FIRST CHAPTER OF BRINGING APOLLO HOME
SERENDIPITOUS
I glanced at the quiet,
fair-skinned gentleman sitting next to me at the bar. I’d seen him here before.
Il Forno Classico is like that. People come in several nights a week, just to
touch bases with the local community. If you’re single, or want to meet some
friends for dinner, this is that kind of bar… like Cheers, but with excellent
Italian food.
This guy next to me was in his
eighties, eighty-seven it turned out. His name’s Clay Boyce. He always had his
iPad and a glass of something clear on ice. If no one struck up a conversation,
he sifted through the internet. I struck up a conversation. I like talking to
old people. Now, now, that’s not meant to be patronizing! I really do. They’ve
got really interesting stuff to say (Usually… there are complete bores in every
generation), and I plan to be old, so it behooves me to learn the ropes.
As a physical therapist
specializing in geriatrics, I’ve heard it all, and it seems to me we are all
making world history. Maybe just tiny chunks of history, but we each have a
story to tell. Clay’s story really is world history.
Back to the bar. The first item
of conversation was me asking about a photo he had open on his iPad. It showed
a young man half dressed in fatigues on what appeared to be a dry hillside.
He said, “That’s me camping in
Germany.” His eyes were definitely twinkling as he waited to see if I would
bite.
“Really? Where in Germany?” I
grinned as I bit the bait.
“On top of a mountain. I was one
of a team of three officers and thirty-five Airmen (I was second in command).
We had the electronic equipment needed for the Matador.”
I raised a brow. “What’s a
Matador?” I knew it wasn’t a piece of physical therapy equipment.
“The Matador was the U.S. Air
Force’s First Pilotless Bomber… today it would be called a drone. It
carried a warhead eight times the power of Hiroshima.
My job, besides guiding the missile, was to move its operating equipment
around… the Russians couldn’t figure out where we were, so it kept them in
check. But they were always looking. Always trying to find us. This photo was
taken when I first got there, in Germany.”
“Where in Germany?” I asked
again.
He looked thoughtful for a
moment, and replied, “It was spring 1954, my unit was in Northern Germany (the
British Controlled Zone of postwar Western Germany), we moved around a lot. We
weren’t on a base. On orders from our Squadron Command Center, we would move
our guidance equipment as quickly as possible to another location. The problem
was the amount of time it took for us to pack up and move two tractor-semis
loaded with the electronic guidance equipment and twenty other trucks loaded
with support equipment. It took an hour and a half from receipt of orders ‘till
we were able to move out. We knew it only took the enemy (Russian) planes
fifteen minutes to reach us if they knew exactly where we were and decided to
attack. That was a problem,” he added laconically.
“So, what did you do? What was
your job?” I asked.
“I sat around and waited,” he
said with a laugh. “Well, I was self-training. I was assigned as a Guidance
Systems Officer, which meant my primary job was to guide the missile if a war
started—no prior training in that. I rapidly became quite competent at it.” More on this later. “Also, as a brand-new
officer, I was learning real time how to help manage the thirty some Airmen who
kept the electronics, other equipment, and services functioning… that was
interesting. As I said, just the guidance equipment took up two semi-trailers
full of electronic components.” He swirled his glass as he talked.
“If the Soviets wanted to start
a war, during the Cold War—that’s what the Cold War meant—having real missiles
ready to launch was a good deterrent. All of Europe was inundated with
destruction from WWII. The Allies didn’t have enough manpower or equipment to
stop the six or seven thousand tanks that Stalin had accumulated, so our Air
Force created this remotely guided missile we could use to wipe them out if
they rallied and tried to start another war.”
The bartender set a glass of
wine in front of me. After I took a sip, I asked him to finish his story. I
couldn’t help but think my father would have loved to talk to this guy.
“I was assigned the task of
figuring out how to shorten the amount of time it took to pack up all this equipment
and get ‘em moving. The two semi’s trailer vans were easy—unhook electric
cables, close the doors and they were ready to go. However, the enormous
bundles of electrical cables that connected the vans to each other were
extremely heavy. [Nerd Alert: Three multi copper wire conductor cables were
over 100 ft. long and each were about 3 to 4 inches in diameter.] They would be
laid out between the two semi-trailers, which were usually parked about thirty
feet apart. It took a lot of men to lift those things and coil them into the
back of a truck. I requisitioned a small trailer and parked it between the two
semi-trailers and coiled the cables inside it. When we arrived at our new
hide-out, we simply parked the small trailer between the big ones and pulled
the cable ends out just far enough to reach each semi-trailer and plugged them
in. It cut the moving-out time in half! They were happy with me for that one,”
Clay grinned.
My husband poked me in the ribs
and asked me what I wanted for dinner. So that was the first time I spoke to
Clay.
I told Clay that night he should
write all his stories in a book. It would be cool to have all this crazy life
written down. He explained that though he’d heard that before, he wasn’t a good
writer, and in fact he hated to write. Well, I’m an author… I like stories…
I agreed to meet with him once a week and chat (back in February, 2017).
It was a win-win decision for me because he’s fun to talk to, and I can learn
more about American space history for my writing. The first thing I did was to
confirm he is who he says he is. Thankfully a simple internet search brought up
Clay Boyce and even had multiple photos of his bright-eyed little face to
confirm this wasn’t some lunatic who
thought
he was Clay Boyce. Other than that, I won’t be doing much research to write
this story. It’s
his story richly
seasoned with one of his favorite sayings: “I was in the right place at
the right time,” or “There’s a story behind that,” and “It was just Dumb Luck.”
When I entered his home the
following week, I was escorted to his kitchen and placed at the head of the
kitchen table. This was my routine for several years. Once the stories were
exhausted, we began the editing process, which was Clay’s job. As I copied his
stories down in real time, I made multiple errors in locations and time frames.
His job was to correct all my mistakes. His part took a year… why? Because Clay
Boyce is a nerd. He felt compelled to research and investigate every detail. He
would get deep into the rabbit hole of science and history on the internet.
I can’t really emphasize enough
what an honor this was to hear his story. It was both complex and remarkably
simple. After he completed his part, I organized it in chronological order to
give it continuity, but that’s definitely
not how it was told. I hope I
made the right choice. I wanted each story to stand alone, but flow through
time.
A second thing I want to point
out is the use of the Nerd Alert. As a rocket scientist, Clay could describe
things with intricate detail. Sometimes it would take away from the story. In
those cases, I enclose the details in a bracket with the warning; [Nerd Alert]…
so be warned.
Well, here we go… pull up a
chair to the table and join us.
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