and has worked closely with since – was John Wolfram, a classmate from Fort Atkinson High School. Wolfram and Carmichael had been on the school swim team together. In 1969, Wolfram was 20 years old and a Navy frogman. He was assigned to the Hornet’s rescue team of divers, had jumped with his team from their helicopter, and had swum to the Apollo capsule to attach the floatation ring that would keep the capsule upright until the Hornet could arrive and lift the capsule from the sea.

The book includes a picture of Wolfram standing on the floatation ring. He was the first person whom astronauts Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins saw after splashdown.

At $37, this is a book you’re not likely to buy. But do check it out from your local library and relive that time when moon flight was magically and the return home dramatic.

Tomorrow: We go to Broadway

[Pepper Smith]

LOL! Even at that price, it's the kind of book I'm likely to buy and read. It sounds very interesting. Thanks for telling us about it.