Charlie understood; he was a pilot too. He explained that he hadn’t been able to get anyone to agree to serve as Peggy’s backup, having gone through most of the more experienced astronauts. He offered me a deal: if I would serve as Peggy’s backup, which would mean returning to Russia for a significant period of time to train on the Russian ISS systems and on the Soyuz, he would assign me as commander of the space shuttle on my next flight, and as the commander of the International Space Station after that. After giving it a lot of thought, I went into his office with a list of reasons why I still thought I was the wrong person for the job. Charlie listened patiently.
“All that said,” I told him, “I’ve never said no when someone asked me to do something hard. So if you ask me to do this, I won’t say no.”
“I’m not going to accept that,” Charlie answered. “You’re going to have to say yes.”
“Okay,” I said somewhat grudgingly. “Yes, I’ll do it.”
I had been given this assignment later than normal, so in addition to taking a job that didn’t feel natural to me, I was trying to play catch-up. I trained a great deal in Russia, learning their Soyuz and the Russian part of the ISS. I also worked to hone my skills in the Russian language, which I had always found excruciatingly difficult. In addition to this, I had to learn the U.S. segment of the space station, which is incredibly complex; how to fly the space station’s robotic arm; and how to do spacewalks.
I went through Russian water survival training with Dima Kondratyev, whom I had gone through winter survival training with, and cosmonaut Sasha Kaleri, my two new backup crewmates. We left early in the morning on September 11, 2001, on an old Russian Navy vessel from Sochi, a palm-tree-covered coastal town on the Black Sea at the base of the Caucasus Mountains. As we slowly motored out to sea, we were given a tour of the ship and shown how to use some of the equipment. Toilet paper was forbidden, as it clogged up the sanitation system. We were told instead to use a brush soaking in antiseptic next to the toilet. Community ass brush? I thought to myself. Shit!
The water survival training wasn’t much more pleasant than winter survival training—an old Soyuz was lowered into the water, and we had to climb into it wearing our Sokol launch and entry suits. The hatch was closed behind us, and we sat there in the stifling heat until we were directed to remove our Sokol suits and put on our winter survival gear, followed by a rubber anti-exposure suit. It was almost impossible to follow these directions in the tight confines of the Soyuz. Dima, Sasha, and I had to take turns one by one lying spread out across one another’s laps to struggle out of one suit and into the other. The capsule heaved up and down with the rolling swells of the Black Sea, and I thought about how impossible this would be if we were returning from space and already weakened from living in zero gravity. Once in my winter clothing—not pleasurable since the Soyuz was as hot as a sauna—I then had to put on the full rubber anti-exposure suit, including layers of hats and hoods. We were drenched in our own sweat and exhausted even before climbing out of the Soyuz and jumping into the sea. This wasn’t really about training on the hardware or learning techniques; like winter survival training, it was almost exclusively a psychological and team-building exercise in dealing with shared hardship. To me, it would have been more effective to just admit that fact.
Once we finished up our training, we headed back to the bridge of the ship, where the captain toasted our success with vodka. I reflected on how strange this scene would have looked even just a few years before—me, an officer in the United States Navy, drinking alcohol on the bridge of a Russian Navy ship with its captain and Dima, a Russian Air Force pilot.
As we got back on shore, we got a call from Star City telling us that two planes had just crashed into the towers of the World Trade Center. We were as shocked as the rest of the world, and for me it was a horrible feeling to be so far from my country when it was under attack. We found the nearest television, and like most people at home, I spent hours watching the coverage and trying to understand what was happening. The Russians rose to the occasion, doing everything they could to help us. They brought food, translated the Russian news so we could understand what was going on, and even canceled the remaining training to get us back home as soon as possible. We flew out of Sochi the next day, and I was startled by how much the security had increased at the airport, despite the fact that the terrorist attack had been in another country on the other side of the world. As we waited in Moscow for flights to the United States to resume, we saw flowers piled high outside the gate of the U.S. embassy in a show of solidarity that I will never forget.
While in Russia, I also got to spend time with the prime crew—Peggy Whitson, my classmate, as well as Sergei Treshchev and Valery Korzun. Valery, who would be the commander of Expedition 5, was an atypical Russian with a welcoming smile and an endearing personality.
As part of our training, we had to learn to fly the Canadian robot arm, so Valery and I traveled together to Montreal in one of NASA’s T-38 jets. This was a rare opportunity to fly in a T-38 for a Russian cosmonaut, and it was fun for me as well to fly with a former Russian fighter pilot. After we completed our training in Montreal, I wanted to stop at my old Navy base, Pax River, for the annual test pilot school reunion. There I could catch up with old friends like Paul Conigliaro, and I thought Valery would enjoy meeting some Navy test pilots and they him. I made sure to get the appropriate permission before landing on a U.S. Navy base with an active-duty Russian Air Force colonel. I also had to make sure a U.S. customs official would meet our plane, since we would be flying directly from Canada.
When we landed and parked on the tarmac, right next to the Chesapeake Bay, the customs official wasn’t there yet. When I called, he said he hadn’t left his office—ninety minutes away in Baltimore. He told me sternly that we were not to leave the airplane until he arrived, but it was below freezing and windy, and Valery and I were wearing only our NASA blue flight suits and light flight jackets. I told the customs official we weren’t going to freeze to death waiting for him and would be in the Officers’ Club and hung up while he was still yelling at me to stay at the airplane. Had we had the proper supplies, perhaps we could have constructed a teepee.