This was a skillet!-a frying pan!-a short-order grill!-not gray but black, smeared with skid marks from one end to the other and glistening with pools of hydraulic fluid and the occasional jet-fuel slick, all of it still hot, sticky, greasy, runny, virulent from God knows what traumas-still ablaze!-consumed in detonations, explosions, flames, combustion, roars, shrieks, whines, blasts, horrible shudders, fracturing impacts, as little men in screaming red and yellow and purple and green shirts with black Mickey Mouse helmets over their ears skittered about on the surface as if for their very lives (you’ve said it now!), hooking fighter planes onto the catapult shuttles so that they can explode their afterburners and be slung off the deck in a red-mad fury with a kaboom! that pounds through the entire deck-a procedure that seems absolutely controlled, orderly, sublime, however, compared to what he is about to watch as aircraft return to the ship for what is known in the engineering stoicisms of the military as “recovery and arrest.” To say that an F-4 was coming back onto this heaving barbecue from out of the sky at a speed of 135 knots… that might have been the truth in the training lecture, but it did not begin to get across the idea of what the newcomer saw from the deck itself, because it created the notion that perhaps the plane was gliding in. And yet once the newcomer’s two feet were on it… Geometry-my God, man, this is a… skillet! It heaved, it moved up and down underneath his feet, it pitched up, it pitched down, it rolled to port (this great beast rolled!) and it rolled to starboard, as the ship moved into the wind and, therefore, into the waves, and the wind kept sweeping across, sixty feet up in the air out in the open sea, and there were no railings whatsoever. In the training film the flight deck was a grand piece of gray geometry, perilous, to be sure, but an amazing abstract shape as one looks down upon it on the screen.

T was not until they were actually standing on the carrier deck that they first began to wonder if they had the proper stuff, after all. This, according to Tom Wolfe, is what it feels like to attempt to land a plane on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean. When I taught writing to homeschooled teenagers, I used a passage from this book to jolt them out of their complacency and show them how nonfiction writing could grab you by the throat and place you into a moment. Back in 1979, at the height of powers, he published The Right Stuff, a novel about the experimental pilots at the center of the space program.

The right stuff tom wolf