In late April, Michael Collins passed away. Collins is such a common name that there were probably those who may not have placed Collins in the historical niche of important people. “Hmm,” some probably thought, “where have I heard that name before? Was he a football player? A former senator? Maybe that character actor I saw in a couple of movies?”
For those who were as captivated as I was in the 1960s with the Gemini and Apollo space missions, they remembered Michael Collins as the third astronaut in the Apollo 11 capsule. Collins was the one who stayed behind in the summer of ’69 while our own Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first and second of what are now just 12 men in history to take a lunar stroll.
In my opinion, in the history of those wonderful support people that we call our wing men or women, those people who serve as the perfect complements to others who play more prominent roles, if there was one person who was the perfect embodiment of what a wing person should be, it would be Collins.
The media often tried to portray him as “the lonely astronaut.” Despite, no doubt, having a yearning to take those wonderful first steps on the moon’s surface, Collins always insisted he was never lonely. He said after being confined in the module with Armstrong and Aldrin for such a long time, he actually enjoyed his “alone time” doing his work tracking his colleagues’ activities on the moon.
While the nation watched, transfixed by the grainy video images of Armstrong and Aldrin bunny-hopping through the dust, Collins played a different version of designated driver by also orbiting the moon when he wasn’t recording data. Collins’ enjoyment of his “alone time” sounds like the perfect rationalization that the perfect wing man would make, as he receded into the shadows so a couple of others could grab the lion’s share of the accolades.
A year or so after the celebrated mission, probably many in the country were hard-pressed to remember that astronaut who stayed behind. Armstrong, as the first, had the most notoriety, and we all loved his Wapakoneta roots in these parts. Aldrin, the last of the three still alive, would go on to lead a colorful and very public life. However, Collins made the conscious choice to live a much quieter life, one he began following his departure from the space program after the Apollo 11 mission was completed.
I think one important trait a good wing person possesses is humility, and surely an example of Collins’ humility was his decision to leave the space program after the mission, realizing doing so would cost him a near-certain chance to walk where Armstrong and Aldrin had walked. You see, as a vet of both the Gemini and Apollo programs, under the rotation system, Collins would have been the commander of what turned out to be the last moon-walk mission, Apollo 17, which would have meant he’d have been the last man to walk on the surface of the moon, rather than Eugene Cernan.
However, despite still being in his 30s, Collins felt there were other roads in life he wanted to travel. It was a totally Henry David Thoreau thing to do. When the transcendental author and philosopher decided to rejoin the race and leave his Walden Pond existence after 26 months, he said, “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.”
Unlike Thoreau, who died at the tender age of just 44, Collins more than doubled that before succumbing to cancer at the age of 90. In a life so very well lived, Collins’ rather quiet roads led to his authoring four books and also becoming the first director of the National Air and Space Museum.
In the military, a wing man is a pilot flying slightly behind the right wing of the lead pilot, there because he’s watching the lead pilot’s rear and his blind side. And, like Michael Collins, there have been so many who have filled that role.
While it’s nice to have those who can walk in lockstep with you at times, sharing the weight of a heavy load, it’s also so comforting to know that someone is just behind your right wing, content to live largely without much fanfare while protecting your flanks.
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