Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Read Online Free PDF Page B

he was flying solo, having earned his pilot's license while still a teenager.
One Saturday Frank was caught in a sudden thunderstorm as he was returning from one of his first solo flights. Fighting the howling wind and the turbulence, Borman suddenly felt great excitement and joy: he was going to bring that plane home no matter what. His mind cleared, his senses became sharp, and he focused his entire being on doing what had to be done to land safely. When that plane glided to a stop at the end of the runway, Borman found himself overwhelmed with an extraordinary feeling of accomplishment.
By his senior year of high school Frank Borman knew that he wanted to spend his life flying airplanes. He had also met and dated the one woman he would share that life with.
Unfortunately, he didn't know this yet.
She did, however.
When seventeen-year-old Frank Borman first asked fifteen-year-old Susan Bugbee for a date, she knew that he was the man for her. Her father had died when she was thirteen, and she saw in Borman a stability and strength that few other teenagers had. She knew that he would be successful in whatever he did, and she fervently wanted to help him get there. Borman himself was strongly attracted to Susan. She was smart, articulate, and beautiful. By the end of high school they were going steady. Neither, however, had yet considered marriage.
Frank's focus was instead on flying. Because Borman's family was too poor to send him to any of the preeminent aeronautical schools, he was left
     

Page 24
with two choices: enlist and take advantage of the G.I. Bill, or apply to West Point. Unfortunately, he hadn't thought of West Point until well into his senior year of high school. It was now too late. There were too many applicants ahead of him.
Then, as Borman believes, fate intervened. The son of a local judge was in trouble, hanging out with the wrong people. Having heard that a certain high school student by the name of Borman had not only obtained his pilot's license but also built and flew model airplanes, the judge asked Frank to work with his son. He even offered to buy all the model plane kits, regardless of cost.
For Borman this was a deal he couldn't pass up. He and the boy became good friends as they assembled and flew some of the most expensive model planes available. In gratitude for straightening his son out, the judge pulled the right strings and got Borman on the applicants' list to West Point. The day after he graduated high school Borman received a letter telling him to report to the academy. He was in.
Three years later, Frank was on his way to Europe. His standing at the military academy was high enough for him to be chosen as one of a dozen cadets to tour Europe.
Borman arrived in Berlin just as the yearlong Berlin Airlift was coming to an end. "We flew into West Berlin on sacks of coal," he wrote later. 4 During the previous eleven months, the Soviet military had barred all ground transportation from entering an already struggling West Berlin. Food shipments were stopped. Coal supplies were blocked. Electricity, which came from a power plant in East Berlin, was cut off. With stockpiles for, at most, one to two months, it appeared that the 2.5 million inhabitants of West Berlin faced starvation unless the Western powers abandoned them to the communists.
The Soviets began the blockade not merely to exert their power. They had a legitimate fear of a re-united Germany, and felt that dividing the country would prevent the Germans from mounting another war against Russia. 5 They also wished to install a communist state in their East German zone. The presence of the capitalist island of West Berlin in the center of the communist zone made these goals difficult, if not impossible, to
     

Page 25
achieve. 6 When, on June 18th, the three Western powers unilaterally introduced a new West German currency, the Soviets responded in kind, further declaring that their East German marks were the sole currency for all of