To answer the title question: I don’t know. It’s not clear to me if anyone knows the answer to that question for certain. It’s quite likely that Armstrong (yes, first human on the Moon Armstrong) did kill people, and yet there’s no clear (public) record of it. Very few sources even seem to want to report it, only noting slightly euphemistically that he flew combat missions in Korea, and then they rush off to his later, cleaner exploits.
That’s kind of weird. The actual violence tells us something about Armstrong, but the whitewashing of his background arguably tells us more about ourselves.
To spell it out clearly, he was mostly involved in ground attack flights, for example bombing anti-aircraft guns (which would likely have killed the people firing those guns), so that later bombers could pass by unimpeded (and possibly kill more people with their own bombs). This is what Neil Armstrong did before he became an astronaut.
I don’t think this is the defining activity of his life, if such a thing even really exists. We all mainly know him as the Moon guy, but we also get that this wasn’t his whole life. Most people would think of him also as a scientist or pilot, and those who’ve done their homework would be more specific and call him a naval aviator, test pilot, engineer, and academic. Some might focus on his family life, or his religion, or his media presence. But it doesn’t take that much thought to go beyond purely “Moon guy”. So why the resistance to also giving him the title of “someone who has probably killed people”?
This is something that’s bugged me about many astronauts. Quite a lot of them have military backgrounds, and more than a few have shot people. In most sane professions, that’s something that keeps you from getting even the first interview, and yet NASA considers it a virtue instead? We put these people up on pedestals and expect kids to regard them as rolemodels. (Are we hoping the kids will never find out about the violence? Or that they will?) When the first astronauts were hired, it was widely considered damning that most of the early ones were having a lot of sex with a lot of people (oh noes!), and yet not damning in the least that they might have ended someone’s life on purpose. That’s a pretty fucked up set of priorities.
I’ve responded to this by doing what any sane, well-adjusted individual would do, and spent several days scanning through every single astronaut/cosmonaut/taikonaut profile page on wikipedia (plus other sources, notably spacefacts.de, where greater clarity was needed) to build up a spreadsheet that categorises all of them by the level of violence they’re known to have embraced. Below is the google docs version of that.
…
The second column gives the person’s violence level, on a scale from 0 to 3. 0 indicates no known violence; 1 indicates military employment, with no known actual violence; 2 indicates participation in violent activities, but uncertainty about whether this actually killed anyone or not; 3 indicates definitely actually killing someone.
This is a kind of interesting question, but the article also adopts this tone of… what should I call it… moral buffedlement(?) that really bugs me. Like:
Quite a lot of them have military backgrounds, and more than a few have shot people. In most sane professions, that’s something that keeps you from getting even the first interview, and yet NASA considers it a virtue instead?
First of all this is not true; having shot people in a military context does not bar you from a first interview in most professions. Having shot people outside of a military context does. Second of all, it’s pretty clear why NASA considers military experience (especially flight experience!) to be a virtue for astronauts. So the point the author is making here seems confused.
Just because you think something is bad does not mean you have to be baffled by it! In fact, acting baffled by it when it is perfectly rational seems kind of weird!
the reason there’s resistance to calling the apollo astronauts killers and drawing attention to your doing so is because that imparts miasma, the same as anyone else, and miasma is a problem that requires solution.
there are extremely carefully constructed systems, especially during and after the 1939-1945 war, to attempt to purify people of that miasma, to make them clean, and to forgive their sin. especially for veterans of the war, these were generally very successful and those men went on to live mostly unpolluted lives, with the miasma safely contained and mitigated.
generally once you have solved the containment problem, you don’t want to go unsolving it. it is extremely silly to just *assume* that there have been no miasma-forgiveness systems and blithely state that well, of course, anyone with miasma has to live outside the camp and everyone setting up first interviews would be able to smell it and isn’t that how society is? No they didn’t, no they can’t, no it isn’t, and why are you wishing it were?
There was a *tremendous amount of effort* spent in overcoming the idea that veterans returning from the wars were polluted. The Germans failed to do this during and after the Great War, and ended up with thousands of miasmatic soldiers going around, stinking of death and defeat, who ended up forming the nucleus of the National Socialists. Nobody wanted a repeat of that shit, so the Allied effort from the very beginning had anti-miasma shit built in.
“Sane well-adjusted people” do not pick the scars of ex-lepers in the hope of discovering some encysted mycobacteria. They don’t point to mildly polluting sexual acts, the overreaction to that and say, oh, please, continue to be hysterical and purity policing but *please*, turn that hysteria onto something that’s a thousand times more ruining, and a thousand times less possible to do anything about if it gets out of hand. Someone obsessing about minor sexual improprieties *is* sanity, compared to that.
The Apollo program was a miasma-containment system, anyway. This is obviously the case on multiple levels - It gave clean, prosocial work to rehabilitate people who were trained to do dirty work.
There’s no mystery to it. Listen to the Apollo transcripts. Aldrin and Armstrong are very aware they were beating swords into ploughshares, and being heroic peacemakers. They were more aware than any of us will be, and they have their intention expressed plainly on the plaque:
There is something primally, corruptivity… MALICIOUS about the framing of this entire discussion. And I don’t say that lightly, I’m not being flippant.
There is, in no uncertain terms, no actual reason to CARE how many people Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin killed during their tours of duty in WW2. It’s not as if they’ve got some secret history of butchering prisoners or targeting civilians, there’s no thing that goes beyond the remit and expectations of a soldier. They were military men, fighting other military men, to defend the rights of the innocent from being murdered by a despotic regime.
That the question is even ASKED, that the framework is accepted, that the tone of their service is even later re-defined in a context of ‘miasma’ speaks not to an understanding of the horrors of war, but rather to an absolute, even aggressive IGNORANCE of war, and it’s resulting horrors. It requires a perspective so far removed from war as a reality as to see it not as an unfortunate result of incompatible states but rather as some kind of ethereal evil that infects everything it touches and leaves a stain upon everyone who contacts it.
It’s not a matter of a 'tremendous amount of effort’ to 'contain miasma’ or 'rehabilitate people’. People just understood, culturally and in general, that sometimes one must lift up the sword, and then afterwards put it back down, or better still beat it into the plowshare to till new fields with. The CONCEPT that soldiers should not be allowed to return to the lives that they left did not even really EXIST at that time, and really wouldn’t exist until somewhere around the Korean/Vietnam wars, due to anti-war activists showing no compassion to those drafted into the war when they finally were allowed to return FROM it. That it has grown from that sickening dehumanisation of those people pressed into battle against their will only makes it all the more obvious how evil the concept is.
Anti-Americanism keeps taking such weird turns.
Character assassination of men who did something amazing, just because they’re American.
This is how G*d punishes you for posting interesting stuff
silliness aside, the way that military conscription was an organising principle and common experience of the 20th century is another thing that separates it from the 21st, in most jurisdictions at least.
