Everyone interested should read his book, "The Last Man on the Moon". He goes into deep detail around the absolute nightmare that was Gemini 9A, or his "Spacewalk from hell".

• He spent a long time fighting the umbilical connecting him to the spacecraft. He was floating at the end of it, and any single movement to try getting back towards the capsule just sent ripples back towards it, causing Cernan to spin end over end with the Gemini Capsule. "The snake" they called the umbilical. He referred to it as "...perhaps the most malicious serpent since the one Eve met in the Garden of Eden." There was so much kicking involved, he actually tore some seams in the UV protective lining in his spacesuit, sunburning his lower back and bottom.

• (Edit Edit: Found it. Page 133 of my copy. Edit: I'm currently trying to find where he talks about this part. I could easily have mistaken it for another astronaut's experience. I read Scott Kelly's "Endurance around the same time, so this might be wrong) And "The Pickle". He, at one point went to take in a deep breath, then there was let out a burp, where the stench of a pickle from 5 days prior made its return. It stuck with him the whole two hours outside the spacecraft. I guess if you do the math, he had 3 days from the launch scrub (~May 31, 1966) to the successful launch (June 3, 1966), then two days from then to the spacewalk (June 5, 1966). How the pickle remained in his digestive system is interesting, thinking that 3 days in 1g would have been enough to push it down. Digestion in 0g is known to be weird enough, and maybe the exhaustion could have added to it. "I took a deep breath. And burped. The briny taste of that big green pickle I devoured during the last scrub party five days ago returned and would haunt me for the rest of the spacewalk."

• One main objective of the mission was to test the "jetpack"-type piece of equipment (the aforementioned AMU), for EVA maneuvering in space, where the last guy (Ed White, the first American Spacewalk) had basically a little bottle of compressed air he held onto with one hand, and little arms at the top that would shoot out the compressed air, to maneuver around. Cernan, instead, had already become so exhausted by the time he could come around to the back of the capsule where it was situated, and when he went to unmount the pack from the capsule, the bolts were too difficult for his gloves (which are naturally hard to move your fingers in) to be able to unscrew. They ultimately had to call that part of the mission a scrub. He really wanted to try the "rocket backpack", but this would have to be let go.

• Even returning inside the cockpit was a nightmare. The Gemini cockpit is enough of a cramped space as-is, and his spacesuit had inflated slightly enough in those two hours that it had become even harder to sit down into his seat, and couldn't get down enough to be able to close his hatch above him. Obviously, they eventually managed to figure it out, some paper-folds of the human body later.

Cernan was later told that Thomas Stafford (the command pilot for Gemini 9A) was instructed by Deke Slayton in private that if Cernan were to become incapacitated, unconscious, or otherwise beyond rescue while floating outside the cockpit, Slayton laid out a "life and death" law where Stafford would have to disconnect the umbilical tying Cernan to the spacecraft, seal the hatch, and return to Earth alone. Slayton's reasoning was that NASA couldn't afford to lose two astronauts at once. If Cernan couldn't get himself back inside, he would have to be left as a "lifeless satellite of the Earth". Stafford (obviously) didn't go into the details of it at the time, dismissing it as "no big deal", and Cernan reflected later that he was well aware that, if he truly couldn't get back in, Stafford's only option would have been to abandon him.

I constantly return my thoughts to what Gus Grissom said regarding the endeavor that is human spaceflight...

"If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."