Historic Truths / Looking at Earth
For my generation, the “conquest” of space and the war in Vietnam were twin foci of an elliptical career, equally important but literally worlds apart, each adrift, seemingly unto itself in a mental void.
It was a coincidence that President Eisenhower should make America’s first commitment to defend South Vietnam just five days before the first class of astronauts was announced on 9 April 1959. It was likewise a coincidence that four hundred Green Berets should leave for Vietnam on 10 May 1961, five days after Alan B. Shepard left earth on America’s first manned spaceflight. On 14 February 1962, President John Kennedy permitted American troops in Vietnam to return fire if shot at, and a week later, on 21 February, John Glenn safely orbited the globe. Vice President Lyndon Johnson called for a “strong program of action” to defend South Vietnam on 9 May 1963. On 25 May, President Kennedy announced an accelerated, top-priority space program that would put astronauts on the moon by the end of the decade.
Sometimes tragic setbacks coincided. The Tet Offensive began on 31 January 1968, as the Apollo program still struggled with the deaths of three astronauts in catastrophic fire during launch rehearsal the previous year. Other times, achievements in space counterpointed horrors on earth. On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, an event that took place at fantastic distance in the American imagination from the simultaneous bombing of Cambodia. The space program and the war in Vietnam were antithetical propositions, and whatever happened in Vietnam, the moon project was America “at its best,” clean and ever innocent.
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