posted on Mar, 20 2010 @ 02:27 PM
(continued from previous post)
[Obviously these won't be his exact words, but in feel and fact they aren't terribly far off. I took the liberty of making up the name of a magazine
article below. My memory is keen and aided by my journal from that period, but both have limits.]
"Von Braun wore the meatball pin [NASA's logo] on his lapel for every launch, and at many PR and press events. It was his good luck charm. A
member of his transplanted Peenemunde team had given it to him the morning of the first Mercury flight, and he wore it for the launch. Mission
successful, the ritual stuck. Much too much was riding on each flight not to seek ridiculous comfort in rituals. All of us were superstitious in
those days. Damned if I didn't wear the same Bulova watch for every flight, even after it broke and I had to wear a second watch on the other
wrist. Early the morning of one of the later manned Mercury launches I went to help Von Braun with a press event, to answer anything that came up
related to my systems. Technical problems with the PA system forced a slight delay, and we were waiting in an adjoining lounge for the event to
start, just him and I. Only a few times had I been alone with him, and I always found the experience discomfiting. Luckily Von Braun sensed the
awkwardness. He immediately took off his coat, put it on the back of his chair, and walked out of the room to get coffee. An engineer came in a
moment later to fetch us and lead us to the dais. Trying to save time, I grabbed Von Braun's coat so he wouldn't have to come back for it.
Running down the hall to find him, I accidentally dropped the coat. Unconsciously I reached down, and as I picked it up a spur on the edge of the
meatball pin hooked onto the carpet fibers, snagging the coat for a moment before the coat, but not the pin, pulled free. Stuck face down on the
carpet, what stared up at me should have been the plain back of a dull silver pin. To my surprise, I was looking at a dull silver skull and
crossbones fitting just inside the pin and roll clasp of the original pin. With no time to waste on comprehension, and all my worry devoted to the
press event and the subsequent launch, I just grabbed the pin, reattached it where I thought it had been, and continued down the hall. On finding
Von Braun, he seemed annoyed, grabbed the jacket, and we went to the press briefing. Obviously I should have thought more about the pin incident,
but it got lost among the seemingly more serious events. No more than a month later, though, I was at a bar reading a story in one of those men's
adventure magazines that was popular at the time; "Escaped from the SS" was the title. I flipped the page and there in an illustrated scene of
horror was an SS officer smiling charmingly, despoiled girl at his feet, his cap nonchalantly skewed, and upon that cap the skull and crossbones
"death's head" logo of the SS. I felt sick. How had I not understood it when I saw it on Von Braun's pin? Out of context, in the commotion of
my anxieties, I just didn't get it. Now I did, and I began to consider what it meant that the head of our program wore this, wore it hidden in
plain sight. I had seen him meet with Eisenhower wearing that pin for Christ's sake, I had the photo to prove it. I noticed later that he
sometimes wore it more discretely pinned underneath his lapel flap; you wouldn't know the meatball pin was there unless you lifted up the flap. I
considered the possibility that perhaps this was just another superstition. Perhaps this was his "lucky" death's head from his days launching
V-2s. Perhaps some would have swallowed that story if he'd offered it, but no death's head ever brought luck to the slave labor at his Peenemunde,
or to the Jews exterminated from the cities and towns throughout his Germany. If he still considered that a talisman of luck, then god help the man
who has no luck at all.