I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in a cockpit. Death is the great enemy and robber in my profession, taking away so many friends over the years, all of them young. Facing death takes many different kinds of courage. There's battlefield courage, for example, where a guy, hopelessly trapped, suddenly decides to take as many of the enemy with him before he himself is killed. Many Congressional Medals of Honor were awarded for those kind of heroics. Posthumously, of course. Then, there is a more calculated kind of courage that comes when you are strapped inside a bullet-shaped rocket airplane to fly at speeds where many experts think the ship will disintegrate. Does that kind of courage merit the Medal of Honor? Jackie Cochran thought so, and the year after I retired, she set out in typical Jackie style to beat down every door in Washington to win that medal for me. At the time, I wouldn't have bet on her chances, but the nicest part about winning that medal was that I'd receive it standing up.
A few months after Chuck got out, I received a phone call from Jackie Cochran, asking my advice about her plan to win for Chuck the Congressional Medal of Honor. She said she had discussed the matter with Gen. George Brown, who was then the Air Force Chief of Staff, and that General Brown was very enthusiastic and promised her that the Air Force would back her all the way. She asked me and several others who had worked on the X-1 to send letters to General Brown stating our view about Chuck's courage in attempting those flights. I told her, "Jackie, I helped design that airplane and knew more about it than anyone, yet I could not say with any certainty that it could make it safely through Mach 1. Courage is right." Well, she proceeded and got to the point where the Air Force drafted a recommendation for General Brown to submit to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. To get this proposal to Congress needed a unanimous recommendation by all the other branches. But the Army, Navy, and Marines decided not to go along with the Air Force because the X-1 program was conducted in peacetime, and the Congressional Medal of Honor was for wartime exploits against an enemy.
So, the Air Force backed off, regrouped, and redrafted a proposal to give Yeager a special peacetime Medal of Honor. They sent it on to Congress, and it was approved.
Jackie certainly was the impetus for the medal, but a lot of us thought that the reason Chuck didn't get the regular Congressional Medal was that Jackie had made too many enemies over the years. Had it been somebody else pushing his case, the outcome might've been different. But, hell, what difference? It was a tremendous honor, the nation's highest tribute to a guy who deserved it. President Ford presented it to Chuck at the White House in 1976. And a lot of us who have known Chuck for nearly thirty years couldn't help being misty-eyed about it: glad for Yeager, sad to see the end of an era that produced his kind of pilot. He was, without question, the best pilot this country has produced.
A FAREWELL TO ARMS
When the time came, I was ready to get out, and I think Chuck was, too. His retirement was the Air Force's loss, and although I don't think he would have been happy serving seven years longer without being able to fly, in my opinion-prejudiced of course-he should have received a second star. We spent our first month in retirement at Jackie's place in Indio because the house I bought for us in Grass Valley wasn't ready-a big, sprawling house with redwood siding in a forest of madronas and Douglas firs, with a big pond out front where mallard and wood ducks brood in season. We planned to stock it with trout and bass. Grass Valley is in the California Gold Rush country, in the foothills of the Sierra, and my family has lived there for three generations. The house was really the house of our dreams.
Starting our new life at Jackie's was a good idea, a way to just unwind with not much to do but horseback ride and soak up the sunshine. While we were in Pakistan, Jackie had suffered a serious heart condition and now wore a pacemaker. During our time at Norton, Chuck did weekly grocery shopping for Floyd and Jackie, who, as a retired Air Force colonel was entitled to use the commissary. He bought about three or four hundred dollars' worth of groceries every week and drove it down to them
She and Floyd were really in poor health, and it was sad to see. Jackie just couldn't accept growing old. She hated it passionately-couldn't stand it mostly because she was forced to retire from competitive flying, and finally had to sell her Lodestar, which really crushed her. She was in her middle sixties. But I'll hand it to her, she decided Chuck should have the Congressional Medal of Honor and went chasing after it and nailed it down. It was a wonderful honor that might not have happened if not for her. But after all her work, she felt so poorly that she couldn't make it to the ceremonies in Washington. Neither could General Boyd, who died only a few weeks later from cancer. That news was really a depressing shocker.
We were Floyd and Jackie's closest friends and saw a lot of them in the last years. Floyd died at age eighty in 1977, and Chuck was named executor of his estate. Floyd asked that his ashes be scattered over the ranch to nourish his plants and flowers. Chuck and another friend took care of that, but some ashes were blown back inside the airplane. Chuck and I agreed that was the way to do things when our time came-only be neater. And no services, nothing, we had had enough of those during our years in the military, although it was impossible to get Chuck to go to any of them. He'd say, "What difference does it make? The guy won't know whether I was there or not." I'd say, "That's not why you go. You go to lend support to his survivors." The only one I could get him to attend was when Eleanor Anderson's mother died; he did that out of respect to Bud and Eleanor, and he put on a suit, too.
After Floyd died, Jackie began to rapidly decline. I think she just gave up and wanted out. She suffered heart and kidney failure, became swollen and had to sleep sitting up in a chair. It got to the point where friends didn't want to visit her because she became so impossible. Chuck continued to visit and was about the only one on earth who could get her to smile. She died in August 1980, in her seventies, living in a modest house because the ranch was sold to a condominium developer.
I started my own little business, buying properties around Grass Valley, and kept very busy, but it took Chuck a while to adjust to retirement. He kept a sixteen-pound sledgehammer in the garage that his dad had used in the gas fields of West Virginia, and used that to break up firewood. It was great exercise, but it meant he was bored. He chopped mountains of firewood. He'd putter around, building cabinets, chopping wood, wondering what to do with himself from one minute to the next. He drove me crazy, he drove Bud crazy, and I thought, "How many years is it going to be like this?"
Gradually he got into the swing, and, as always with Chuck, things began to fall into place. He had invitations to go out and make speeches-that had never stopped since the sound-barrier flight-and he began accepting. Friends invited him to hunt antelope in Wyoming, and he and Bud hunted dove and quail in the fall, and still, every July, they go on a two-week backpack into the Sierra. Those two carry in fifty-pound packs and trek about 125 miles up to a lake where the golden trout spawn, at thirteen thousand feet.
Somewhere along the trail he discovered hang gliding, and took up that. Then some West Virginia Republicans came along and tried to get him to run for the Senate against Robert Byrd. Chuck just laughed and said to me, "Can you imagine me doing that?" I said, "Nope." A Hollywood movie director named Hal Needham asked him to work on a rocket car speed record and on the movie, Smokey and the Bandit 2. They raced at Rogers Dry Lake and got the car up to Mach 1.