An astronaut who sees an angel during a routine lunar mission is the hero of this biting and savagely funny novel.
Colonel Curt Mint, a churchgoing, golf-playing, slowpulsed father of two who had graduated no lower than 10th in a class of five hundred at the military academy, who had earned (not merely acquired) a masters degree in science for a thesis on manned orbital rendezvous, who had flown more than sixty combat missions in Korea, who had won a Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal with two oak-leaf clusters, was - until the cosmic occasion of his madness - the very model of a modern American astronaut. Sensible, temperate, conservative, fairminded, devoted to wife and sons, obedient to superiours, Mint was the exemplary product of the military machine. Then he saw his angel.
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How the most powerful nation in the world deploys its vast resources to debrief one command pilot is the subject of this brilliant comic novel whose action builds to a conclusion as terrifying as it is plausable.
Colonel Curt Mint, a churchgoing, golf-playing, slowpulsed father of two who had graduated no lower than 10th in a class of five hundred at the military academy, who had earned (not merely acquired) a masters degree in science for a thesis on manned orbital rendezvous, who had flown more than sixty combat missions in Korea, who had won a Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal with two oak-leaf clusters, was - until the cosmic occasion of his madness - the very model of a modern American astronaut. Sensible, temperate, conservative, fairminded, devoted to wife and sons, obedient to superiours, Mint was the exemplary product of the military machine. Then he saw his angel.
....
How the most powerful nation in the world deploys its vast resources to debrief one command pilot is the subject of this brilliant comic novel whose action builds to a conclusion as terrifying as it is plausable.
