Al Worden: Falling to Earth

It was like nothing I had ever experienced in my farming background, and a lot of fun after a strenuous week at West Point. I soon grew very close to Pam’s mother and father. They became like second parents to me and even loaned me money to help buy my car during my senior year.

Pam and I married at the cadet chapel on the hill overlooking the West Point campus in 1955, just before I left the academy. Naturally, we had our reception at the Hotel Astor. I truly felt like I belonged as a member of Pam’s family, and that we had the same aspirations and dreams for the future. In retrospect, neither of us knew—or perhaps could have known—what a tough road it would be for us both. I dragged a kind, loving, and gentle girl into some hard places, where it was impossible for her to follow. Could we have known that was coming as we celebrated our wedding day? Probably not.

Pam was my first serious girlfriend, and now she was my wife. The day I married, I was still a virgin. It wasn’t that I’d lacked the opportunities in high school. It just meant something special to me, so despite all my raging teenage hormones, I had waited. However, my patience meant I knew little about love and marriage.

In retrospect, I was too young, too focused, and too ambitious to be a great husband back then. My ambitions, and the military life, simply would not allow a young love to grow and flourish. We were two naïve kids, headed for brutal military lives in distant outposts. I had no real business bringing this trusting girl along. But I didn’t know. We were in love and believed we could tough it out.

In those first months, we couldn’t have been happier. Yet with my time at West Point ending, I’d also had to make some decisions about which branch of the service I wanted to join. The free education came with a price, and it was time to pay the military back for the years they had invested in me. Pam and I steeled ourselves for the unexpected. Military life was new to both of us: we had no personal experience or military family members to learn from. But I was ambitious and ready to dive in.

During my first few years at West Point, I felt I would want to remain with the army. My idea of a glorious military career was to be the first guy charging up the hill in a battle, with all the troops behind me. In my final year, however, I began to change my mind. A couple of my tactical officers were from the air force, and they really started working on me, explaining how it was the place for a more technically minded guy like me. In the new jet era, the air force seemed like a glamorous service branch, too, and that also formed part of my decision. To be honest, however, I still wasn’t sure I would enjoy flying.

In the end I chose the air force because I thought I would get promoted faster than in the army. That’s what those tactical officers told me. It turned out to be totally false—complete sales talk. But damn them, it worked. It wasn’t the last time I would run across those guys either. One of them, an officer named Jim Allen, would offer me some great advice a couple of years later, when I felt like quitting the military altogether.

We all gathered to choose our service specialty in a process called branch drawing. Not everybody got his first choice. Instead, we lined up in a big theater in order of academic standing. Starting with the top guy, we chose different branches of the army or air force. Because they did not have their own academy graduates yet, one-third of the graduates went to the air force. Army engineering went fast, as the bright guys took those places. Once the number of slots for each branch was filled, they were crossed off the board. By the end of the process, the last guys had nothing to choose from.

That day, the process was overseen by the superintendent of the academy, a formidable army general named Blackshear Bryan. He was a real blood-and-guts soldier, not long back from the Korean War, and bald as a billiard ball. As far as he was concerned, the infantry was the Queen of Battle and, by God, that was the way it would always be. He did not want anything to do with the air force, and forced air force officers stationed at West Point into out-of-the-way offices.

Perhaps it was a reflection of changing times, but that day the air force slots were chosen as fast as the army engineering slots, until about one hundred and fifty graduates remained—the bottom guys—who had no choice but to stay in the army and serve in the infantry. Feeling sorry for the general but also a little amused, I watched him as the selections were made. As, one by one, we chose the air force, I watched a flush of red rise up the back of his neck and spread across the top of his head, until he looked like he was going to explode. Before the selection process ended, he jumped to his feet and stormed out of the theater, completely disgusted. The times were changing, and he hated it.

In just a few years, I had come a long way from the farm. I had married, joined the air force, and was about to begin a flying career. I hoped like hell that I would be able to learn how to fly aircraft, enjoy the experience, and survive. I had made a big career decision with little to base it on. My total time piloting an airplane at that moment? Zero. For all I knew, I was going to be the worst pilot the air force had ever attempted to train.

The air force first sent me clear down to the border with Mexico, in south Texas. I was assigned to Moore Air Base, a private field just west of the town of Edinburg. On a warm and clear June morning, Pam and I loaded up our new Chevrolet convertible, put the top down, and headed south from her parents’ home on Long Island.

Pam and I had married so that we could be together during my training. We had already decided to spend our lives together, and we didn’t want that commitment interrupted. Why wait, we reasoned? We’d been dating long enough that marriage seemed like a natural step.

America was at peace when I joined the air force. The Korean War had ended in 1953 while I was still at West Point, two years before I graduated. It was clear, however, that America could be pulled into a conflict with another country at any time: the era of the Cold War always felt tense.

The base wasn’t where I wanted to be assigned. When we left West Point, we were allowed to suggest three choices of training bases. I chose locations in Florida and Arizona and didn’t even consider Moore, but they assigned me there anyway. Once in Texas, we found a tiny apartment in hot, dusty Edinburg. For the next six months I traveled thirty miles to the base every morning as part of a carpool of pilots, so Pam could have the car during the day. We couldn’t live any closer; the air base was pretty isolated.

But there wasn’t much for Pam to do in Edinburg even with a car; it was not our idea of a great place to live. It was a typical little Texas town with a small square, a movie theater, and not much else. The nearest interesting place was Monterrey, but that city was located deep into Mexico, and it was hard for Pam and me to escape there other than for an occasional weekend. More often, we’d just drive a few miles south of home to the Mexican border town of Reynosa for some of the best steaks I have ever had in my life. The only other “entertainment” in that border town wasn’t the kind a newly married man should be involved in, so I steered clear of that.

It was a very different life for both of us, which left little time to get to know each other better. But during my training, in the hurried moments I had to reflect on it, I believed that Pam was adjusting to military living just fine. We tried to make time at the end of every day to have dinner and talk for a while, see a movie, or maybe visit some friends. She quickly made new friends in town and kept busy with them, especially a group of women she would invite over to play bridge. One day I came home to find all of them standing on chairs in the living room, and Pam had a broom in her hand. A rodent had snuck into the house and thrown their quiet afternoon into disarray. I had to catch it and throw it out. A mouse was one of the less dangerous creatures that ran around in that desert region. Every morning, as I drank a cup of coffee in my kitchen, I was guaranteed to see a scorpion walk across our doorstep. They never came in so we left them alone, but we checked our shoes before putting them on, just in case.