“We Came in Peace for All Mankind” Fifty six years ago, the night of the Apollo 11 moon landing in July of 1969, I was at camp in the heart of the beautiful Texas Hill Country feeling safe and secure. It was “Camp Arrowhead,” now called “Heart O’ The Hills.” Since the recent horrific flooding from this past July 4th weekend, I can’t get the camp out of my mind. I also can’t keep this one transcendent night out of my mind – a night from so long ago.
I loved camp. Camp was sublime. I was growing up, building a little independence away from home with my friend Kathy as my camp buddy. We had both been born in the Rio Gand Valley in McAllen, Texas, and our mothers had been good friends; and so here we were.
While I started camp as this weird little ‘tween, I blossomed there. My Mom knew it had the power to allow me to grow. I tolerated riding, shunned rifle shooting, but it was in the river that I excelled. I aspired to be part of the prestigious Canoe Club, and I got in!
In school the year before I had been taunted and teased by my classmates. I was new, returning to Texas from Colorado, and therefore weird and an outsider. I didn’t even know what a 7-Eleven Slurpee was! I thought everyone’s drawl was a big joke. But at camp, I was around all these new girls similarly displaced and so we bonded – with our cabin-mates and our counselor. I had friends!
It was July 21, 1969. Little did we know that a remarkable thing was happening on the moon that night. I guess we went to sleep first? I honestly can’t be sure, but I will never forget what happened next. We were asked to bring our blankets to the lawn in front of the main lodge. There, we settled down and made one huge camp-wide pallet while the director of the camp turned on a small black and white TV. I thought: ‘This is cool, outside under the stars and we were going to watch TV!’ Along with everyone at camp and a majority of humans on Earth, the next thing we saw, on live TV was Neil Armstrong climb down ladder, and make the remarkable statement, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind.”
Me, all by myself, without my own family, but with this family of campers, beside this beautiful river I had come to love – we saw an astronaut walk on the moon! In thinking about this years later, what really resonates with me is this statement on a plaque that the astronauts left on the moon: “ Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
Just for a moment, the vast majority of Americans, and hundreds of millions of other people on planet Earth, were united.
After the July 4, 2025 flood in the Texas Hill Country, you could say that Mankind has shown up for good once again – all kinds of people came forward to help ease the suffering of that tragedy.
In 1969, on the shores of the serene Guadalupe River, under a Texas sky full of stars, I was blessed with an experience and a truth that I wouldn’t fully realize until more than fifty years later. “We Came in Peace for All Mankind.” That night, in 1969, for many of us, it was the first time, but thankfully not the last time, that Mankind has felt real.
(Elizabeth Buckley is a Peabody and Gracie Award–winning filmmaker, known for PBS’s ‘Wishbone’. Her documentary film ‘The Stars at Night’, first workshopped at Wimberley StoryFest, has screened worldwide. She teaches film at Texas State University. Find out more at thestarsatnight.org and environmentalartsalliance. org; [email protected])
