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I wanted to express to Joan that it wasn’t her fault, that I had been struggling to escape the quicksand that had been pulling me down for the past few years, and that even now I had no firm grasp on the present. Change in the future seemed to offer the only hope to me. “I can’t go on like this,” I said. We talked rather bluntly for the next several hours, and we both shed tears. Joan was a good woman and the mother of my children. She had been thrown into a world where neither of us knew how to function, but she had tried to make the best of it. I certainly didn’t want to hurt her, but I told her honestly that I didn’t see us growing old together, either. She seemed resigned that we would divorce and begin life anew, apart from each other. We were adults; we could handle this.

When I awakened the next morning, Joan was already sitting out on the balcony in the bright morning sun, having a cup of coffee. I went out and joined her, and she made no move to go inside. We sat silently for a while before Joan looked at me and asked, “Where will you go, now that you are going to begin again, alone?”

I dropped the bombshell. “I hope to marry Marianne, even though she is engaged to someone else.”

Joan bristled. Then she lit into me. Who did I think I was, anyhow? Had I simply said I wanted a divorce, she probably could have handled that. These past years hadn’t been easy for her, either. But to think that I was dumping her for another woman? Oh no! She wasn’t going to roll over and play dead while I did that.

It would not be an amicable divorce. We went home together, walking around the same house but living on two different planets. Joan had asked that we not say anything to our children until we had a plan, but kids are smart; they know when Mom and Dad aren’t doing well. Our kids easily picked up the tension between us.

Meanwhile, I tried to get in touch with Marianne, to no avail. She refused to answer any of my calls. When I finally reached a mutual friend, I was told that Marianne was getting married the following day. I was flabbergasted.

When I told Joan, she didn’t gloat; it was just more sadness on top of sadness. Ironically, being jilted by Marianne somehow caused both Joan and me to reconsider our plans. Joan was a strong woman, and she handled things in her own way. We had nothing to lose and everything to gain by staying together. I was thinking more and more about retirement, so we decided to postpone any final decision on our marriage until after that.

In mid-January I flew to Washington, D.C., for a press conference to announce my retirement from the Air Force. The day before my announcement, while at the Pentagon, I bumped into General George Brown, my boss’s boss, and thus mine as well. The general and I exchanged pleasantries, and then he floored me. “Colonel, did you know that your guys lost a plane at the test pilot school this morning?”

The look on my face told him that I had not yet heard. “And the pilot?”

“I don’t know for sure, but I think he bailed out.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

“The plane was an A-7, Colonel,” Brown said curtly, as he continued down the hall. I knew what that meant. It was one of our guys flying the subsonic A-7 jet. I called Ted Twinting as soon as I could find a phone. When Ted told me the name of the pilot who had lost the plane, I gulped hard. He was a student pilot who had a physical problem that made the safety of his flying questionable in my mind. Both Ted and I had expressed misgivings about his ability to fly, but his medical reports showed that he could handle it. While doing a lateral test, he had allowed the plane’s altitude to get too low, and he’d lost it. Fortunately, he escaped with only cuts and bruises, but the plane was demolished.

On Friday, January 14, 1972, I arrived at the Pentagon to make my retirement announcement. Dan Henkin, the officer in charge of the proceedings, caught my arm before we went out for the press conference. “Buzz,