Riding Rockets

How quickly one’s heart can change. Now I couldn’t wait to get back to West Point. I couldn’t wait to send a letter. I flew to Colorado Springs, where I connected with an Air National Guard flight to a field near West Point. The plane was filled with returning cadets who were slumped in their seats in near suicidal depression. But not me. As the C-97 droned eastward, I wore a permanent smile, the dopey smile of young love. Other cadets stared at me, certain I had lost it, certain at any moment I would rush the door and leap to my death. No sane cadet smiled while returning to the granite asylum.

I penned my first letter within an hour of arriving in my room. As I sealed the envelope, I stared at the photo of my imaginary girlfriend. I thought of how long I had defined happiness as getting this girl to love me, how long I had prayed she would send me letters (none ever came). As Garth Brooks sings, some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers. I tossed the photo in the garbage.

Donna’s and my relationship continued through the mail. I sent out more letters than Publishers Clearing House. I needed continual assurance she was still there, that she wasn’t as imaginary as my prior girlfriend. Her letters arrived by the truckload. We had “known” each other for a total of two hours, yet in our correspondence, we each professed our everlasting love.

Donna’s entry into my life probably saved me from expulsion from the academy. While my academic grades were satisfactory, my “military bearing” was seriously lacking. I had loathed the hazing of plebe year, never understanding how it could possibly contribute to the development of a leader. (I still don’t.) Upperclassmen sensed my contempt for the tradition and I was rewarded with a steady stream of demerits for various infractions, such as scuffed shoes, unpolished brass, and failure to satisfactorily render plebe knowledge. As a yearling I was rated near the bottom of my class in leadership skills by senior cadets. I was certain some of those cadets interpreted my lack of zeal at enforcing the plebe system on the latest class as further evidence of my disdain for it. Before Christmas leave, I was warned by my tactical officer that I could be terminated if my attitude didn’t improve. My parents received a letter from that same officer, saying that I was floundering, and my dad called in an attempt to rally me. But I remained indifferent to the warnings. I was rudderless, not sure I even wanted to stay at West Point. Then Donna stepped into my life. In her I found clarity and focus. I had to succeed—not for myself, but for her. Almost overnight my attitude and behavior changed. While I’m certain my superiors thought it was their great leadership that had turned me around, it was really Donna. I still had discipline relapses, such as when I was caught skipping a senior class’s graduation ceremony, a transgression that earned me another tactical officer rebuke and forty-four hours of “walking the area” with a shouldered rifle, plus a two-month confinement to my barracks. But I was on the road to graduation, guided unerringly by a star two thousand miles away—Donna.

In February 1965, I sent her an “A-pin” (A forArmy ), which was West Point’s version of a fraternity pin. It was another blitzkrieg escalation of our relationship.

In March 1965, I flew home for a three-day spring leave. Donna and I were inseparable. We grew more emotionally—and physically—intimate. At age nineteen, at the Silver Dollar drive-in theater in the backseat of a 1954 Chevy Bel Air, I finally got to second base with a girl. It was also in this passion pit that Donna told me of her dark secret, that she had had a baby. I didn’t care. It didn’t change anything between us, I said. This might sound mature and noble except, at the time, I had my hand in her bra. She could have told me she was a whorehouse madam and it wouldn’t have mattered.

Then, as the dialogue of some forgotten film squealed and popped through the window-mounted speaker, I proposed marriage and Donna accepted. There was no ring, no romantic dinner, no months of wonderful anticipation. It was as spontaneous as a heartbeat. I was mad to legitimize my claim to this woman andmad was the correct word.

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…Imailed 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.