When I decided to stay in Iraq, I decided to take the fear out of my body and put it into a freezer.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I want to be frozen on the hope that they'll find whatever I died of and bring me back.
I have a pathological terror of falling through ice. I nearly drowned once. I fell off a boat and got a cramp, and was rescued by an oil-rig diver, a great bear of a man who simply leant into the water and scooped me out with one finger.
I'm not panicking, and I'm not scared, I've been through the Gulf War, the Asia crisis, and the Russian crisis.
I always put on a brave face when I was the most terrified, the most trapped and out of control.
When I was immobilized by fear, I might have a panic attack. I've had a couple of panic attacks in my life.
The first day I arrived, they told me to go home and get rid of that cold.
Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.
The only time I had what you would call life-threatening fear was when I was on the Moon. Towards the end of our stay, we got excited and we were going to do the high jump, and I jumped and fell over backwards. That was a scary time, because if the backpack got broken, I would have had it. But everything held together.
I returned to Vietnam in '94, and even then, all those decades later, walking around that place, I remained afraid. And, in some ways, rightly so.
After I was assaulted in Egypt, I learned fear. I've just never been so scared in my life. I've never been so close to death.