Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane [87]
At my graduation from West Point I took a commission in the USAF, something I was permitted to do because my dad was a retired USAF NCO. But I was not released to the commissioning ceremony until my tactical officer made one last effort to get me to pledge my life to the U.S. Army. “Mr. Mullane, going into the air force is the dumbest thing you could ever do. Your background is all army. You’ll never get far in the air force.” Thank God I tuned him out.
Donna and I married one week later in the Kirtland AFB chapel in Albuquerque. She made a lovely bride. In high school she had never worn the tiara of the homecoming queen or the uniform of a cheerleader or played the lead in the senior class play. She didn’t possess the beauty of girls who typically captured those honors. But seen through the lens of my young love, she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
Three of my West Point classmates served as groomsmen. We were all in uniform—they in their army dress blues and I in my black-tie air force livery. Military weddings are timeless. With the carefree smiles of youth and the lights glistening from our polished brass, the scene could have been lifted from WWII, or even a Civil War daguerreotype. We were still too intoxicated by our recent release from West Point to hear the guns of our war…Vietnam. But they were waiting for us. Mike Parr, one of my groomsmen, would be killed in action seventeen months later.
Donna and I took a honeymoon to someplace. I hardly recall where. We never left the sheets. I only remember that the rented room had hardwood floors and the bed was on castors. If there had been an odometer on the bed frame, the instrument would have recorded a couple thousand miles during our short stay. By the time we returned to Albuquerque, Donna was already morning sick, pregnant with twins. (This was before the days of ultrasound. We wouldn’t know she was carrying twins until two weeks prior to her delivery.) As we had done everything else, we had children spontaneously. There had been no real thought or discussion. We were Catholic. You got married and had kids. What was there to discuss?
In July 1967, we drove from Albuquerque to begin our life as military nomads. In that car was a social retard…me. It is true what cadets say about West Point: “It takes eighteen-year-old men and turns them into twenty-one-year-old boys.” Did it ever. I had learned to drive tanks and fire a howitzer and field-strip a machine gun, but I had never used a Laundromat or cooked a meal. I couldn’t dance. I had never written a check. I had never made a stock investment or shopped for a car or clothes or groceries. I had no clue about home ownership.
God only knew what this woman at my side saw in me. But throughout my journey toward the prize of spaceflight, Donna never wavered in her support. Even ten minutes into that drive from Albuquerque, she was there for me. I was still trying to come to grips with the fact that my bad eyesight had blocked me from pilot training and thrown me into navigator training instead. To be an astronaut I would have to be a test pilot and that wasn’t going to happen if I couldn’t get into pilot training. Donna