Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

Much later in life Donna and I would recount a PG-13 version of this story to our teenage children and warn them that if they ever did what we did, we would kill them. It was insanity. We were engaged to be married after knowing each other for a total of three days and a hundred letters. I was marrying for sex. Donna was marrying to escape her parents. Oh, yeah. This is gonna last.

For her birthday in 1965 I mailed Donna an engagement ring. That’s correct…I mailed it. I couldn’t wait until we were together again. This woman had become my life. I couldn’t let her escape. But marriage was going to have to wait until after my graduation, two long years away. West Point cadets were forbidden to be married.

We were able to wait for marriage, but not the honeymoon. On my summer leave of 1966—in my twentieth year of life—I finally slid into home plate with a girl. It happened in Donna’s bedroom. Her parents were away for a few hours, which established opportunity. Motive had long been raging. Two hours later Donna and I were in the confessional admitting our sin to the tobacco-breath shadow behind the curtain. The priest reminded me that having premarital sex was a violation of the temple of God (our bodies) and I would burn in everlasting fire if I didn’t change my ways. (I guess it was okay to smoke in God’s temple.) Donna and I shared the same kneeler as we prayed our penance and promised God that in the future we’d keep our hands and the rest of our bodies to ourselves. Even under penalty of losing our immortal souls, we couldn’t keep that promise. On every leave we’d end up in that Chevy, parked in a drive-in theater or the wilds of the desert, the windows steamed over and our sacred “temples” in rhythmic collision. The next day we’d be in the confessional hearing more dire warnings of hell-fire ahead. I have no doubt we frustrated that priest into a three-pack-a-day habit.

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 knew how bitterly disappointed I was and gave me her shoulder to cry on. “It’ll all work out for the best, Mike. God has a plan. You’ll see.” That was Donna’s hallmark, the faith of the pope. She would turn every house we would ever occupy into a mini-Lourdes, with wall-mounted crucifixes and Virgin Mary statuary everywhere. In our bedroom she always had candles burning for one saint or another. She would send cash gifts to various orders of nuns and ask them to pray for us. Priests would get checks asking that they say Masses on our behalf. If the Mike Mullane family had a connection to God, it was certainly through Donna, not me.

A small cinder-block house on Mather AFB in Sacramento, California, was our first home. While we waited for our few possessions to catch up, we enjoyed Uncle Sam’s furniture. We sat on metal folding chairs and ate our meals off a card table and made love on a one-man canvas cot. It was the richest we’ve ever been. We had each other and that was all we needed.

My immediate goal was to graduate from navigator training into the backseat of F-4 Phantoms, so I worked like a Trojan to finish high in my class. It wasn’t going to be easy. Flight assignments were given in order of class rank, and the group was filled with Air Force Academy wizards who had been through much of the coursework during their academy years. But Donna was there for me. I would hang a sextant from a neighbor’s child’s swing and practice shooting three-star “fixes.” She would be at my side, teeth chattering in the cold night air, holding a flashlight to illuminate the instrument bubble chamber and recording my observations on a clipboard. When the twins were born on March 5, 1968, she assumed full parental duties to allow me to continue to focus on my studies. Never once did she hound me to get up for a 2A.M . feeding or wash the diapers or prepare formula. No new father of a single child, much less twins, had it as easy as I did.

I graduated first in my class and took an assignment to the backseat of RF-4C Phantoms, the reconnaissance version of that fabled fighter. I had never finished first in anything in my life and it wouldn’t have happened without Donna.

Meanwhile, I continued to make calls to air force HQ begging for a pilot training position, but the requests were repeatedly denied. At my annual flight physical I hounded the surgeon about ways I might improve my eyesight. He said there were none. “Mike, your astigmatism is caused by a physical defect in the lens of your eye. There’s nothing that will correct that defect.” I refused to believe him and searched the library for a miracle…and thought I had found it in a book titled Sight Without Glasses. But after practicing the recommended eye exercises for months, my visual acuity did not change. I remained physically unqualified for pilot training. As I cursed my bad luck, Donna continued to preach patience. “God has a plan.”