For a nation in search of heroes

...here's one.

"As to just what this ineffable quality was … well, it obviously involved bravery. But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life.… Any fool could do that.… No, the idea … seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull back in the last yawning moment—and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day.… There was … a seemingly infinite series of tests.… A dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even—ultimately, God willing, one day—that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men's eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself."

- Tom Wolfe