I could hear Andy buzzing me and managed to wave at him on his second go-round. I finally got up and took off my parachute harness, pulling apart the scorched shroud lines with my bare hands. Then I pushed the release locks on the neck ring connected to my pressure suit helmet, rotated it, and took off my helmet. Until then, I don't think anyone had ever taken off a pressure suit helmet without help. It is literally impossible to get all those latches unlocked by yourself; I don't know how in hell I did it. I recall glancing at my helmet with my good right eye, and it really looked like war. It was bloody and burned and smashed.
I was dazed, standing alone on the desert, my helmet crooked in one arm, my hand hurting so bad that I thought I would pass out. My face didn't hurt at all. I saw a young guy running toward me; I had come down only a mile or so from Highway 6 that goes to Bishop out of Mojave, and he watched me land in my chute, then parked his pickup and came to offer his help. He looked at me, then turned away. My face was charred meat. I asked him if he had a knife. He took out a small penknife, unfolded the blade, and handed it to me. I said to him, "I've gotta do something about my hand. I can't stand it any more." I used his knife to cut off the rubber-lined glove, and part of two burned fingers came off with it. The guy got sick.
Then the chopper came for me. I remember the medics running up. I asked them, "Can you do something for my hand? It's just killing me." They gave me a shot of morphine through my pressure suit. They couldn't get the suit off because it had to be unzipped all the way down, and then I'd have to get my head out through the metal ring but my face was in such sorry condition that they didn't dare. At the hospital, they brought in local firemen with bolt cutters to try to cut that ring off my neck. It just wouldn't do the job. Finally, I said, "Look in the right pocket of my pressure suit and get that survival saw out of there." It was a little ring saw that I always carried with me, even on backpacks, and they zapped through that ring in less than a minute.
I began dozing off from the morphine, only half-aware that Glennis was there, but Doc Stan Bear, the flight surgeon, kept shaking me awake. He was probing into the blood caked over my left eye, where there was a deep gash. The blood was glazed like glass from the heat of the fire, and Doc kept poking through it asking me if I could see anything. I said no. I heard him mutter, "Christ, I guess he lost it.' But suddenly I saw a ray of light through a small hole. I told Doc and he smiled. "That dried blood saved your sight, buddy," he said. Then he let me pass out.
They had me on an IV, and I was so groggy the next day that when General Branch came by and I tried to tell him what happened, I fell asleep in the middle of a sentence. Glennis, Andy, Bob Hoover, and test pilot Tony LeVier came to visit, but I was hardly aware. They were keeping me on pain killers.
So, it was several days before I realized how bad things really were. My face was swollen to the size of a pumpkin, badly charred from being blowtorched. 01' Stan Bear came in and sat down. He said, "Well, Chuck, I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that your lungs have not been permanently damaged from inhaling flame and smoke, and your eye looks normal. The bad news is I'm gonna have to hurt you like you've never hurt before in your life to keep you from being permanently disfigured. And I'm gonna have to do it every four days." I stayed in the hospital a month, and every four days, Doc started from the middle of my face and neck, scraping away the accumulated scab. It was a new technique developed to avoid horrible crisscross scars as the skin grew beneath the scabs. And it worked beautifully. I have only a few scars on my neck, but my face healed perfectly smooth. The pain, though, was worse than any I have ever known. I remember Jackie insisting that I recuperate at her ranch after I was discharged from the hospital. She said, "I was once a nurse and if something comes up, I'll know how to handle it." Doc Bear flew down there, too, to do scraping, and told her, "Jackie, you might want to leave. This is pretty rough." And she huffed, hell, no, she was a nurse, and all that. Man, she lasted twenty seconds and had to leave the room. How I wish I could've gone with her. In the end, though, I came out no worse than losing the tips of two fingers, and I'd call that getting away cheap.
Chuck's mother had arrived the night before his accident. We had gone to lunch with him between his two flights in the 104, and because it was a gorgeous December afternoon, I decided to take her around the golf course on my cart. We saw a helicopter fly overhead and land on the hospital pad. We could even see the patient being helped out; he was wearing an orange pressure suit, same as Chuck's, but I never made the connection somehow. We went on home and the phone was ringing. It was Jackie Cochran calling me from New York. She was hysterical. "What happened to Chuck?" she asked. I said to her, "What on earth are you talking about?" She said, "He's been hurt. General LeMay was notified at the Pentagon and his office just called me." I yelled "I'll call you back," and hung up on her just as she was shouting for me not to.
At the hospital, Doctor Bear met me and said, "Basically he's pretty good considering he has first, second, and third-degree burns." I asked to see Chuck and he hesitated. "He looks pretty bad." Heck, I had seen plenty, but when I walked inside and saw them trying to saw through his neck ring, I had to steel myself. It was horrifying. And I saw that he saw me. I said, "How do you expect to be asked to dance looking like that?" I got a smile, but I didn't know what to say. Every human being has some vanity. I remember Chuck getting upset as he started losing hair up front. I was worried about getting gray so young. But I thought there was no way to keep him from being horribly disfigured, and I thought, how unfair, how much he didn't deserve it. I was just sick.
Jackie wanted to send her personal physician Dr. Randy Lovelace, who was also a friend of ours. To her, Randy was Jesus Christ. I asked Chuck what he wanted to do and he said, "I'll stick with Doc Bear. He knows what he's doing." How true, although there were moments when I wanted to punch him for how he was forced to hurt Chuck while peeling the scabs off his face. But he worked a wonder, and we owe him deep gratitude.
A SPACE LEGACY
By the end of my sixth year as commandant, the space school was the most advanced facility of its kind in the world. The school was a major employment agency for both the military and civilian space programs. Our kids constituted nearly half of the NASA astronauts, all of the Air Force team selected to fly in the first orbiting space labs and Dyna-Soar shuttle programs, and I couldn't help but feel damned good about our contribution to the next big revolution in flying.
Mostly because of our high-powered staff and a demanding academic and test flying program, a student graduating with our diploma could practically call his own shot for the future. Each of our graduating classes was pounced on by both the Air Force and the civilian space agency. About half the class chose to go with NASA; the others were among those selected to be the first Air Force astronauts, destined to fly the X-20 Dyna-Soar, then under development with Boeing, the forerunner of the reusable space shuttle.