Moon Men Return: USS Hornet and the Recovery of the Apollo 11 Astronauts by Scott Carmichael

Moon Men Return was published in 2010 by Naval Institute Press. The first printing of the hardcover edition runs 237 pages. The front cover features a photo of Apollo 11’s recovery ship, the USS Hornet, and a photo of the Command Module Columbia floating in the Pacific. The back features blurbs from two of the three Apollo 11 astronauts, with Armstrong being the exception. Moon Men Return includes one section of photos, including images of the rescue swimmers and the recovery. It also features a never-before-published photograph rediscovered during research for the book: the only image in existence of the moment of the Apollo 11 splashdown.

Carmichael’s book covers events from the perspective of Hornet’s crew, detailing the training for and execution of the mission to recover Columbia and the astronauts within. Part of the mission included providing accommodations for press aboard the ship and preparing for a post-splashdown visit by President Richard Nixon. The overriding theme of the recovery procedures was precaution against potential back-contamination by so-called “Moon germs.” The astronauts were immediately quarantined upon their recovery, and contingencies existed to quarantine the entire ship and evacuate the president in the event their isolation was breached or Moon germs proved to be real.

I went into this book not expecting much, but by the end of it I counted it one of my favorite Apollo library titles. A few factors combine to make the story unexpectedly engaging. First, the book is written with military precision. Carmichael’s writing style makes the book feel very much like a military document (not surprisingly, he is an employee of the Department of Defense, though the book is not a government publication). This comes not just in the jargon of the armed forces (which, like obscenity, is a difficult thing for which to pin down a definition, but which you can instantly recognize when you see it), but also in the extensive research.

Carmichael combines volumes of official documents from Hornet with thorough interviews with dozens of crew members to paint a comprehensive picture of the preparation for Apollo 11’s recovery. He familiarizes the reader with the key individuals on Hornet, providing brief biographies and frequently allowing the sailors to relate their own memories. The result is that the reader is immersed in the insular world of Hornet at sea; the style makes you feel like you are aboard the ship viewing the events.

A book that feels like an official after-action report runs the risk of being dry and boring. But the second unexpected factor I found while reading is that the book is subtly subversive in ways that a proper military document never could be. Carmichael shows us a crew whose outward appearance is total professionalism, but also gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the actual events as they happened, even when they do not entirely according to regulations.

A surprising number of funny anecdotes pepper the book. We learn about the Apollo 10 rescue swimmers who got chewed out by NASA scientists for slapping a huge decal of a daisy on the Command Module’s window. The swimmers on Apollo 11 instead wore daisy decals on their wet suits. We are privy to a secret caper, revealed only decades after the fact: when an archaic model of spotlight on Hornet breaks down before the big day, two of the ship’s crew members sneak aboard another Navy vessel to swap it with a working one. We discover the precise choreography established for Nixon’s visit and share the horror experienced by Hornet’s crew when unauthorized people begin eating off of Nixon’s ornate presidential pastry tray. These moments make the history of the Hornet and its crew in July 1969 come alive. The reader gets a sense of the Navy professionalism on display, but can also relate to the crew as ordinary people.

Moon Men Return is a fantastic addition to the Apollo library. Carmichael does a wonderful job of filling in some little-known history. The interviews with the crew make it possible for him to bring Hornet to life and let the reader experience a few exciting weeks in the vessel’s history. With Apollo 11 more than 50 years old, personal perspectives on history like this will only become more and more scarce.