Algor: Earth's interior "millions of degrees"...

At least Al Gore didn't spend his Viet Nam years protecting Texas from Olahoma.At least Al Gore didn't spend his Viet Nam years protecting Texas from Olahoma.

Gentlemen, despite anything you might have heard, there is not a single thing in this ******* place worth dying or getting severely injured or maimed over, the ONLY thing you are trying to achieve here is to return home in one piece a year and a half or so hence.

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.

"Well, am I running?" George W. Bush demanded to know.

I happened to be sitting in my Suburban near the south door of the state capitol, discharging a passenger, just as the governor's silver-gray Lincoln Continental was doing the same. It was early February, well before he would announce the formation of a presidential exploratory committee, and a smidgen of suspense still lingered. I had waved at Bush as he went past, and he had swerved over to deliver the opening gambit in one of his favorite games: conversational one-upmanship. Having played it before, I knew I didn't have a chance.

"Sure," I said. "You'd be the wuss of all time if you didn't."

"But what about the rumors?" he shot back. Then, to my utter stupefaction, he proceeded to tick off everything the national press was investigating about his past: five or six of the most salacious things that could be said about anyone—including, in his own words, "I bought cocaine at my dad's inauguration"—plus intimate gossip about his family.

As he well knew, I had already heard all of it through the media grapevine. "You missed one," I said. "You crashed a jet while you were in the National Guard because you were drunk."

He spread his hands. "That's easy," he said. "Where's the plane?" Game over. He spun around and headed off.

World War II produced a generation of hard-nosed pilots who soon dominated the fledgling commercial airline industry and also led the peacetime military efforts to fly higher and faster in experimental aircraft. After the war, many top test pilots, some of whom would later fly into space, were stationed at Wright Field, an isolated base at Muroc in the Mojave desert of California. Men like Chuck Yeager assaulted the sound barrier in the skies by day, and at sundown gathered at Pancho's Fly Inn, a ramshackle saloon.

Yeager didn't go to Pancho's and knock back a few because two days later the big test was coming up. Nor did he knock back a few because it was the weekend. No, he knocked back a few because night had come and he was a pilot at Muroc. In keeping with the military tradition of Flying and Drinking, that was what you did.

-- ''The Right Stuff,'' by Tom Wolfe (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979)