When you’re cold, you’re just by yourself.” When you’re exercising, you can push through the pain. The cold was magnified because your body’s so broken. I had that taste of comfort, and then it was taken away from you. “And when you’re snuggled up in this warm sleeping bag and they wake you up and immediately make you go in the frigid ocean, it was the closest I ever came to quitting.
“They let us sleep for a couple of hours in nice sleeping bags, one of only two naps you get in five days of training,” Kim said. He considered quitting during “hell week,” a five-day stretch of near continuous training in cold, wet conditions. SEAL training was just as tough as advertised, Kim said. And for me, getting out of my comfort zone, getting away from the people I grew up with, and finding adventure, that was my odyssey, and it was the best decision I ever made.” “I needed to find myself and my identity. “I didn’t like the person I was growing up to become,” he said. The recruiter could promise only the chance to try. So he enlisted in the Navy and asked to become a member of one of its elite SEAL teams. As high school graduation neared, it seemed only a radical step could get him off the road to nowhere. Buffeted by family instability and a difficult time at school, he didn’t see in himself the qualities he admired in others: the courage of the astronauts whose posters adorned his walls, the quiet professionalism and odds-defying determination of the Special Forces. Kim, 33, has come a long way from the shyness and small dreams of his Los Angeles youth. “Why wouldn’t NASA want him?” said David Brown, head of MGH’s Department of Emergency Medicine and MGH Trustees Professor of Emergency Medicine at HMS. His military honors include a Silver Star and a Bronze Star. Before going on inactive reserve to pursue his medical training, he was a Navy SEAL with more than 100 combat missions under his belt.
This isn’t the first time Kim has exchanged one high-pressure career for another. A year into a four-year residency at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Kim will put his medical career on hold so he can learn to fly a plane, spacewalk, operate the International Space Station’s robotic arm, and master other skills NASA considers essential.
Kim, a 2016 Harvard Medical School (HMS) graduate, was one of a dozen candidates picked by NASA in June for its next astronaut class. I told her and she was jumping up and down in the grocery store. “I was happy, jubilated, excited - all these emotions,” Kim said. Jonny Kim was in the grocery store when the call came: He would have to exchange his emergency room scrubs for a space suit.
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