Landing on the Moon, 1969

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s Gift to Unhappy Outsiders

It was the summer of my senior year in high school and my friend Linda and I were enrolled in the language program of the Université d’Aix-Marseille in Aix-en-Provence. We had visited France on a one-week trip during Easter break and fallen in love with the architecture, elegance and sophistication of Paris. It had not occurred to us that the people in a country we adored would not love us back. But this was the height of the Vietnam War. On a campus with thousands of radical-minded students, “American” was synonymous with “evil.” We found ourselves blamed for every battle, which were extensively covered in the French press. We were puzzled when students yelled, “Hamburger!” at us, but eventually learned that they blamed Linda and I personally for the 700 North Vietnamese deaths in the battle of Hamburger Hill that May.

We were pushed and spit on, which had both of us near tears. We became hesitant to leave our dorm room for the classroom. It was like running the gauntlet. We gave up eating in the cafeteria, where we were easy sitting targets for student anger.

Until the night of July 20, 1969. We’d read in the International Herald Tribunethat astronauts would be landing on the moon, but we had no plans to venture to the student common room to try to watch it on tv.

At 9pm, someone started banging on our door. We didn’t open it. We feared for our lives. But soon the banging was coming from several hands, and we heard voices calling our names. Then they opened the door – it wasn’t locked – and about a dozen smiling French students rushed in and began to clap us on the back and congratulate us. “Félicitations! La lune! La lune! Hommes sur la lune!”
We were pulled down the hallway and into the common room, where we saw the lunar module Eagle sitting on the moon’s surface. Then, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin emerged. The students went nuts, cheering and dancing and howling, grinning at us as if we were personally responsible for this daring act. It was the first night that wine bottles were shared with us, the first night we got drunk in France, and the first time we were considered something other than raving violent American warmongers.
The amazement of the idea of men walking on the moon finally got through to both of us. Linda and I were still in shock, not trusting at all that the students who had so cruelly abused us for a month wouldn’t suddenly turn on us again. Those first footsteps on another planet. How incredible it seemed. How American, this defiance of gravity. That night was the best of America, and these students, who had been so awful, were now ready to admire our country’s daring and innovation.
Later, we were swept along with the crowd out to the plaza at the center of the university, where students in a drunken or dreamy state danced on the grass, faces turned up to the moon, which had never seemed so big, and bright, and full. It was the moon and it belonged to everybody, but now, as Americans, we were credited with having a special relationship with it, a connection that proved stronger than their hatred of us from previous days.
The next two weeks passed easily, with students inviting us to their parties and plying us with cheap wine. They seemed happy to be in the company of Americans whose countrymen had slipped the surly bonds of earth. They imagined us as worthy. They held us in high regard. All because of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
Passing the next two weeks in a drunken haze proved no better for our studies than the four weeks we’d spent as hated enemies. Because of our frequent absences and failure to show up for tests, we did not pass. But it didn’t matter. We celebrated our American-ness that night. It felt good, as though we were special people. We held our heads high. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin gave us back our sense of pride. I can never think of that night without a swelling in my heart, the night that changed the fate of two sad, scared high school girls.