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The Hero as a complicated figure
Those we admire can be flawed. Perhaps that makes them even more interesting.
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The lunar module, with astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, approaching the Apollo 11 command module with Earth in the background, on July 21, 1969.
PHOTO: NASA
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To the man on the moon came earthly requests. Please, Mr Neil Armstrong, wrote 13-year-old Fiorella Giusti from Italy, can you send me one of your socks. Others asked for cards or a signed cheque to be framed. A dying 14-year-old boy simply asked for an autographed message.
The boy’s request was accompanied by a letter from his mother. “He does not,” she wrote to Armstrong, “know the gravity of his health problem, and I do not want him to know; however, I thought that if you knew how little time he has left on this earth and that it is within your power to give him the biggest moment of happiness in his short life, perhaps you would be able to find a few moments in your overcrowded schedule to write a few words to him.”
