Read Online Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman by Neal Thompson - Free Book Online

shaped—Shepard had withstood plenty of military protocol from his father. Second, Shepard had the temperament of a mule, refusing to tremble and cower like some of the other plebes. “As an Army brat, conforming to academy procedures was natural—at least Alan made it appear so,” his classmate Bob Kirk once remarked.
    What troubled some of the upperclassmen, though, was that he didn’t seem to take any of it too seriously. Friends called him “Shep” or “Schimpf” (a classmate’s young niece’s mispronunciation of “Shep,” which Shepard and his new friends found hilarious). “Full of piss and vinegar” is how Dick Sewall remembers Shepard, who was three years his junior. Shepard was “pretty crafty,” Sewall said, and he often found routes around the academy’s rules. Sometimes Shepard would get caught and punished, but half the time he’d talk his way out of it, and Sewall would agree not to report him. Instead of openly resenting his superiors, Shepard had a way of befriending them, adopting them as his allies and protectors. When they did chew him out, he would just smirk. One classmate called Shepard “ratey,” an academy moniker for someone who acts as if he rated better than the rest. “He was supposed to be subservient to his master and he was not.”
    One annoying duty forced upon plebes was waking thirty minutes before the upperclassmen and walking quietly into the older boys’ rooms to shut windows so that they wouldn’t be too cold when they awoke. One morning Shepard organized a small rebellion—he and a few other plebes stole the left shoe of every upperclassman and hid them in a bathroom. When the firsties learned Shepard was the ringleader, they made him bend over and grab his ankles while they took turns with a broom.
    “But he didn’t get broken by it,” Sewall said. “He was thinking:
Next time I just won’t get caught.”

    At the time—the late summer of 1941—the two-year-old war in Europe had crept steadily closer to America’s shores and minds. German submarines, or U-boats, were sinking British ships in the Atlantic Ocean, and the U.S. Navy had begun patrolling through the Atlantic and Caribbean, searching for German subs and escorting convoys of merchant ships and war supplies across to Europe. Day by day, as Hitler’s aggressions stomped further across Europe and then out into the seas, it was becoming obvious that America couldn’t wait on the sidelines much longer. Indeed, the United States’alignment with and support of England had put it essentially in an undeclared war with Germany. Shepardand his classmates knew it was just a matter of time before their nation headed to battle, and that they’d play a part in the fight.
    Finally, on October 31, 1941, Germany sunk its first U.S. ship—a torpedo that split open a Navy escort ship, the USS
Reuben James.
More than a hundred men died—“Tell me, what were their names?” Woody Guthrie wrote in a tribute song— marking the first U.S. Navy ship to be sunk in the escalating, expanding war. Meanwhile, Japan had begun snatching pieces of coastal China and numerous volcanic islands across Indochina, leading to increased frictions between Japan and the United States, which responded with an oil embargo that infuriated the oil-hungry Japanese military machine.
    Such escalations soon began to touch Shepard’s life at the Naval Academy. On November 29, as German panzer divisions marched steadily toward Moscow, Shepard and his classmates rode a train to Philadelphia for the annual Army-Navy football game. Before ninety-eight thousand fans, Navy beat Army 14–6, capping a 7–1–1 season under coach “Swede” Larson, a major with the Marines. Right after the game, Larson resigned as coach and rejoined the Marines, proclaiming: “There’s a bigger game, a bigger battle coming up and I’m going to be in it.” A week later, on a lazy Sunday morning, Admiral Husband Kimmel and his fleet of ships at Pearl Harbor